The polycategoriality parameter: Noun-verb similarities in some languages of the Americas (conference talk, SSILA New Orleans)

• Main Author: Haspelmath, Martin
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Davidson; Orleans; Mayan; Mithun; eskimo*
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/4625031; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4625031

The polycategoriality parameter: Noun-verb similarities in Wakashan, Salishan, Eskimoan and Mayan For over a century, linguists have repeatedly claimed, for various non-European languages, and in particular for North American languages, that the noun-verb distinction is not made in the same way as we know it from Latin or English. For the verb-adjective distinction (and also the noun-adjective distinction), an analogous claim has been even more common. In recent years, however, the pendulum seems to have swung back to a general universalist attitude, and it has been claimed, for example, that “for the last decade there has been a consensus among linguists working on Salishan and Wakashan languages that a noun-verb distinction must be recognized at both the morphological and syntactic levels” (Davis et al. 2014: e198). In this presentation, I reexamine and compare the facts of Wakashan (e.g. Swadesh 1938; Davidson 2002), Salishan (e.g. Davis & Matthewson 1999), Eskimoan (e.g. Sadock 1999; Mithun 2017) and Mayan (e.g. Lois & Vapnarsky 2003), and I argue for a shift in perspective: Instead of asking “whether all languages have a noun-verb distinction” (e.g. Evans & Osada 2005), or “whether all languages have a verb-adjective distinction” (e.g. Dixon 2004), it is more productive to ask how languages are classified on the polycategoriality parameter: (1) The polycategoriality parameter Value A: Predicative nouns require a copula, and/or referential verbs require a relativizer Value B: Nouns do not require a copula, and verbs do not require a relativizer Latin and English have value A for this parameter, and Nuuchahnulth has value B, as noted by Swadesh (1938). This striking difference remains unaffected by recent claims of category universality (as exemplified by Chung 2012; Davis et al. 2014). If we ask HOW languages distinguish nouns and verbs rather than WHETHER they distinguish them at all (even if they distinguish them in a “very subtle” way), we arrive at an interesting parametric contrast that ...