Comments on Austronesian nominalism: A Mayan perspective

Coon, Jessica

doi:10.1515/thli.2009.004

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

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“…Similar conclusions have been reached for many other languages with supposedly unusual category systems; see e.g. Richards (2009a) and Sabbagh (2009) on Tagalog, Bauer (1997) on Maori, Evans and Osada (2005) on Mundari, Coon (2009) on Mayan languages, and Koch and Matthewson (2009) on Salish languages. (Some of these authors discuss only nouns and verbs; on the status of adjectives, see Baker [2003] and Dixon and A ikhenvald [2004].…”

Section: The Issuesupporting

confidence: 72%

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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Section: The Issuesupporting

confidence: 72%

Are lexical categories universal? The view from Chamorro

Chung

2012

Theoretical Linguistics

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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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Optional agreement in Santiago Tz’utujil (Mayan) is syntactic

Levin

Lyskawa

Ranero

2020

Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft

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Some Mayan languages display optional verbal agreement with 3pl arguments (Dayley1985; Henderson2009; England2011). Focusing on novel data from Santiago Tz’utujil (ST), we demonstrate that this optionality is not reducible to phonological or morphological factors. Rather, the source of optionality is in the syntax. Specifically, the distinction between arguments generated in the specifier position and arguments generated in the complement position governs the pattern. Only base-complements control agreement optionally; base-specifiers control agreement obligatorily. We provide an analysis in which optional agreement results from the availability of two syntactic representations (DP vs. reduced nominal argument). Thus, while the syntactic operation Agree is deterministic, surface optionality arises when the operation targets two different sized goals.

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Comments on Austronesian nominalism: A Mayan perspective

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

Are lexical categories universal? The view from Chamorro

Are lexical categories universal? The view from Chamorro

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

Optional agreement in Santiago Tz’utujil (Mayan) is syntactic

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