Abstract
Abstract Word classes are taken to be essentialist categories; they serve as the building blocks for syntactic constructions, and are language universals (that is, cross-linguistically valid). But a word class is language-specific. This is because a word class is defined distributionally, by the occurrence of the words in a particular construction in a particular language. Hence it is not a building block for syntactic constructions. Moreover, a word class is not an essentialist category. A word class is a population: a spatiotemporally bounded set of historical entities—in this case, the occurrences of the words in question in language use in the language, interconnected by lineages of replication. Hence a word class cannot serve as a comparative concept for language universals. Instead, meaning and certain non-distributional properties of form can be used to compare word classes/populations defined by different constructions within and across languages, and reveal universals of grammar.
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