Lexical Categories

For decades generative linguistics has said little about the differences between verbs nouns and adjectives. This book seeks to fill this theoretical gap by presenting simple and substantive syntactic definitions of these three lexical categories. Mark C. Baker claims that the various superficial differences found in particular languages have a single underlying source which can be used to give better characterizations of these ''parts of speech''. These definitions are supported by data from languages from every continent including English Italian Japanese Edo Mohawk Chichewa Quechua Choctaw Nahuatl Mapuche and several Austronesian and Australian languages. Baker argues for a formal syntax-oriented and universal approach to the parts of speech as opposed to the functionalist semantic and relativist approaches that have dominated the few previous works on this subject. This book will be welcomed by researchers and students of linguistics and by related cognitive scientists of language.