Title: Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns, and Adjectives Author(s): Mark C. Baker Publisher: Cambridge University Press Date: 2004 Pages: 368 Size: 1.23 Mb Format: PDF Quality: High Language: American English Contents: 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. Acknowledgements page xi List of abbreviations xiii 1 The problem of the lexical categories 1 1.1 A theoretical lacuna 1 1.2 Unanswerable typological questions concerning categories 3 1.3 Categories in other linguistic traditions 11 1.4 Goals, methods, and outline of the current work 17 2 Verbs as licensers of subjects 23 2.1 Introduction 23 2.2 Initial motivations 24 2.3 The distribution of Pred 34 2.4 Copular particles 39 2.5 Inflection for tense 46 2.6 Morphological causatives 53 2.7 Word order differences 60 2.8 Unaccusativity diagnostics 62 2.9 Adjectives in the decomposition of verbs 77 2.10 Are there languages without verbs? 88 3 Nouns as bearers of a referential index 95 3.1 What is special about nouns? 95 3.2 The criterion of identity 101 3.3 Occurrence with quantifiers and determiners 109 3.4 Nouns in binding and anaphora 125 3.5 Nouns and movement 132 3.6 Nouns as arguments 142 3.7 Nouns must be related to argument positions 153 ixx Contents 3.8 Predicate nominals and verbalization 159 3.9 Are nouns universal? 169 4 Adjectives as neither nouns nor verbs 190 4.1 The essence of having no essence 190 4.2 Attributive modification 192 4.3 Adjectives and degree heads 212 4.4 Resultative secondary predication 219 4.5 Adjectives and adverbs 230 4.6 Are adjectives universal? 238 5 Lexical categories and the nature of the grammar 264 5.1 What has a category? 265 5.2 Categories and the architecture of the grammar 275 5.3 Why are the lexical categories universal? 298 5.4 Final remarks 301 Appendix. Adpositions as functional categories 303 A.1 Evidence that adpositions are functional 303 A.2 The place of adpositions in a typology of categories 311 References 326 Index