36.2418, Confs: Workshop: Effects of Grammatical System on the Lexicon (Mexico)

Thu Aug 14 09:05:02 UTC 2025

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2418. Thu Aug 14 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2418, Confs: Workshop: Effects of Grammatical System on the Lexicon (Mexico)

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Date: 14-Aug-2025
From: Denisse Martinez [denissef.martinezm at gmail.com]
Subject: Workshop: Effects of Grammatical System on the Lexicon

Workshop: Effects of Grammatical System on the Lexicon

Date: 13-Nov-2025 - 14-Nov-2025
Location: Hermosillo, Mexico
Meeting URL:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EmrSs_wmhbBPjCMWT24WmKfmBIZdY61Q/view?usp=drive_link

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax; Typology
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
                     Spanish (spa)

Submission Deadline: 05-Sep-2025

Addition to the Workshop Announcement
Throughout the history of linguistics, the prevailing assumption has
been that the lexicon is an independent component of language, and
that syntax operates on the lexicon. One characteristic of the lexicon
across languages is that the types of lexical categories and
subcategories differ from one language to another. For example, some
languages have the category adjective, while others do not (Dixon,
1977, 1982); some languages have the category adjectival
predicate distinct from adjectives, while others do not (Frajzyngier,
forthcoming); and some languages have distinct categories
for noun and verb, while others rely solely on syntactic means to
indicate the category of a lexical item.
In this workshop, we propose to address the following hypothesis:
lexical categories and subcategories are an economical means of
realizing functions encoded in a language’s grammatical system. In
some cases, a single lexical category can satisfy multiple functions
encoded in the grammatical system. Accordingly, we invite papers
discussing languages in which the number of lexical categories and
subcategories is greater or smaller than in the “Average
Indo-European” system of Noun, Verb, Adjective, and Adverb. Beyond
lexical categories, the existence of certain lexical items may also be
motivated by a language’s grammatical system. This is the case, for
example, with so-called copulas in a variety of languages, existential
affirmative and negative predicates distinct from verbs, purely
locative predicates, and certain verbs of motion (Frajzyngier, 2024).
We therefore also invite papers that demonstrate the grammatical
motivation for the existence of specific lexical items. These two
hypotheses have important consequences for our understanding of
utterance formation in the world’s languages.
Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Description of the workshop:
Preamble: Many contemporary studies treat the lexicon as an autonomous
entity not affected by other components of a given language (Jeżek
2016, Pustejovsky and Batiukova 2024, Talmy 2007, 2023).
The aim of the workshop is to examine how functions encoded in the
grammatical systems, and the forms used to encode them (i.e. syntax),
interact with the lexicon. The following are some of the
manifestations of the grammatical system on the lexicon that will be
examined at the workshop:
(i) One manifestation of the effects of the grammatical system on the
lexicon includes syntactic categories such as ‘noun’, ‘verb’,
‘adjective’, ‘adverb’, etc. Some linguists take the existence of these
categories as given and not requiring any explanations, as is the case
in many works in the generative tradition (for a recent discussion see
Chomsky et al. 2023). Some studies of syntactic categories have sought
the motivation for their existence in the roles they play in larger
structures or their functions in grammatical systems (Dixon 1977,
Frajzyngier 1986, Hengeveld 1992, Croft 2000). Despite many studies of
lexical categories, several questions remain unanswered, including:
(1) Why do languages have lexical categories? and (2) Why do languages
differ in the number and types of their lexical categories?
(ii) Some languages may have the categories ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’,
‘adjectives’, ‘adverbs’, as attested in many Indo-European languages.
Other languages may have more lexical categories, as demonstrated in
Frajzyngier, Johnston, with Edwards (2005). In some languages,
categories are distinguished in specific constructions (Croft 2022).
Other languages may have fewer categories, as demonstrated in Dixon
(1977), Frajzyngier, Gurian and Karpenko (2021). In other languages
lexical items are not formally distinguished for their categoriality,
as in Mandarin Chinese, (Chao 1968), while other languages demonstrate
omnipredicativity (Launey, 2004). The workshop gives the opportunity
to examine reasons for which languages have different inventories of
lexical categories.
(iii) The very presence of some lexical items in a language is
motivated solely by the functions encoded in the grammatical system.
Lexical items belonging to this group may include predicators, not
verbs, in equational, existential, and locative predications.
(iv) The presence of some lexical items is motivated by constraints on
the syntactic structures available in the language. For example, the
coding of non-default tense and non-assertive modality in Gidar
(Central Chadic, Frajzyngier 2008) is marked by auxiliary verbs.
Auxiliary verbs require another verb to follow them. In equational and
existential predications in Gidar there are no verbs. Consequently,
Gidar inserts a ‘dummy’ verb sa, glossed as ‘be’, which enables the
coding of non-assertive modality and non-default tense. The verb sa
itself is not inflected for modality and tense.
(v) Some semantic and syntactic properties of lexical items, rather
than being completely non- predictable, are in fact determined by
functions encoded in the grammatical system. Here is an example:
Although all languages can indicate where an event happens or the
directionality and other parameters of motion, only some languages
encode the locative domain in their grammatical systems while other
languages do not. Languages that encode the locative domain in their
grammatical system have inherently locative nouns and inherently
locative verbs whose syntactic behavior is different from other verbs
and nouns in the language. Languages that do not code locative domain
as a distinct domain in the grammatical system do not make the lexical
distinction between inherently locative nouns and verbs and inherently
non-locative nouns and verbs (Frajzyngier 2024).
We are looking for studies that discuss effects of grammatical systems
on lexical items and for studies that draw broader implications and
open questions generated by such facts.
Please send an abstract of 500 words, plus one page of examples and
references, by August 15 to:
Zygmunt Frajzyngier at zygmunt.frajzyngier at colorado.edu
Zarina Estrada Fernández at zarinaef at gmail.com
Albert Alvarez Gonzalez at albert.gonzalez at unison.mx
References:
Chomsky, Noam, T. Daniel Seely, Robert C. Berwick, Sandiway Fog, M. A.
C. Huybregts, Hisatsugu Kitahara, Andrew McInnerney, and Yushi
Sugimoto. 2023. Merge and strong Minimalist thesis. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Croft, William. 2000. Parts of speech as language universals and as
language-particular categories.  Approaches to the Typology of Word
Classes, ed. by Petra M. Vogel and Bernard Comrie, Berlin, New York:
De Gruyter Mouton, 65–102. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110806120.65
Dixon, R.M.W. 1977. Where have all the adjectives gone? Studies in
Language 1: 19-80.
Dixon, R.M.W. 1982. Where have all the adjectives gone? and Other
Essays in Semantics and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 1986. Propositional characterization of
categories. In Papers from the First Pacific Linguistic Conference,
ed. by Scott DeLancey and Russell Tomlin, 108-119.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2008. A Grammar of Gidar. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2019. An integrated approach to lexicon, syntax,
and functions. Te reo- The Journal of the Linguistic Society of New
Zealand, 62(2): 1–23.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2023. A Typology of Reference Systems. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2024. Locative Predications in Chadic Languages:
Implications for Semantic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. (submitted). Semantic structures of grammatical
systems and their realizations.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Eric Johnston with Adrian Edwards. 2005. A
Grammar of Mina. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Natalia Gurian, and Sergei Karpenko. 2021.
Language Formation by Adults: The Case of Sino-Russian Idiolects.
Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Hengeveld, Kees. 1992. Non-verbal predication: Theory, typology,
diachrony. Berlin: Mouton
Jeżek, Elisabetta. 2016. The Lexicon: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Launey, Michel 2004. The features of omnipredicativity in Classical
Nahuatl. STUF. Language Typology and Universals, 57(1): 49–69.
Pustejovsky, James, and Olga Batiukova. 2024. The Lexicon. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ramchand, Gillian Catriona. 2024. Generativity, comparative grammar,
and the syntax vs. the lexicon debates. Nordlyd, 48(1): 93–114.
https://munin.uit.no/bitstream/handle/10037/36222/article.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
Talmy, Leonard. 2007. Lexical typologies. In Timothy Shopen (ed.),
Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume III: Grammatical
Categories and the Lexicon, 66–168. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Talmy, Leonard. 2023. Forward: A taxonomy of cognitive semantics. In
Thomas Fuyin Li (ed.), Handbook of Cognitive Semantics, Vol. 1, 1–73.
Leiden and Boston: Brill.

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