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Most grammatical theories assume that the parts of speech — noun, verb, adjective — are categories of particular languages, but may be absent in some languages. But standard analyses are arbitrary and inconsistent about the constructions used to define syntactic categories, which leads some theorists to lump words into fewer categories and others to split words into more categories. One can be rigorous and consistent in analysis by using the same constructions across languages, namely the constructions denoting the propositional acts of reference, predication and modification, and comparing the structural coding and behavioral potential of semantic classes of lexical roots. This rigorous approach leads to universal prototypes for noun (reference to an object), verb (predication of an action), and adjective (modification by a property). Language-specific categories are represented as semantic maps on a universal conceptual space, constrained by the part of speech prototypes.

Radical Construction Grammar is a construction grammar, in which syntactic representation is a pairing of form and meaning. Constructions are the basic, primitive units of syntactic representation; syntactic categories are roles in constructions. The only type of syntactic relation is the role of a syntactic unit in its construction. Constructions are language-specific, though their structural properties can be mapped onto a syntactic space. Categories are mapped onto conceptual space, which represents the constraints of typological universals and reflects properties of the human mind. Radical Construction Grammar is embedded in an evolutionary theory of language. Utterances are instantiations of constructions in communicative interaction. But communication is imperfect, since we cannot read each other’s minds. Speakers are constantly reanalysing the form-meaning mapping in constructions, and this process leads to grammatical change, which can be propagated through a speech community. Grammar is thus constantly evolving as it is continually replicated in language use.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book as a whole. It begins with a detailed critical review of historical approaches to Words, focusing, in particular, on the rationale for listedness and lexical word formation, and attempting to show that from both a phonological and syntactic perspective, that move is conceptually and theoretically problematic. This is followed by a preliminary presentation of the specifics of the system to be used throughout the book, eventually to be justified in detail in Chapters 6–10. Specifically, roots are introduced as a phonological index, and two distinct functors are introduced—a categorial functor (C-functor), responsible for the division of the categorial space, and a semantic functor (S-functor) responsible for valuing otherwise null terminals to project — once valued and thus categorized — as segments of Extended Projections. Extended Projections are likewise defined as a universally fixed set of segments of Extended Projections dominating a categorial core (C-core). The chapter ends with an outline and discussion of the general organization of the book.

This chapter examines evidence that adults and infants can learn proto-categories through morphological paradigms in which a subset of the categories are double-marked. It is possible that the requirement for double-marking of categories provides evidence for analogy as a category learning mechanism. Experimental results allow for a refinement of factors contributing to ‘good analogies’. These refinements, in turn, may lead to advances in the understanding of syntactic category acquisition.

This chapter explores mismatches between syntactic and lexical categories, adducing evidence from Creole land Amerindian languages, with a case study of Popoloca de Mezontla. Core lexical features may not have a grammatical role and grammatical features may not have a representation in the lexicon. The case study of Popoloca shows that borrowed content words have a quite specific distribution, depending on the topic of the text they occur in. In contrast, the number of function words borrowed (in tokens) is almost comparable to that of content words. The borrowing process itself is partly constrained by lexical, and partly by syntactic feature configurations. The presence or absence of a noun/verb distinction in different languages may itself be a case of mismatch between the lexicon and the syntax.

This chapter examines the standard Bare Phrase Structure-style system and its problems with labeling syntactic structures containing specifiers, challenges different proposals for the labeling of specifiers, and proposes an alternative that eliminates this problem. The new system removes a stipulation built into Merge and offers a solution to the labeling problem for specifiers. In addition, phrases can never be Merged with lexical roots, resulting in a complete severance of arguments from their lexical entries. Instead, syntactic categories, rather than lexical properties of roots, must introduce the arguments.

Don and Van Lier focus on Evans and Osada’s criterion of semantic compositionality: What is the interpretation of formally identical lexemes in different syntactic contexts, and what implications does this have for categorial distinctions in individual languages? Data of three candidates for ‘flexible languages’—Kharia (Munda, India), Tagalog (Malayo-Polynesian, Philippines), and Samoan (Oceanic, Samoa)—are compared with Dutch, a ‘differentiated language’ with distinct lexical classes of verbs and nouns. Compositional and non-compositional semantic shifts are found in all four languages. The difference between ‘flexible’ and ‘differentiated’ languages resides in the fact that lexical and syntactic categorization are part of a single operation in languages of the latter type, whereas they are distinct operations in a flexible language. Specifically, while roots in differentiated languages combine with a categorial label before they are further processed by the morphology and syntax, flexible languages can (zero-)derive and combine roots without affecting their distributional freedom.

This chapter is concerned with the nature of functional projections, specifically the relation between features and projections. It addresses the question of whether the feature of Number should be declared a syntactic category (i.e., the head of a dedicated functional projection Num(ber)P), or rather viewed as a feature that attaches to some other syntactic category.

This chapter is devoted to articulating a model of categorial determination based fundamentally on the conceptualization of categorial selection as a partition of the categorial space, and as establishing equivalence classes. In essence, functors define not only the category which they, themselves project, but also define a complement categorial domain, which comes to be associated with their complements. If such complements are otherwise category-less (e.g. roots) they thus come to be equivalent to a category (e.g. V-equivalent, N-equivalent and so on). If the complement is already categorial (e.g. itself headed by a functor), the existence of a complement categorial domain amounts, effectively, to a checking or a selection mechanism ruling out, e.g. the merger of a V-selecting functor such as -ation with a derived adjective such as ‘available’. Crucially, the model of categorization put forth is committed to the categorization of form in ‘the form’ as N or of form within ‘formation’ as V without the presence of additional structure, i.e., in both these cases ‘form’ is crucially a terminal and mono-morphemic. As a consequence, the account is committed to the absence of zero-affixes marking ‘form’ as N or V respectively. Much of the chapter, consequently, is devoted to arguing against the existence of zero-instantiated C-functors in English. Final comments concern the status of multi-function functors such as -ing and the status of adjectives.

This chapter examines the organization of overt phrasal syntactic representation, the constituent structure or c-structure. Section 3.1 discusses some traditional arguments for constituent structure representation. Many of these arguments prove to be flawed, since the theory of phrase structure has a different status in LFG than in theories in which grammatical functions are defined configurationally and abstract syntactic (and other) relations are represented in phrase structure terms. Valid criteria within LFG for phrase structure determination are proposed in Section 3.2. The inventory of constituent structure categories, both lexical and functional, that are crosslinguistically available and the theory of the organization of words and categories into phrases are explored in Section 3.3. The general theory of constituent structure organization is exemplified in Section 3.4, where we provide more specific discussion of the constituent structure organization of clauses. Section 3.5 discusses the relation between hierarchical constituent structure and surface linear order.

This chapter provides the topos-theoretic background necessary for understanding the contents of the book; the presentation is self-contained and only assumes a basic familiarity with the language of category theory. The chapter begins by reviewing the basic theory of Grothendieck toposes, including the fundamental equivalence between geometric morphisms and flat functors. Then it presents the notion of first-order theory and the various deductive systems for fragments of first-order logic that will be considered in the course of the book, notably including that of geometric logic. Further, it discusses categorical semantics, i.e. the interpretation of first-order theories in categories possessing ‘enough’ structure. Lastly, the key concept of syntactic category of a first-order theory is reviewed; this notion will be used in Chapter 2 for constructing classifying toposes of geometric theories.

Noam Chomsky identified close parallels in the structures built around syntactic categories; specifically, around noun and verb. Based on the explanation for the behavior of nominalizations, he suggested an enrichment of the base component of the grammar based on the notion that nominalizations and their non-nominalized forms were listed in the lexicon, rather than being related by a transformational syntactic rule. Moreover, the syntactic commonalities between the two forms could be captured by underspecifying the categorial information in certain lexical entries, thus marking them as ambiguous in their nominal or verbal status. Given Chomsky’s arguments about nominalizations, nouns and verbs should project similar syntactic structures. This chapter considers the syntax of relational nominals and shows that such nominals, unlike verbs, systematically take their apparent arguments optionally.

This chapter examines the theory that both morphological and syntactic structures are constructed from the same set of categories. Focusing on clitic variation across Romance dialects (specifically Italian and Swiss), it argues that it is necessary to redefine the standard morphological feature set (person, number, gender, case). It also suggests that both syntax and morphology should be based on syntactic categories such as nominal class, quantification, and definiteness, and not on the traditional f-features and Case. The chapter also considers plurals and datives, nominatives, Agree, nominal class and person, accusatives, and minimalism.

The introduction to this book reviews detail the major claims put forth in RoN in 1970, and in particular, the claim that complex words, with deverbal nominals being the case at point, represent a formation that is neither predictable nor productive, and are hence lexically listed. This claim goes hand in hand, in RoN, with the claim that whatever similarities do hold between the deverbal nominal such as destruction and the verb destroy emerge from the existence of a category neutral listed form, DESTROY, which has a consistent subcategorization frame (an object in this case), which is realized identically in the syntax, in accordance with the X’-theory, and where the form DESTROY itself inherits its category from its categorial insertion context (N, V etc.). Since 1970, a rich body of studies has emerged which investigated the properties of lexical formations such as destruction and their relationship with the verb destroy, giving rise to multiple accounts of the emergence of complex words, as well as to the emergence of distinct argument structure combination in the context of nominalizations in particular, and word formation in general. Particularly influential was Grimshaw’s (1990) work, which introduced a typologically sound distinction between nominalizations with event structure (Complex Event Nominals, or Argument Structure Nominals) and nominals which lack event structure, and which may be result nominals or referential nominals or Simple Event Nominals, i.e. nouns which denote an event, but which do not have an event structure in the verbal sense (e.g. trip). More recently there has been the questioning of the partition between word formation and syntactic constituent building altogether, starting with Marantz (1997), and continuing with influential work by many of the contributors to this volume. This volume brings together a sample of contemporary approaches to nominalization, based on the historical record, but also branching into new grounds, both in terms of their syntactic approaches, and in terms of the range of languages considered.<320>

This chapter briefly considers the evidence for transitive nouns and adjectives in early Indo-Aryan in both a typological and a theoretical perspective. The fact that most transitive nouns and adjectives in early Indo-Aryan fall under the traditional heading of ‘agent nouns’ (subject-oriented formations) is typologically notable, since while action nouns with verbal government are well-known, the possibility of relatively verbal agent nouns has not always been acknowledged. The theoretical analysis is framed within Lexical-Functional Grammar, and makes use of the concept of ‘mixed’ categories to effect a clear formalization of transitive nouns and adjectives which captures their transitivity while allowing them to remain fundamentally nouns and adjectives in categorial terms.

The first part of this chapter discusses the traditional definition of an adjective and the way it has developed in the history of grammar. It questions the validity of syntactic categories at the level of the traditional parts of speech, and in particular the criteria by which words in a- such as asleep are distinguished as adjectives from similar adverbs. The second part discusses the view implicit in dictionaries that words classified as nouns or adverbs undergo conversion to adjectives when their function is attributive. The argument emphasizes the restricted uses of adverbs as premodifiers, as opposed to their more general syntactic function as postmodifiers, and the concept of microsyntax as a syntax of words individually.

This final chapter, which is much shorter than the others, tries to draw some morals for the study of syntax generally. These concern especially the distinction between functions and categories, and the importance of polysystemic analysis; the basis on which units are grouped into categories at different levels of abstraction; the extent to which analysis into constituents is justified; and the dangers of adopting theories of syntactic constructions which are restricted too precisely.

This chapter provides some background on the history of Michif, the language spoken by at least a few hundred Métis people. The Métis were originally located in the Red River Valley, and are today mostly located in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada. As Michif is usually characterized as a ‘mixed language’, arising from contact of Plains Cree and French, this chapter discusses ‘contact languages’ more generally, including creoles, pidgins, and mixed languages, as well as the claim that Michif is a ‘mixed language’ itself. This chapter also provides background on the elements within the Michif Determiner Phrase (DP), such as the origin of certain syntactic categories, and presents the basic facts that are investigated in more detail in the rest of the book. Other facts relevant to the issues discussed in the book are also briefly discussed.