Are verbs, nouns and adjectives real?
Written by la gleki :
There is no a unified criterion of what verb, noun and adjective mean. One will have to apply different criteria for different languages. For example, here is what is believed to be noun:
- Greek Noun (Dionysius Thrax, Ars minor, 2nd c. BCE)
ὄνομά ἐστι μέρος λόγου πτωτικόν, σῶμα ἢ πρᾶγμα σημαῖνον
"Noun is a case-inflected part of speech that denotes a thing or an action."
- English Noun (Quirk et al. 1985: 72)
"Noun is a word that can follow determiners like the, this and that."
- Mandarin Chinese Noun
"Noun is a word that can follow a classifier."
Haspelmath claims [1] that the following classification is to be applied:
- thing-root: a root that denotes a physical object (animate or inanimate)
- action-root: a root that denotes a volitional action
- property-root: a root that denotes a property such as age, dimension or value
and more precisely:
- nouns are roots used for reference without special coding (reference-roots)
- verbs are roots used for predication without special coding (predication-roots)
- adjectives are roots used for attribution without special coding (attribution-roots)
- manner adverbs are roots used for adverbation without special coding (adverbation-roots)
This is based on an assumption that e.g. in Tagalog action-roots take aspect-modality inflection and voice affixes (e.g. the prefix nag-), while thing-roots do
not have these possibilities.
This leads Haspelmath to an idea that his classification of parts of speech is useful.
Useful or not it simply represents a very simple semantic categorization of roots.
The lack of aspect-modality on "action-roots" can be simple explained by the semantic incompatibility and usage of those words in real life.
Likewise, we can split roots into other classes based on other criteria.
Other than that there is no difference between those roots in Tagalog. They are perfectly in line with how Lojban works.