Structuralists and generativists define word classes distributionally (Palmer 1971, Baker 2003, Aarts 2007), while cognitive linguists take a semantic (Langacker 1987a) or semantic-pragmatic approach (Croft 1991, 2001). Psycholinguistic research, by contrast, has shown that phonological properties also play a role (Kelly 1992, Monaghan et al. 2005). This study reports on a production experiment involving English nonce nouns and verbs. The data confirm the importance of phonology, whilst also suggesting that distributional facts are involved in lexical categorisation. Together with the existing psycholinguistic evidence, the results show that both the generative and cognitive models of word classes are too restricted. However, the usage-based model can accommodate the facts straightforwardly. This was already anticipated by Taylor (2002) but is worked out in more detail here by elaborating on his notion of phonological “sub-schemas” and by bringing together insights from Croft (1991, 2001) related to discourse propositional act constructions and recent suggestions by Langacker (2008b) concerning “summary scanning” and “sequential scanning”.
2022. Chinese adverbs. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 20:2 ► pp. 330 ff.
HOLLMANN, WILLEM B.
2021. The ‘nouniness’ of attributive adjectives and ‘verbiness’ of predicative adjectives: evidence from phonology. English Language and Linguistics 25:2 ► pp. 257 ff.
Lohmann, Arne
2017. Phonological properties of word classes and directionality in conversion. Word Structure 10:2 ► pp. 204 ff.
Vartiainen, Turo
2016. A Constructionist Approach to Category Change. Journal of English Linguistics 44:1 ► pp. 34 ff.
Vartiainen, Turo
2021. Trends and Recent Change in the Syntactic Distribution of Degree Modifiers: Implications for a Usage-based Theory of Word Classes. Journal of English Linguistics 49:2 ► pp. 228 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.