This paper has been withdrawn.
The Language Particular Basis of Lexical Categories
The necessity of defining lexical categories/word classes/parts of speech in language specific terms has long been a mainstay of linguistic theory. While there may be a semantic core to the definitions of lexical categories, e.g. nouns denote objects and verbs, events, it has long been observed that this is not a necessary linkage, i. e. meetings is a noun in English, yet it denotes events. This has led to a robust requirement in linguistic theory that lexical categories be determined and defined on language internal structural criteria, language specific facts. Still, and seemingly almost a contradiction, many linguists hold that the distinction between the categories of noun and verb is a universal one; although being recognized as structural classes by language specific facts, nouns and verbs are nonetheless a distinction that informs the grammars of all languages. Most commonly the analyses proposed are inductive ones: assume a prototypical meaning of nouns and verbs, investigate the structural behavior of roots which exemplify this meaning, and then motivate the distinction in the light of these structural facts; Croft (2001) is a typical example of this well known approach. Unfortunately, it suffers seriously from circularity in its reasoning and an underdeveloped theory of lexical meaning and the role of polysemy. A more recent and perhaps more successful deductive approach is illustrated by Baker: posit universal structural definitions of nouns and verbs as a theoretical move and then see if their behavior in every language matches the predictions of the theory. This approach, however, requires all languages to exhibit at least one core core crosslinguistic structural trait which validates the structural definitions offered. This paper will argue that neither of these approaches is completely adequate to motivate a universal lexical contrast of noun and verb, by investigating problematic data in English, Austronesian, Salish and Wakashan languages. We must conclude that in the present state of our knowledge, there appear to be no grounds for believing that this contrast is universal and that the division of roots into lexical categories is an entirely language specific fact, although it may be guided in large part by wider semantic considerations.
References
Baker, M. 2003. Lexical Categories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Croft, W. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.