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

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Thursday, December 10, 1998, 4:33
At 10:39 09/12/98 -0800, you wrote:
>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. >
Everything's disputed in linguistics (not only in linguistics, the number of scientists that don't agree with the "canon" is impressive). But what do you call "noun-like" and "verb-like" class? Is this a semantic distinction, a distinction of everyday use or something else? I'd like to know more about it.
>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. > >------------------------------------ >Matt Pearson >mpearson@ucla.edu >UCLA Linguistics Department >405 Hilgard Avenue >Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543 >------------------------------------ > >
Christophe Grandsire |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G. "R=E9sister ou servir" homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html