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