Adjectives in MSEA languages: What do they teach us about the nature, identification and universality of word classes? Mark William Post Research Centre for Linguistic Typology m.post@latrobe.edu.au 1. What is a “word class”? …a structural primitive which is “given” in a language? Word Classes: Noun, Verb, Adjective… (Noss 1964) …or in Language? S → NP VP NP → (DET) (ADJP) N ADJP → (ADVP) ADJ (Chomsky 1965) …a quasi-categorical outcome of feature specifications (which are in turn “given” in Language)? [+N][-V] (N) [+N][+V] (ADJ) [-N][+V] (V) [-N][-V] (PREP) (Chomsky 1970; Baker 2003) …a type of linguistic category of some other kind, perhaps reflecting a cross- linguistically “prototypical” set of semantic and behavioural features? All languages exhibit sets of words which differ from one another in some aspects of their structure and/or behaviour, and which are traditionally, therefore, grouped into separate classes. Structurally-distributionally-based subclassification typically correlates well with the semantic contents of word classes, which are often thought to be the primary “motivation” for the existence of structural and distributional differences in the first place. The most universally predictive criteria are semantic. (Givón 2001 [1984]:49) There are certain universal semantic types, and…each language has some words belonging to each type…For languages which have the major class Adjective, the semantic content of the class is fairly consistent from language to language. (Dixon 1977:62, 20) 1