Semantic types and grammatical word classes

There are many thousands of words in a language, each with a meaning; some meaning differences are large, others small. The words can be grouped together in a natural way into large classes that have a common meaning component. I will refer to these as semantic types. Verbs begin, start, commence, finish, cease, stop, continue and a few others all make up one type. (Rather than manufacture some high-sounding label for a type, I generally name it after one of its more important members—calling this the BEGINNING type.) Adjectives such as big, broad, short, shallow comprise the DIMENSION type. And so on, for forty to fifty more types, which between them cover the whole of the vocabulary of a language.

At the level of semantics words can be arranged in semantic types, with a common meaning element. At the level of grammar, they can be arranged in word classes (traditionally called ‘parts of speech’), with common morphological and syntactic properties.

Languages differ in the weightings they assign to different parts of grammar. Some languages have a simple morphology but make up for this by having complex rules for the ways in which words are combined. Other languages have long words, typically consisting of many morphemes, but a fairly straightforward syntax. For every language we can recognize word classes, sets of words that have the same grammatical properties, although the nature of these properties will vary, depending on the grammatical profile of the language.

There are two sorts of word classes—major and minor. The minor classes have limited membership and cannot readily be added to. For instance, there are just seven Personal Pronouns in English (me, us, you, him, her, it, them); new pronouns do not get coined in a hurry. (As a language evolves some pronouns do disappear and others evolve, but this is a slow and natural process. Old English had thou for second person singular; its context of use became more and more restricted and it was finally replaced by you, which was originally used just for second person plural.) Most minor classes do not have any independent referential meaning (they do not correspond to any object or quality or activity) but serve just to modify words from the major classes, and link them together into phrases, clauses and sentences. Articles (a, the, etc.) and Linkers (and, because, after, and so on) are minor classes in English, whose functions and meanings should be fully covered within a comprehensive grammar of the language.

Then there are major word classes—such as Noun, Verb and Adjective— which have a large and potentially unlimited membership. It is impossible to give an exhaustive list of the many thousands of nouns, since new ones are being coined all the time (and others will gradually be dropping out of use). Two words that belong to the same class may have almost exactly the same grammatical properties (monkey and baboon, for instance, or black and red) and will only be distinguishable through definitions in a dictionary.

For every language a number of major word classes can be recognized, on internal grammatical criteria. Latin has one class (which we can call A) each member of which inflects for case and number, another (B) showing inflection for case, number and gender, and a third (C) whose members inflect for tense, aspect, mood, person and number. Note that it is possible to give entirely morphological criteria for the major word classes in Latin. But English is much less rich morphologically and here the criteria must mingle morphological and syntactic properties. One major word class in English (which we can call X) can have the inflection -ed (or some variant) on virtually every member. A word belonging to a second class (Y) may be immediately preceded by an article and does not need to be followed by any other word. Members of a third open class (Z) may be immediately preceded by an article and must then normally be followed by a word from class Y.

We can make cross-language identification between classes A and Y, calling these Noun, between B and Z, calling them Adjective, and between C and X, calling them Verb. The identification is not because of any detailed grammatical similarity (the criteria employed for recognizing word classes in the two languages being rather different) but because the classes show semantic congruence. That is, most nouns in Latin would be translated by a noun in English, and vice versa. (There are just a few exceptions—where English has a noun hunger there is a verb in Latin, e¯surio ‘to be hungry’. Interestingly, English has a derived adjective hungry, formed from the noun, and Latin also has an adjective e¯suriens ‘hungry’, derived from the verb.)

There is a relationship between semantic types and grammatical word classes. Each major word class is essentially a grouping together of semantic types. The types are related to classes in similar (but not identical) ways in different languages. The Noun class always includes words with CONCRETE reference (house, foot, grass, star, fire, hill, boy, city, etc.). It usually also includes KIN terms, but in some languages these words belong to the Verb class (after all, John is Tom’s father indicates a relationship between John and Tom, comparable to John employs Tom).

Verbs have different grammatical properties from language to language but there is always a major class Verb, which includes words referring to MOTION (run, carry, etc.), REST (sit, put), AFFECT (hit, cut, burn), ATTENTION (see, hear), GIVING and SPEAKING.

Many semantic types belong to the same word class in every language. But for others there is quite a bit of variation. Words to do with LIKING (love, loathe, prefer, etc.), for instance, belong to the Verb class in some languages, to the Adjective class in other languages, and even to the Noun class in a few languages.