[Lexicog] Defining verbs, etc.

[Rudolph Troike]

Mark Baker's definitions (below) cited by John Roberts presuppose
very specific theoretical model of syntax (and semantics) which
may or may not survive Chomsky's next revelation of Truth. (Is
anyone old enough to remember the "God's Truth or Hocus-Pocus"
controversy? There can be no doubt that Chomsky's work is in the
hocus-pocus category, given the frequent radical changes in the
model.) For one thing, those interested in lexical decomposition
recognize that many (perhaps most) verbs consist of a covert
light verb component and a nominal component, which is then
subject to Baker's semantic criterion for nouns. For another,
distinguishing Adjectives from Verbs is a very Western European
thing, as in many languages the corresponding lexical items are
simply Stative Verbs (a perspective Lakoff and Ross "discovered"
regarding "Adjectives" in English in the 1970s). Baker is simply
following Chomsky's assertion that there are four lexical categories,
N, V, A, and P. Of course Prepositions/Postpositions don't exist
in many languages, and the corresponding affixes are Functional
heads, not Lexical. Prepositions share qualities with Verbs, and
in Chinese, many are derived from, or are synchronically difficult
to distinguish from the apparently purely verbal use.

   Rudy Troike

P.S. I think that Karolina was asking about definitions by average
lay users of the language. It's a matter of cultural tradition that
one would expect native speakers of a language to have labels for
grammatical categories, as this is something that in most instances
would be a product of school learning. Speakers of many languages may
have accurate intuitions about grammatical categories, but lack a
tradition of a metalanguage for labeling them and discussing them.

  -----
Mark Baker in Baker (2003) Lexical Categories. Verbs, Nouns and
Adjectives, proposes a syntactic definition for these categories.

For verb:
X is a verb iff X is a lexical category and X has a specifier

For noun:
a) Semantic version: nouns and only nouns have criteria of identity,
whereby they can serve as standards of sameness.
b) Syntactic version: X is a noun iff X is a lexical category and X
bears a referential index, expressed as an ordered pair of integers.

For adjective:
Adjectives have neither the properties of verbs or nouns.

John Roberts




 
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