nouns and verbs

[Ulrike Zeshan]

Hello all,
maybe I am a little late for jumping into the discussion. Sorry for that.
I would like to add to the 'reading list' what Hans-Juergen Sasse wrote about
 Cayuga (a North-American Indian language). He
claims that in this language there are verbs but there are no nouns. All
 'concrete' notions, objects, names, or whatever
semantic criterion you like, are expressed verbally with the same inflections as
 verbs, e.g.
'door' is expressed as 'it doors'
'telephone' is expressed as 'you put your voice into it'
Maybe some of you will also be familiar with the idea of 'precategoriality' in
 Tagalog (Philippine language) but I won't
go into this here.
I believe that the question of word classes is one of the most fundamental ones
 from a typological point of view, and I feel
that this question has hardly been addressed in sign language research. I agree
 with Adam Schembri that Supalla & Newport
only refers to a limited number of noun/verb pairs. As far as I know, there is
 no comprehensive treatment of word class
distinctions in any sign language, including ASL (please correct me if I am
 wrong, and I'll put a relevant reference on top
of *my* reading list!).
Now for IPSL I have found something similar to what Sonja found for DGS (we have
 not cooperated on this even though we are
both Germans...). In IPSL it was easy to define three major morphological
 classes on the basis of spatial possibilities:
1. class of words that cannot be modified spatially
2. class of words that can modify their place of articulation
3. class of words that can be moved between two points in space (corresponding
 to 'directional' signs)
However, these morphological classes do *not* correspond with either semantic or
 distributional/syntactic criteria.
Directional signs are 'verby' to some extent but the other two classes have both
 'nouny' and 'verby' items. I have not
been able to identify word classes on the basis of semantic or
 distributional/syntactic criteria or on the basis of other
morphological criteria.
I have noted in the discussion that 'nouny' and 'verby' criteria in a number of
 cases only appear when the sign is actually
used in context (like adding mouth patterns or adverbial facial expressions or
 modifying the movement). So could it be that
the lexical items under discussion are not per se in a certain lexical category
 but receive different characteristics when
they are used in different slots or functions in the sentence?
I don't know whether I have made myself clear, if not, please comment.
Ulrike Zeshan