Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives

by Mark C. Baker

• ISBN13: 9780521001106
• ISBN10: 0521001102
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

For decades, generative linguistics has said little about the differences between verbs, nouns, and adjectives. This book seeks to fill this theoretical gap by presenting simple and substantive syntactic definitions of these three lexical categories. Mark C. Baker claims that the various superficial differences found in particular languages have a single underlying source which can be used to give better characterizations of these 'parts of speech'. These new definitions are supported by data from languages from every continent, including English, Italian, Japanese, Edo, Mohawk, Chichewa, Quechua, Choctaw, Nahuatl, Mapuche, and several Austronesian and Australian languages. Baker argues for a formal, syntax-oriented, and universal approach to the parts of speech, as opposed to the functionalist, semantic, and relativist approaches that have dominated the few previous works on this subject. This book will be welcomed by researchers and students of linguistics and by related cognitive scientists of language.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	xi
List of abbreviations	xiii
1 The problem of the lexical categories	1	(22)
1.1 A theoretical lacuna	1	(2)
1.2 Unanswerable typological questions concerning categories	3	(8)
1.3 Categories in other linguistic traditions	11	(6)
1.4 Goals, methods, and outline of the current work	17	(6)
2 Verbs as licensers of subjects	23	(72)
2.1 Introduction	23	(1)
2.2 Initial motivations	24	(10)
2.3 The distribution of Pred	34	(5)
2.4 Copular particles	39	(7)
2.5 Inflection for tense	46	(7)
2.6 Morphological causatives	53	(9)
2.7 Word order differences 60
2.8 Unaccusativity diagnostics	62	(15)
2.9 Adjectives in the decomposition of verbs	77	(11)
2.10 Are there languages without verbs?	88	(7)
3 Nouns as bearers of a referential index	95	(95)
3.1 What is special about nouns?	95	(6)
3.2 The criterion of identity	101	(8)
3.3 Occurrence with quantifiers and determiners	109	(16)
3.4 Nouns in binding and anaphora	125	(7)
3.5 Nouns and movement	132	(10)
3.6 Nouns as arguments	142	(11)
3.7 Nouns must be related to argument positions	153	(6)
3.8 Predicate nominals and verbalization	159	(10)
3.9 Are nouns universal?	169	(21)
4 Adjectives as neither nouns nor verbs	190	(74)
4.1 The essence of having no essence	190	(2)
4.2 Attributive modification	192	(20)
4.3 Adjectives and degree heads	212	(7)
4.4 Resultative secondary predication	219	(11)
4.5 Adjectives and adverbs	230	(8)
4.6 Are adjectives universal?	238	(26)
5 Lexical categories and the nature of the grammar	264	(39)
5.1 What has a category?	265	(10)
5.2 Categories and the architecture of the grammar	275	(23)
5.3 Why are the lexical categories universal?	298	(3)
5.4 Final remarks	301	(2)
Appendix. Adpositions as functional categories	303	(23)
A.1 Evidence that adpositions are functional	303	(8)
A.2 The place of adpositions in a typology of categories	311	(15)
References	326	(13)
Index	339