Nouns, verbs and flexibles: implications for typologies of word classes

Abstract

Following Farrell’s analysis [Farrell, P., 2001. Functional shift as category underspecification. English Language and Linguistics 5 (1), 109–130], I submit that the most parsimonious hypothesis for stems that are ambiguous with respect to the noun/verb distinction (such as English walk, love, kill, etc.) is that they are neither nouns nor verbs but flexibles. It is generally agreed that the main functions of nouns and verbs are linguistic argument and linguistic predicate, respectively, and that the linguistic predicate/argument distinction is universal in the world’s languages. I claim that if all languages have linguistic predicates and arguments, all languages must have at least one lexical class that maps to linguistic predicate and at least one lexical class that maps to linguistic argument. There are only three possibilities as to how a lexical class can map to linguistic predicate or argument: it can map to predicate, it can map to argument, or it can map to both. These three ways correspond to verbs, nouns and flexibles, respectively. Given this inventory of lexical classes, together with the premise that all languages have at least one lexical class that maps to argument and at least one that maps to predicate, the following five logically possible language types emerge: noun/verb/flexible, noun/flexible, verb/flexible, noun/verb, and flexible. After analyzing typological evidence for each of these types, I conclude that, if the criterion of pervasiveness of the typological trait is applied, type noun/verb/flexible is by far the most common, if not the only one present among the world’s languages, with type flexible ranking next in probability. In addition, as ‘word’ has traditionally been found difficult to define [Broschart, J., 1997. Why Tongan does it differently: categorial distinctions in a language without nouns and verbs. Linguistic Typology 1 (2), 123–166; Di Sciullo, A.M., Williams, E., 1987. On the definition of word. Linguistic Inquiry Monographs, vol. 14. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; Greenberg, J.H., 1963. Essays in Linguistics, Phoenix Books. Chicago, London], I propose the following definition for elementary word: a minimal unit of speech understood (though not necessarily used) outside context.