This book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, flexibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality -according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, specified for lexical category- in a wide number of unrelated languages, and within different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Twenty languages are thoroughly analyzed. Apart from French, Arabic and Hebrew, the volume includes mostly understudied languages, spoken in New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, Amazonia, Meso- and North America. Resulting from a long-standing collaboration between leading international experts, this book brings under one cover new data analyses and results on word categories from the linguistic and acquisitional point of view. It will be of the utmost interest to researchers, teachers and graduate students in different fields of linguistics (morpho-syntax, semantics, typology), language acquisition, as well as psycholinguistics, cognition and anthropology.
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ISBN-13
978-90-272-5947-9 (9789027259479)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Herausgeber*in
CNRS & Universite Paris Nanterre
Universite Paris Descartes & CNRS
1. Dedication; 2. Acknowledgments; 3. Lexical Polycategoriality: Cross-linguistic, cross-theoretical and language acquisition approaches: An introduction (by Vapnarsky, Valentina); 4. Part I. Polycategoriality: The where and how of flexibility?; 5. The flexibility of the noun/verb distinction in the lexicon of Mandinka (by Creissels, Denis); 6. Derivationally based homophony in French (by Kerleroux, Francoise); 7. Categorial flexibility as an emergent phenomenon: A comparison of Arabic, Wolof, and French (by Kihm, Alain); 8. Part II. Polycategoriality across Amerindian languages: From words to roots; 9. Polycategoriality and hybridity across Mayan Languages: Action nouns and ergative splits (by Lois, Ximena); 10. Polycategoriality and zero derivation: Insights from Central Alaskan Yup'ik Eskimo (by Mithun, Marianne); 11. What determines constraints on the relationships between roots and lexical categories?: Evidence from Choctaw and Cherokee (by Haag, Marcia); 12. Part III. Polycategoriality across Austronesian languages: Function and typology; 13. Lexical and syntactic categories in Nelemwa (New Caledonia) and some other Austronesian languages: Fluid vs. rigid categoriality (by Bril, Isabelle); 14. Two classes of verbs in Northern Australian languages: Implications for the typology of polycategoriality (by Schultze-Berndt, Eva); 15. Part IV. Linguistic analysis in the light of acquisition data; 16. The ontology of roots and the emergence of nouns and verbs in Kuikuro: Adult speech and children's acquisition (by Franchetto, Bruna); 17. Flexibles and polyvalence in Ku Waru: A developmental perspective (by Merlan, Francesca); 18. Word class distinctiveness versus polycategoriality in Modern Hebrew: Typological and psycholinguistic perspectives (by Berman, Ruth A.); 19. Part V. Lexical categories and polycategoriality in acquisition; 20. Noun and Verb categories in acquisition: Evidence from fillers and inflectional morphology in French-acquiring children (by Veneziano, Edy); 21. Semantic discrimination of Noun/Verb categories in French children aged 1;6 to 2;11 (by Parisse, Christophe); 22. The acquisition of action nouns in Yucatec Maya (by Pfeiler, Barbara)
