36.305, Reviews: The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes: Maxwell (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-305. Wed Jan 22 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.305, Reviews: The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes: Maxwell (2025)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Justin Fuller
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Joel Jenkins, Daniel Swanson, Erin Steitz
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Joel Jenkins <joel at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 22-Jan-2025
From: Michael B. Maxwell [mmaxwell at umd.edu]
Subject: Morphology, Syntax, Typology; The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes: Maxwell (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-897

Title: The Oxford Handbook of Word Classes
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-word-classes-9780198852889?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Editor(s): Eva van Lier

Reviewer: Michael B. Maxwell

PRELIMINARIES
I need to begin my review by saying something about how I am reviewing
this handbook.  Most handbooks have several characteristics that set
them apart from other books, including other books that are reviewed
here at Linguist List:
1) Handbooks tend to be quite large.  The Oxford Handbook of Word
Classes reviewed here weighs in at 45 chapters and more than a
thousand pages.  This precludes my giving the usual chapter-by-chapter
summary, since that would take more space than the review is allowed.
2) The sheer number of chapters also precludes my evaluating each
article individually.  Hence my review will touch on only a selection
of the chapters, as well as some overall comments on the book.
3) Handbooks present a wide range of perspectives on issues, and this
volume is no exception: there are nine chapters on approaches to word
classes from very different theories, for example.  Those chapters
exist to give an overview of each theory's perspective, and I
therefore do not feel it is my task as a reviewer to disagree (or
agree) with those authors; that would instead be for someone reviewing
a book on the particular theory.
I now turn to the review itself.
SUMMARY
This handbook can be purchased as a hardbound book, or as an ebook
(Amazon lists it as a Kindle book, but I have not accessed it in that
way).  Individual chapters can also be purchased in electronic form
(see also comments below).
The introductory chapter by the handbook's editor presents a succinct
synopsis of each of the other chapters.  The publisher has chosen not
to make this chapter freely accessible; more on this decision in the
evaluation section of this review.
The remaining chapters fall under five numbered Parts (I'll capitalize
this use of the word).  As stated, I will not describe each of the
remaining chapters, but the five Parts are as follows:
I. "Fundamental Issues": The chapters in this Part respond to
questions like whether it even makes sense to compare grammatical
categories across languages (Martin Haspelmath argues that it does
not---but see below---and William A. Foley and William Croft express
similar views in their chapters); whether categories apply to roots,
stems and/or words (Bisang says this varies by language); lexical vs.
grammatical words (Kasper Boye uses this contrast in a somewhat
analogous way to the distinction between content vs. functional words,
or between open class vs. closed class words); and processes such as
derivational morphology that change categories.  While these issues
are not couched in terms of particular theories, they are relevant to
the theory-based chapters in the following part.  For example, if
grammatical categories cannot be equated across languages, then the
notion of innate categories assumed under some of those theories
probably doesn't make sense.
II. "Theoretical Approaches" contains chapters describing the approach
to grammatical categories under a number of current theories.  The
authors of some of these chapters assume innate categories (or
category-like features) drawn from  Minimalism and Head Driven Phrase
Structure Grammar (HPSG)---although the theories themselves could
probably be re-cast with non-innate features or categories.  Other
theories described here view grammatical categories as emergent and/or
gradient (some words being more noun-like than others within a given
language, for example--there is an entire chapter devoted to this
issue).  Gradient categories are presumably a poor fit with theories
that postulate innate categories, so those theories generally opt for
allowing lexemes to belong to two or more categories (or for lexemes
to have two or more alternative feature sets).
III. "Specific Word Classes": Chapters in this Part deal with such
traditional categories as noun, verb, adjective and adverb, but there
are also chapters on ideophones and interjections.
IV. "Word Classes in Genetic and Areal Language Groups": As the name
suggests, the chapters here discuss categories in individual
languages, or---more frequently---groups of languages.  The selection
of groups and languages is broad, including not only the usual
suspects (like Indo-European, the chapter on which, unlike the other
chapters, looks at historical changes in categories), but also
Austronesian and several language families of the Americas.  (The
Americas may even be over-represented, particularly in comparison to
languages of Africa.)  There is even a chapter "Word Classes in Sign
Languages", by Vadim Kimmelman and Carl Börstell.
V. "Word Classes in Linguistic Subdisciplines": This Part contains
chapters on a variety of topics related to sub-disciplines of
linguistics, ranging from first and second language acquisition to
computational linguistics, and including psycholinguistics,
neurolinguistics, grammaticalization, and language contact
(particularly borrowing).
The bibliography is at the end of the book (rather than having
separate bibliographies at the end of each chapter); it is freely
accessible on-line.  Thus, if you choose to purchase an individual
chapter or two in electronic form, you will have access to the
references.
I will add here a few non-evaluative comments on points made
throughout this handbook.
As mentioned, Haspelmath argues that it is not possible to directly
compare grammatical categories across languages, saying "So if word
classes are defined in a language-particular way, with reference to
different constructions in different languages..., then there is no
way to match classes across languages."  One might think that if this
argument is correct, it would not make sense to have a chapter in Part
II on verbs or nouns, for example, since there is allegedly no such
thing as a universal category of verbs or nouns.  Several authors in
that Part address this conundrum; Alexander Letuchiy, the author of
the verbs chapter, meets the objection head-on, listing "several
properties that are typical for verbs."
But in fact what Haspelmath's right hand takes away, his left hand
gives back, since a few pages later he provides semantic criteria for
noun roots, verb roots and adjective roots: he says they are
object-denoting, action-denoting, and property-denoting roots,
respectively.  In other words, while definitions of grammatical
categories in terms of their grammatical properties cannot be used
across languages, semantic-like definitions can, at least for some
properties and their corresponding categories.  It's not clear whether
adpositions can be identified across languages by their semantic
properties; the Mayan languages chapter provides insight on this,
since Mayan languages typically have only one or two adpositions, with
further distinctions made by relational nouns; the English "in the
house" is for example paraphrasable in Tzeltal (ISO 639-3 tzh) as
"<preposition> the house's interior".
This issue of comparability of word classes surfaces over and over
(except of course for those Part II chapters on theories which
presuppose innate categories).  For instance, in Part IV, whose
chapters describe word categories in different languages or language
groups, many authors point out the issue, and nearly everyone
discusses their language-particular grammatical criteria for
membership in each class.
The related issue of variability of behavior (some verbs, for example,
may be more verb-like than others within a particular language) is
also frequently discussed.  Occasionally the issue discussed in
Bisang's "Levels of Analysis" (e.g. whether words in isolation can be
said to belong to a particular category, or whether it is only words
in a morphological and/or syntactic context that have a definite
category) appears---in Ulrike Mosel's chapter "Word classes in
Austronesian languages", for example.
Adjectives are (as usual) defined as words that can modify nouns (or
noun phrases), while adverbs are words that can modify anything else.
But it is unclear why adjectives are singled out from all modifiers;
why are words that modify just verbs, say, not as distinctive a class
as words that modify just nouns?  I did not see this come up as a
discussion point anywhere.
EVALUATION
As mentioned above, there are 45 chapters in this handbook, and the
space available to Linguist List reviews precludes my giving an
evaluation or even an overview of each chapter.  However, the book's
table of contents listing each chapter is available at
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/55353.  Even without login to
Oxford University Press, you can click on each chapter and read its
abstract; or you can purchase access to individual chapters.
The editor, Eva Van Lier, summarizes each chapter in her introduction.
Although this chapter is not freely accessible on the OUP website,
it---as well as much of the first 130-some pages, with one omitted
page out of every five or ten---can currently (as of November 2024) be
read on Amazon as part of the "Sample". I would encourage the
publisher to make this introductory chapter freely available on their
website, as I believe it might increase interest in obtaining the
entire book.  (The table of contents and the bibliography are also
freely available on the publisher's website.)
Moving to an evaluation of this handbook: it would appear that at
least some authors were given the opportunity to review other chapters
before finalizing theirs.  There are therefore significant
cross-references among many of the chapters---for example, between the
theory chapters and the chapters about language families.  That this
was accomplished while still bringing the book to print in a
reasonable amount of time is a testimony to the editor.
Nevertheless, some authors fail to reference other relevant chapters.
For example, Sabine Stoll's chapter "Word Classes in First Language
Acquisition" states that the Mayan languages "have only a small number
of verbs and rely on light verbs".  Although Valentina Vapnarsky's
chapter on the Mayan language family mentions light verbs a couple
times, it does so only with respect to a subset of the branches of
Mayan, and nowhere does she state that even the languages of those
branches _rely_ on light verbs, much less that any Mayan languages
have few verbs.  I looked at a few dictionaries of Mayan languages for
further evidence.  The Tseltal-Spanish multidialectal dictionary
(Polian 2020) lists 8109 entries, of which about 30% are verbs; I
suspect a similar ratio of verbs to non-verbs would be found for many
languages.  Dictionaries of Mam [mam] and Kʼicheʼ [quc] (of the
eastern branch of Mayan) appear to have similar proportions of verbs,
although these dictionaries were in PDF format, so that it is
difficult to make quantifiable judgments.
Stoll further states that the Strait [sic, Straits] Salish language
only distinguishes "between contentive morphemes and functional
morphemes" (p.870--871).  The chapter on Salishan languages mentions
that some authors have claimed this for some Salishan languages
(Straits Salish is not specifically mentioned), but argues at length
for at least a distinction between nouns and verbs, and less
strenuously for finer grained category distinctions in the languages
of this family as well.  (Note: Straits Salish, or Coast Salish, is a
group of languages, including North Straits Salish, ISO code str.)
Similarly, David Beck's chapter on adjectives refers to Haspelmath's
(2012) argument that grammatical categories are not comparable across
languages.  But the same points are made in Haspelmath's chapter in
this handbook, which might have been usefully referenced.  William
Foley's section 6.6 discusses categories in Northern Iroquois
languages, and while it does reference the chapter on Iroquoian
languages, it goes over much the same material as Walter Bisang's
section 3.5.2 without referring to that discussion (Bisang's section
on Iroquois mentions the discussion in Foley's chapter).
The book includes an index of languages discussed, but some languages
seem to have slipped by.  Kharia (a Munda language of India, ISO khr)
is mentioned in several articles, but is missing from the index (I
checked several possible spellings).  The heading of the index lists a
number of reasons some languages are not indexed (e.g. if they only
appear in footnotes), but these reasons do not appear to apply to
Kharia, for which data is shown in at least one place (example (19)
p.59).
Language groups (which in some cases may be more familiar to readers,
like Southern Wakashan of the Pacific Northwest) are not indexed.  The
e-version of the book (which Oxford University Press kindly granted me
access to) makes it easy to look up both languages (including Kharia)
and language groups.  However, the spelling of language names is not
consistent in either the e-book or the print book; the Mayan language
Tzeltal (ISO 639-3 tzh) is spelled that way twice in the text, and as
Tseltal 11 times.  The index includes both spellings as the single
index entry 'Tzeltal/Tseltal', alphabetized with other languages
starting with 'Tz', while the related language Tzotzil (tzo) is
indexed as 'Tsotsil/Tzotzil' and alphabetized among languages starting
with 'Ts'.  The language Tz'utujil is spelled with and without the
glottal (apostrophe) in the Mayan chapter; these are simply
alternative spellings for a single Mayan language (tzj), but are
indexed as if they were two distinct languages.  Why am I so concerned
about the spelling of language names?  Inconsistent spelling of
language names is exactly one of the issues ISO 639-3 codes where
created to solve nearly twenty years ago, and they have been widely
adopted elsewhere; but they are absent from this book, making it
harder than it needs to be to find information about a particular
language.
Occasionally cross references are broken.  There is a reference on
page 945 to a non-existent section 45.4.4.1, and a reference in
section 9.4 (page 191) to "section 9.4", apparently meaning section
9.3.2.2.  Cross references between the text and example sentences are
also sometimes broken.  The text on page 785 refers to example numbers
12 and 13, which do not exist; the references are apparently to
examples 14 and 15.  Similar mismatches appear on pages 800--803.
There are occasional differences between citations in the text and the
bibliography.  For example, Françoise Rose's article "Word Classes in
Maweti-Guarani Languages" cites "Hengeveld (1992)", while the
bibliography lists two publications by that author for 1992, labeled
1992a and 1992b.  In the e-version of the book, some cross-references
are hyperlinks, others are plain text; broken references in the print
version are also broken in the e-version.  I did not conduct an
intensive search for discrepancies such as these, but they seem
fortunately to be rare.
Most tables and figures are readable (however, figure 20.3 is missing
the labels on the x-axis, making it impossible to interpret).  One
minor disadvantage of the e-version is that some figures appear much
larger than the text, and depending on your browser window you may
need to scroll to see the entire image.  This was especially apparent
for photos of signers in the sign language chapter. On the other hand
some e-version photos and charts are in color, unlike the print
version---and occasionally this makes a difference, as in the
reference in the caption of figure 44.2 to the "red plot", which plot
is unfortunately a shade of gray in the print version (the e-version
plot is in color, and far easier to read not only because of that, but
also because of its size).
Apart from the above relatively minor issues, there are a few
decisions that in my opinion might have made this handbook better.
First, the decision to devote Part IV to "Word Classes in Genetic and
Areal Language Groups" led to some of the chapters in this section
covering so many languages within a group that few generalizations can
be drawn.  The chapter on Australian languages covers perhaps 25
language families, and while there may be similarities among unrelated
languages due to areal influence, the diversity is huge.  Even the
Mayan chapter left me with the feeling that there were very few
generalizations among these related languages, apart from head-marked
ergativity and the limitation to a very few adpositions in each
language.  To what extent this apparent lack of generalizations is due
to inadequate or inconsistent descriptions of individual languages is
not clear.  It might have been better to describe word classes as
exemplified by a single well-studied Mayan language, with perhaps the
occasional comment that another Mayan language behaves differently.
The use of language groups rather than individual languages also means
that details needed to understand generalizations are often omitted in
favor of discussing differences among languages of the group.  This is
not totally unexpected, since handbooks in some sense serve as a guide
to the larger literature, rather than providing detailed argumentation
about certain issues; but handbooks are also not just annotated
bibliographies.  In sum, I feel a bit more depth (on individual
languages) and less breadth (on language families and especially areal
groupings) would have been helpful.
Another issue in the chapters on language groups is that while most
example sentences are tagged for the individual language, some are
not; since the chapters discuss multiple languages, tagging all
examples for the individual language would have been helpful.
Secondly, the use of extinct languages in some chapters of Part IV
makes it difficult to know how strong the generalizations are.  There
are really only a few chapters where this is an issue; the chapter on
Egyptian, Semitic and Cushitic languages (where Ancient Egyptian [egy]
is extinct, as are some of the ancient Semitic languages described) is
one.  But the problem is particularly noticeable in the chapter on
Classical Chinese. (The ISO code ozh for "Old Chinese" includes
Classical Chinese, as well as older varieties; ISO code lzh "Literary
Chinese" includes both Classical Chinese and later Chinese written in
a similar style to Classical Chinese.)  I assume that this language
was chosen because it appears to be at an extreme in terms of word
class distinctions---the contention is that many, perhaps most, words
were "flexible", with their actual categories determined by syntactic
context and semantics, supplemented by "pragmatic implicatures (based
on stereotypes), metonymy, metaphor and general aspects of world
knowledge" (p.611).  But as an outside observer (I know next to
nothing about modern Chinese, much less the classical language), I was
wondering how certain these observations were---and whether some of
the claims might be based on our incomplete knowledge of a language
spoken thousands of years ago, written in a non-alphabetic script
where morphology can only be reconstructed, and with the corpus
possibly being poetic or at least stylized, and where present day
scholars reportedly disagree to some extent.  An expert on classical
Chinese might scoff at my skepticism, but that misses the point: the
chapter is not written for experts on this language, but for linguists
interested in word classes in other languages.  To use a language that
only specialized scholars can make much sense of means that
non-experts have a difficult time evaluating the arguments.
Furthermore, if it is true that classical Chinese in some sense lacked
syntactic (non-semantic) word classes, then there must be other
languages---modern languages---that behave the same way.  (Modern
Chinese is apparently not such a language.)  In my view, a discussion
of word classes in one of those modern languages would have been more
convincing.
Most of the authors take a broad view, presenting both sides of
arguments even though the authors clearly have a preference for one
side; the chapters on specific theories are of course understandable
exceptions to this.  But a few authors of ostensibly theory-agnostic
chapters clearly come down on one side without presenting much in the
way of conflicting evidence.  Stoll's chapter on "Word Classes in
First Language Acquisition", for instance, is clearly dismissive of
linguists who advocate for innate categories.  She may be right, but
it would have been helpful to hear more about language acquisition
from their point of view.
Finally, it is unavoidable that a handbook will be slightly out of
date by the time it reaches print, and in this case this is most
noticeable with respect to the discussion of computational
linguistics.  There is a chapter entitled "Word Classes in
Computational Linguistics and AI" by Meladel Mistica, Ekaterina
Vylomova and Francis Bond, and another entitled "Word Classes in
Corpus linguistics", by Natalila Levshina.  Both are devoted in part
to difficulties in establishing cross-language tag sets (word classes)
so that tokens (mostly words) in text corpora can be tagged by humans
to support machine learning.  If there was anything the previous
chapters established, it was that it would be difficult to come up
with universal word classes, so this fact about tag sets hardly comes
as a surprise.
A more interesting question might have been whether it is possible for
the machine to come up with the "right" word classes in particular
languages on its own.  These chapters were of course written before
Large Language Models (LLMs) came to the fore, and the ability of LLMs
to construct coherent sentences might be telling us something
interesting about word categories.  But there was already a
considerable literature going back to the early 1990s showing that
unsupervised machine learning of grammatical categories (clustering of
words in unannotated texts into categories) can be done (see e.g.
Clark and Lappin (2010), particularly section 3.1, and Muralidaran,
Spasić and Knight (2021) for summaries of some approaches that
preceded LLMs).   These programs could serve as proofs of concept that
humans could infer grammatical categories without innate
knowledge---and to the extent that the internal workings of these
programs can be understood (it is notoriously hard to examine the
internals of LLMs), it might even show how humans learn these things.
Or if on the contrary it turns out that unsupervised machine learning
cannot reliably infer grammatical categories under reasonable
constraints (e.g. without access to quantities of data beyond what
children might be expected to hear), this might be an argument for
innate categories.  The question is briefly discussed in Levishina's
chapter (section 38.2.3) and in Mistica et al's chapter (section
45.4.3); but if there will some day be a new edition of this handbook,
I would expect this topic to be much more prominent, both in the
computational chapters and in chapters devoted to theory.
Another question which is not addressed (at least not in any depth) is
morphosyntactic features, such as tense, aspect, number, case and
gender--and perhaps even person.  This absence is perfectly
understandable---the book might have wound up at twice its current
length!  But if nouns and verbs are not directly comparable across
language groups, how much more so the features they carry.  Perhaps
another book will address those questions.
Finally, I mentioned that the Part on language groups includes a
welcome chapter devoted to sign languages.  Sign languages are however
ignored in nearly all the other chapters, despite the possibility that
the very different modality of signing might have a significant effect
on word categories---or not.  Either result will surely throw
interesting light on the question of the universality and innateness
of categories.  I would hope that future researchers on grammatical
categories will rectify this omission.
In summary, this book--or rather, some portion of it!--should be
required reading for anyone working on language documentation, syntax,
morphology or lexicography.  In my opinion, this recommendation should
hold particularly for those linguists working within theories that
assume innate grammatical categories, who might be persuaded to
reconsider that decision, or at least consider why there is so much
variation in categories across languages.  Those working in other
subfields of linguistics may find much to think about here as well.
REFERENCES
Clark, Alexander, and Shalom Lappin.  2010.  "Unsupervised Learning
and Grammr Induction."  Pp. 197--220 in Clark, Alexander; Fox, Chris;
and Shalom Lappin (eds.) The Handbook of Comptuational Linguistics and
Natural Language Processing.  Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell.
Available online at
https://alexc17.github.io/static/pdfs/HANDBOOK2010CHAPTER.pdf.
Accessed 2024-11-14.
Haspelmath, Martin.  2012.  "How to compare major word-classes across
the world's languages."  P. 109--130 in Thomas Graf et al (editors),
Theories of Everything: In Honor of Edward Keenan.  Los Angeles: UCLA
Working Papers in Linguistics 17.  Available online at
https://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/wpl/issues/wpl17/papers/16_haspelmath.pdf.
Accessed 2024-11-14.
Muralidaran, Vigneshwaran; Spasić, Irena; and Dawn Knight. 2021.
Natural Language Engineering. 27(6): 647-689.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1351324920000327.  Accessed on 2024-11-14.
Polian, Gilles. 2020. Tseltal-Spanish multidialectal dictionary.
Dictionaria 10. 1-8109. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526550.
Accessed on 2024-11-11.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr. Maxwell is a retired researcher in computational morphology and
other computational resources for low density languages, formerly at
the Center for Advanced Study of Language (later the Applied Research
Laboratory for Intelligence and Security) at the University of
Maryland.  Before that he did research at the Linguistic Data
Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, and studied endangered
languages of Ecuador and Colombia with the Summer Institute of
Linguistics.



------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List to support the student editors:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

Elsevier Ltd http://www.elsevier.com/linguistics

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Wiley http://www.wiley.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-36-305
----------------------------------------------------------