Grammatical word classes are universal across all human languages
the verdict
REFUTED
the evidence says no
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
4 sources for · 1 against
Some linguistic sources report that word classes are fundamental to all natural human languages, whereas cross-linguistic studies point to the existence of flexible words that defy traditional grammatical categories.
The distinction between nouns and verbs is a language universal. Yet, functional neuroimaging studies comparing noun and verb processing have yielded inconsistent findings, ranging from a complete frontal(verb)–temporal(noun) dichotomy to a complete overlap in activation patterns. The current study addressed the debate about neural distinctions between nouns and verbs by conducting an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta‐analysis of probabilistic cytoarchitectonic maps. Two levels of analysis were conducted: simple effects (Verbs vs. Baseline, Nouns vs. Baseline), and direct comparisons (Verbs vs. Nouns, Nouns vs. Verbs). Nouns were uniquely associated with a left medial temporal cluster (BA37). Activation foci for verbs included extensive inferior frontal (BA44–47) and mid‐temporal (BA22, 21) regions in the left hemisphere. These findings confirm that the two grammatical classes have distinct neural architecture in supra‐modal brain regions. Further, nouns and verbs overlapped in a small left lateral inferior temporal activation cluster (BA37), which is a region for modality‐independent, grammatical class‐independent lexical representations. These findings are most consistent with the view that as one acquires language, linguistic representations for a lexical category shift from the modality specific cortices which represent prototypical members of that category (e.g., motion for verbs) to abstract amodal representations in close proximity to modality specific cortices.
This book is the first major cross-linguistic study of ‘flexible words’, i.e. words that cannot be classified in terms of the traditional lexical categories Verb, Noun, Adjective or Adverb. This is because flexible words can -without special morphosyntactic marking- serve in functions for which other languages must employ members of two or more of the four traditional, ‘specialised’ word classes. Thus, flexible words are underspecified for communicative functions like ‘predicating’ (verbal function), ‘referring’ (nominal function) or ‘modifying’ (a function typically associated with adjectives and e.g. manner adverbs). Even though languages with flexible word classes have been know to exist for more than a century, the phenomenon of lexical flexibility has not played a role in the development of linguistic typology or modern grammatical theory. The current volume aims to remedy this situation by offering ten detailed studies on lexical word classes, investigating their properties and what it means for the grammar of a language to have such a word class. Each contributor to this volume is an expert on lexical flexibility, either because the author has studied lexical flexibility in a particular language, or because (s)he has investigated flexible word classes across languages. Furthermore, this collection of articles provides a variety of theoretical perspectives on the phenomenon of lexical flexibility. The book shows that the recognition and study of flexible words adds significantly to our understanding of the nature of human language and its place in human cognition.
Author's Introduction Word classes (‘parts‐of‐speech’, ‘syntactic categories’, ‘lexical categories’) are the fundamental building blocks of linguistic expressions in all natural human languages. They have been investigated since antiquity and continue to play a central role in modern linguistics. Today an increasingly important role is assigned to the information that is specified in the lexical entry of a word in the lexicon (including, of course, information about its category membership), both in formal and in functional approaches to grammar. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that the traditional set of word classes is biased towards the better studied European languages and needs to be revised to accommodate unfamiliar word classes in non‐European languages. Author Recommends 1. Ansaldo, Umberto, Jan Don, and Roland Pfau (eds). 2008. Parts of Speech: Descriptive tools, theoretical constructs. Special issue of Studies in Language 32–2. doi 10.1075/sl.32.3.02ans ; ISSN 0378‐4177; E‐ISSN 1569‐9978. [notice that the doi refers to the ‘Introduction’ by the editors]. This special issue of Studies in Language offers an excellent, broad overview of current approaches to the study of word classes (to quote the editors: ‘from the theoretical to the descriptive, the synchronic to the diachronic, variation and language contact to acquisition’). The 11 articles discuss a large variety of word class‐related issues on the basis of detailed studies of many different languages (e
We propose a grounded approach to meaning in language typology. We treat data from perceptual modalities, such as images, as a language-agnostic representation of meaning. Hence, we can quantify the function--form relationship between images and captions across languages. Inspired by information theory, we define "groundedness", an empirical measure of contextual semantic contentfulness (formulated as a difference in surprisal) which can be computed with multilingual multimodal language models. As a proof of concept, we apply this measure to the typology of word classes. Our measure captures the contentfulness asymmetry between functional (grammatical) and lexical (content) classes across languages, but contradicts the view that functional classes do not convey content. Moreover, we find universal trends in the hierarchy of groundedness (e.g., nouns > adjectives > verbs), and show that our measure partly correlates with psycholinguistic concreteness norms in English. We release a dataset of groundedness scores for 30 languages. Our results suggest that the grounded typology approach can provide quantitative evidence about semantic function in language.
have different word classes like noun, verb, and preposition. Some word classes ^Some languages … languages are fundamentally different from human languages. In what ways are animal communication … computer languages are learned and natural human languages are acquired? What about computer languages
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