Croft (2000: 65) - Noun, verb and adjective are not ... - grandionline.net

Croft, W. (1991), Syntactic categories and grammatical relations: The cognitiveorganization of information, Chicago, Chicago University Press.Croft, W. (2000), Parts of speech as language universals and as languageparticularcategories, in Vogel, P. / Comrie, B. (eds.), Approaches to theTypology of Word Classes, Berlin – New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 65-102.Visione ‘tradizionale’- Noun, verb and adjective are categories of particular languages.- But noun, verb and adjective are NOT language universals – that is, there areNOT found in some languages.Croft (2000: 65)- Noun, verb and adjective are not categories of particular languages.- But noun, verb and adjective are language universals – that is, there aretypological prototypes […] which should be called noun, verb and adjective.

A proper theory of parts of speech that applies to all languages must satisfy thefollowing three conditions in order to be successful.First, there must be a criterion for distinguishing parts of speech from othermorphosyntactically defined subclasses.Second, there must be a cross-linguistically valid and uniform set of formalgrammatical criteria for evaluating the universality of the parts-of-speechdistinctions.Third there must be a clear distinction between language universals and particularlanguage facts.

“Syntactic categories, including those commonly labelled as parts of speech, arederivative from constructions that define them” (Croft 2000: 85)Actual constructions are the primitive elementsof syntactic representation and categories arederived from them: it is a sample of differentconstructions with a common function thatdefines the boundaries of a category or of apart of speech.Typological comparison will sketch a pattern of variation and every singlelanguage will fit somewhere in this pattern of variation

Croft (1991: 67)ReferenceModificationPredicationObjectsunmarked nounsgenitive,adjectivalisations,PPs on nounspredicate nominals,copulasPropertiesdeadjectival nounsunmarkedadjectivesPredicate adjectives,copulasActionsaction nominals,complements,infinitives, gerundsparticiples, relativeclausesunmarked verbs

The universal-typological theory of parts of speech embraces constructions withand without function-indicating morphosyntax. Function-indicating morphosyntaxovertly encodes the functions of reference, predication and modification forvarious classes of lexical items. As such, function-indicating morphosyntax fallsunder the structural coding criterion of the theory of typological markedness. Thetheory of typological markedness […] is a general theory of the relationshipbetween form and meaning across languages

The theory defines universal prototypes for the three major parts of speech, butdoes not define boundaries for these categories. Boundaries are aspects oflanguage-particular grammatical categories, determined by distributionalanalysis”The typological universals do not predict the exact behaviour of individuallanguages; rather, they predict that a language will fit somewhere in the pattern ofvariation allowed by typological marking theoryThe behavioural potential criterion specifies that the unmarked memberdisplays at least as wide a range of grammatical behaviour as the markedmember. The behavioural potential criterion is again formulated as animplicational universal. It allows for the possibility of marked members […] tohave the same inflectional possibilities as unmarked members […] in somelanguage. It excludes the possibility of marked members having moreinflectional possibilities than unmarked members.The behavioural potential criterion also allows for the limited or “defective”behaviour of the marked member of a category […] without having to committo the marked member being “in” or “not in” the category in a universaltypologicalsense.

Moreover, the terms verb and adjective do not describe language-particulargrammatical categories anyway. They describe cross-linguistic patterns of variation.In particular they describe a prototype. A prototype describes the core of a category;it does not say anything about the boundary of a category […]. In fact, the universaltypological theory of parts of speech defines only prototypes for the parts of speech;it does not define boundaries. Boundaries are features of language-particularcategories.Noun > reference to an objectAdjective > modification by a propertyVerb > predication of an action

In such a theoretical framework, we cannot exclude cases of multiple classmembership and of sporadic occurrence of linguistic constructions in atypicalroles.Croft (2000: 96)“it is quite common cross-linguistically to find a lexical item used in more thanone pragmatic function without overt derivation but with a significant and oftensystematic semantic shift […]. The relevant cross-linguistic universal is thatthese shifts are always towards the semantic class prototypically associated withthe pragmatic function”

NounGenderLexemeNumberinflected formAdjectiveinflected forminflected form?compound > constructional idiom > suffixcompound > constructional idiom > phrase