Mixed Categories in the Hierarchical Lexicon: 90 (Center for the Study of Language and Information Publication Lecture Notes) - Softcover

Malouf, Robert P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1575861909 ISBN 13: 9781575861906

Publisher: The Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications, 2000

Synopsis

Mixed category constructions like the English verbal gerund involve words that seem to be central members of more than one part of speech and so pose a problem for the standard view of syntactic categories. This book presents a novel analysis of this and similar mixed category constructions in languages including Quechua, Tibetan, Arabic, Fijian, Dagaare, and Jacaltec. Under this analysis, verbal gerunds share the selectional properties of verbs and the distributional properties of nouns. Since different dimensions of grammatical information can vary independently, the behavior of mixed categories creates no paradox. But, while these dimensions are in principle independent, in fact certain types of mixed categories are quite common in the world's languages, while others are rare or nonexistent. The cross-linguistic variation can best be accounted for by means of a lexical categorial prototype. Specifically, nouns prototypically denote objects and verbs prototypically denote actions.

About this title

Product Description

Good clean copy.

Book Description

Mixed category constructions like the English verbal gerund involve words that seem to be central members of more than one part of speech and so pose a problem for the standard view of syntactic categories. This presents a novel analysis of this and similar mixed category constructions in various languages.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1575861909
• ISBN 13: 9781575861906
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256