Re: Nouns, verbs, adjectives... and why they're pointless

Nik Taylor wrote:

>Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>>         I totally agree with Josh. Parts of speech are only accidental
>>and I think
>> a language with PoS can evolve into a language without PoS and the contrary
>> is true also. PoS are not mandatory, there is no "universal grammatical
>> feature" that forces people to make a distinction between nouns and verbs.
>> In fact, I know that at least one natlang, Nootka, that really has no parts
>> of speech. Nearly everything's possible in that natlang (I'll find an
>> example if you wish).
>
>I greatly disagree with that.  Altho I don't know anything about Nootka,
>I find it *very* hard to believe that it makes *no* distinction between
>nouns and verbs - it must make some syntactic distinction, at least.
The claim that Nootka has no parts of speech distinctions has been made
more than once in the linguistics literature.  But this claim has also
been disputed, based on the distribution of certain derivational suffixes,
which seem to discriminate between a noun-like class and a verb-like class.
Specifically, these suffixes are required on verb-like words being used
as arguments, but not on noun-like words being used as arguments.
I wish I could give the relevant examples, but the book I have which
discusses this is at school right now.

It has also been claimed (by the linguist David Gil) that the Riau dialect
of Indonesian lacks any part of speech distinctions.  I don't remember
what the evidence is for this claim, though...

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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