The first relates to grammatical profile. In some languages, adjectives have similar properties to nouns; Latin is an example, where adjec- tives inflect for case and number—like nouns—and also for gender— in agreement with the noun they modify. (For such languages, some linguists treat adjectives as a subclass of nouns.) In other languages, adjec- tives share grammatical properties with verbs; in Chinese, for example, an adjective may occur in the same functional slot as an intransitive verb. (Some linguists treat adjectives as a subclass of verbs, in such lan- guages.) Then there are languages—like English—where adjectives have rather different grammatical properties from both nouns and verbs. And others—including the Berber languages of North Africa—whose adjec- tives share properties with both nouns and verbs.
1.11 grammar and lexicon 53 The second parameter of variation is size. English and many other languages have an open class of adjectives, with hundreds of members (to which new items may be added). Other languages have a small, closed class, with from half a dozen to a hundred or so members.
It is far from the case that all the members of each lexical class have the same grammatical properties. We can usefully recognize a number of ‘semantic types’ within each class; the members of a given type will have similar mean- ings and shared grammatical properties.
For adjectives the major semantic types are dimension, age, colour, value, physical property, and human propensity. Small closed adjective classes tend to draw their members from the first four types; for example, there are just eight adjectives in Igbo, from Nigeria, two in each of the critical types—‘large’ and ‘small’ (dimension), ‘new’ and ‘old’ (age), ‘black, dark’ and ‘light, white’ (colour), and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (value). Slightly larger classes may include some physical property terms (such as ‘unripe’ and ‘heavy’). Only in adjective classes with at least a few score members would we expect to findhuman propensity terms (such as ‘clever’ and ‘jealous’).
Within a given language, the types are likely to have different grammatical properties. For example, in English the prefix un- may be used with many adjectives from thehuman propensity type, with some from value and with a few from physical property, but with none from dimension, colour, or age. Just adjectives from the human propensity type may be followed by a preposition-plus-NP explaining the nature of the quality, as in clever at mathematics/at solving puzzles and jealous of his rival/of Mary’s winning the prize.
For the noun class there are also significant semantic types. Only ahuman noun can be subject of asocial contract verb, such as appoint, convert, and arrest. The object of experience is generally astate noun, such as hunger or a whipping.
The class of verbs, in any language, covers a wide range of meanings, so that it is here really useful to recognize distinct semantic types, each with its own set of semantic roles. For verbs of thegiving type, there are three roles: Donor, Gift, and Recipient, as in John gave a book to Mary. For thespeaking type, four roles must be recognized: Speaker, Addressee, Message, and Medium, as in John told Mary a joke in French. Forliking verbs the roles are Experiencer and Stimulus, as in John likes jazz. Forattention verbs (including see, hear, find, witness) the roles are Perceiver and Impression, as in Mary witnessed the fight.
Every semantic type, in a given language, employs a convention whereby each semantic role is associated with a certain syntactic function. In English
all of Donor, Speaker, Experiencer, and Perceiver correspond to transitive subject (A) function. There is little in common between someone who trans- fers possession of something, someone who utters something, someone who experiences a certain feeling, and someone who (possibly unwillingly) receives a sense impression. What is common to these roles is that all are associated with the same syntactic relation. That argument whose referent could initiate or control the activity (if anything could) is recognized as fulfilling function A. A further useful distinction is between Primary verbs, which directly refer to an activity or state, and Secondary verbs (the lexical realization of Secondary concepts), which effect semantic modification of some other verb. And there is a further division. Primary-A verbs have all of their arguments realized as NPs; these semantic types includemotion (such as run, throw), rest (sit, hold), affect (hit, twist), giving (give, present), corporeal (eat, laugh), and half a dozen more. Primary-B verbs may have either an NP or a complement clause as one argument, e.g. I chose Mary or I chose to marry Mary.
In §1.9, we examined the complement clause possibilities for two Primary-B types,thinking and liking. All thinking verbs can take a that complement and allliking verbs accept an ing complement clause, with other verbs from the two types showing other possibilities, relating to their specific meanings. Other Primary-B types includeattention, deciding (e.g. choose, elect), com- paring (resemble, compare), and relating (depend on, imply).
As mentioned earlier, Secondary concepts may be realized as verbal affixes in languages with an extensive morphology, but tend to be expressed as lexemes in languages with little morphology, such as English. A Secondary verb functions as a main verb, but—as illustrated above—it effectively pro- vides semantic modification for the verb of its complement clause. Secondary verbs in English include the semantic types ofbeginning, trying, wanting, making, and helping.
Chapters11 and 12 discuss in more detail the three major word classes, and criteria for distinguishing between them.