Austronesian Nominalism and its consequences: A Tagalog case study

Kaufman, Daniel

doi:10.1515/thli.2009.001

Cited by 72 publications

(24 citation statements)

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“…Chung (2012) is a good recent example of formal generative work on a less-studied language in this tradition. This article taken together with Kaufman (2009) and the commentaries on those two articles provides perhaps the best recent window into what a selection of generativists currently think about the topic of lexical categories.…”

Section: Chomsky 1970 and The Use Of Formal Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To the extent that generative linguists active in this area believe that the categories of noun, verb, and adjective are universal, they claim this to be an empirical result of their investigations, not a presupposition of their theories. Kaufman's (2009) work on Tagalog illustrates this in a backhanded way, in that he defends an atypical generative view in which all lexical heads in Tagalog are essentially nouns. (See also Johns (1992) for a similar proposal for Inuktitut, to derive its ergatitivity from a kind of nominalist hypothesis.)…”

Section: Formal Approaches and The Universality Of The Lexical Categomentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lexical Categories: Legacy, Lacuna, and Opportunity for Functionalists and Formalists

Baker

Croft²

2017

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

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The fundamental importance of lexical categories is uncontroversial within both formal and functional approaches to grammatical analysis. But despite the familiarity of this topic and its foundational nature for grammatical description and analysis, it is paradoxically not among the best-studied or -understood topics from either the functionalist or formalist perspective. Both schools of linguistic theory have inherited their basic assumptions and instincts about lexical categories from the structuralist practice of distributional analysis. We briefly survey approaches to the various lexical categories. We then comment on a few issues of strategic value that arise from these approaches, including the importance of clearly distinguishing roots, stems, words, and syntactic units when it comes to issues of lexical categories; the importance of recognizing when distributional tests are similar across languages in principled ways; and the need for the choice of distributional tests to be informed by theoretical hypotheses.

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Section: Chomsky 1970 and The Use Of Formal Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Formal Approaches and The Universality Of The Lexical Categomentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical Categories: Legacy, Lacuna, and Opportunity for Functionalists and Formalists

Baker

Croft²

2017

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

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“…An attempt to explain the rise and existence of symmetrical voice systems is the so-called "nominalist hypothesis" (Himmelmann 1991(Himmelmann , 2008Kaufman 2009), which assumes all sentences to be intransitive, headed by predicate nominals that are derived through participant nominalizations. The actor-voice affix would thus derive a noun denoting the actor (like -er in English employ-er) and the undergoer voice would derive a noun denoting the undergoer (like -ee in English employ-ee).…”

Section: The Symmetrical-voice Type: Example Tagalogmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inverse and symmetrical voice: On languages with two transitive constructions

Haude

Zúñiga

2016

Linguistics

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In voice and alignment typology, a categorical distinction is generally made between inverse systems on the one hand and symmetrical voice systems on the other. A major reason for distinguishing between these two types is the assumption that inverse systems are governed by a hierarchy involving grammatical, semantic, and ontological criteria, while symmetrical voice systems are based on discourse-pragmatic factors. However, the two types also have several important properties in common, in particular the fact that they have more than one nonderived transitive construction. Based on data from three native languages of South America, we show that the line between the two types is not always easy to draw, and that features of the inverse type can coexist with those of the symmetrical-voice type in the same language.

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“…Are sentences in all languages constructed from the same basic building blocks -the lexical categories known as nouns, verbs, and adjectives? The question, reraised by Kaufman's (2009) target article in Theoretical Linguistics 35.1, is both very old and still unresolved. It dates back at least to Boas's famous statement (1911: 43) that "in a discussion of the characteristics of various languages different fundamental categories will be found".…”

Section: A Hard Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are lexical categories universal? The view from Chamorro

Chung

2012

Theoretical Linguistics

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Many years of linguistic research have led to no consensus on the issue of whether every language has nouns, verbs, and adjectives. This article investigates the issue from the perspective of Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands. Chamorro has been claimed to have an unusual lexical category system consisting of just two language-particular categories. Evidence is presented here that (i) the language does in fact have nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and (ii) the apparent use of content words in multiple syntactic functions results from productive processes of denominal verb formation and denominal adjective formation that are not signaled by overt morphology. The lexical semantics and pragmatics of these processes are shown to be broadly parallel to d enominal verb formation in English. Overall, the evidence supports the claim that lexical categories are universal, and suggests that the broad routes by which semantic and phonological material can be packaged into lexical categories may be universal as well.

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Austronesian Nominalism and its consequences: A Tagalog case study

Cited by 72 publications

References 1 publication

Lexical Categories: Legacy, Lacuna, and Opportunity for Functionalists and Formalists

Lexical Categories: Legacy, Lacuna, and Opportunity for Functionalists and Formalists

Inverse and symmetrical voice: On languages with two transitive constructions

Are lexical categories universal? The view from Chamorro

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