The Intersection of formal grammar and pragmatics

time, while attested categorial changes of the non-prototypical adjectives that
translate as ‘like’, ‘worth’, or ‘near’ are common.
I argue that (2a-d), to the extent that they are motivated, can be explained
by (3a-b):
(3) a. POS are discrete, without an internal prototype structure and
without fuzzy boundaries.
b. Prototypicality effects are a consequence of the pragmatics of the
use of POS, rather than of properties inherent to the POS per se.
Consider (2a). Uncontroversially, I would say, concrete nouns (i.e.,
animates and physical objects) make, in general, better topics, better focuses,
better new referents, better established referents, and so on than do abstract
nouns. Actions can be described with respect to a wider array of tense, aspect,
and modality than states. The morphosyntactic accommodation to these facts is a
greater variety of sentence types in which concrete nouns and actions occur than
in which abstract nouns and states occur. There is no reason to appeal directly to
the prototypicality of the noun or the verb.
As far as (2b) is concerned, it has been known since Zipf (1935) that lexical
structure is shaped in part by ‘least-effort’ conditions. Text counts show that
concrete nouns are talked about more than abstractions and that actions are
talked about more than states (Godfrey et al. 1992). Hence it is not surprising that
concrete nouns and actions require less grammatical coding than abstractions
and states respectively. There is no need to build prototypicality into the
structure of the POS per se.
The correctness of (2c) is greatly exaggerated in the cognitive-functional
literature. For example, no absolute hierarchy of prototypicality can explain why the
English progressive is allowed with non-prototypical temporary state and
psychological predicate verbs (4a-b), but disallowed with putatively more prototypical
achievement verbs (5):
(4) a. The portrait is hanging on the wall of the bedroom.
b. I’m enjoying my sabbatical year.
(5) *I’m noticing a diesel fuel truck passing by my window.
To the extent that (2c) is correct, it is a by-product of (2a). Most hierarchies are
epiphenomenal consequences of what can be used as a topic, focus, and so on. For
example, passives are forbidden with measure verbs in English (see 6a-b), not because
measure verbs are low on some hierarchy, but because the measure phrase following
the verb is a predicate, not an argument, and predicates make poor subject topics:
(6) a. The book cost ten dollars.