Cambridge University Press Lexical Categories Verbs, Nouns, And Adjectives.pdf

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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 new 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.
mark c. baker is Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of
Linguistics at Rutgers University and a member of the Center for Cognitive
Science. He is the author of Incorporation: a theory of grammatical func-
tion changing ( 1988 ), The polysynthesis parameter ( 1996 ), and The atoms of
language: the mind’s hidden rules of grammar ( 2001 ), as well as of numer-
ous articles in journals such as Linguistic Inquiry and Natural Language and
Lingustic Theory.

In this series
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS
General Editors: p. austin, j. bresnan, b. comrie,
w. dressler, c. j. ewen, r. lass, d. lightfoot,
i. roberts, s. romaine, n. v. smith
67 p.h. matthews: Grammatical theory in the United States from Bloomfield to Chomsky
68 ljiljana progovac: Negative and positive polarity: a binding approach
69 r.m.w. dixon: Ergativity
70 yan huang: The syntax and pragmatics of anaphora
71 knud lambrecht: Information structure and sentence form: topic, focus, and the
mental representations of discourse referents
72 luigi burzio: Principles of English stress
73 john a. hawkins: A performance theory of order and constituency
74 alice c. harris and lyle campbell: Historical syntax in cross-linguistic
perspective
75 liliane haegeman: The syntax of negation
76 paul gorrell: Syntax and parsing
77 guglielmo cinque: Italian syntax and universal grammar
78 henry smith: Restrictiveness in case theory
79 d. robert ladd: Intonational phonology
80 andrea moro: The raising of predicates: predicative noun phrases and the theory of
clause structure
81 roger lass: Historical linguistics and language change
82 john m. anderson: A notional theory of syntactic categories
83 bernd heine: Possession: cognitive sources, forces and grammaticalization
84 nomi erteschik-shir: The dynamics of focus structure
85 john coleman: Phonological representations: their names, forms and powers
86 christina y. bethin: Slavic prosody: language change and phonological theory
87 barbara dancygier: Conditionals and prediction: time, knowledge and causation in