Chimalpahin

[Frances Karttunen]

On May 29, 2005, at 3:25 PM, Swanton, M. wrote:

> Galen,
> In a descriptive grammar of some language L, all posited lexical
> categories (verbs, nouns, positionals, etc) should be defined based on
> their linguistic behavior in language L. In other words, lexical
> categories are language-specific and should be empirically, not
> "logically", defined.
>
>

To put it in simplistic terms, if it takes verbal affixes, it's a verb.
  If it takes nominal suffixes, it's a noun.  Derivational processes
yield nouns from verbs, verbs from nouns, abstract nouns from concrete
nouns, etc., etc., but the end result takes some particular set of
inflectional affixes and not the rest.

There is nothing I know of in Nahuatl inflectional morphology that
distinguishes adjectives from nouns, so I am always very wary of
talking about adjectives in Nahuatl.

However, nouns can and do function adverbially in constructions like
Cuauhtemoc 'he has descended eagle-wise,' etc. Nouns functioning
adverbially can be distinguished from incorporated nonspecific objects
because they appear in intransitive verb constructions and when
incorporated into transitive verbal constructions, there is also an
object prefix referring to the actual object.

That said, I disagree that lexical categories are language-specific.
If you look at a large range of languages, you find that some
categories are common to all, even though no language makes use of the
full set of possibilities.