Chapter 3 Lexical categories
This chapter considers the issue of what lexical categories should be recognized
in Madurese. As in any language, there are both open class categories–
categories that readily admit new items either through coinage or borrowing–
and closed class categories–those that resist new items. For the most part, the
set of closed class categories identifiable in Madurese is similar to those in re-
lated languages: pronouns, demonstratives, numerals and quantifiers, preposi-
tions, adverbs, auxiliaries, conjunctions and assorted particles.
An issue of potential contention in analyses of Austronesian languages is
identifying the set of open class categories, basically the categories correspond-
ing to noun, verb, and adjective in Indo-European languages. The majority of
recent analyses posit a distinction between nouns and verbs. However, they are
divided about whether to recognize a class of adjectives distinct from verbs.
Although adjective has been recognized as a separate class in much early work,
this may simply reflect the lens of the Western grammatical tradition through
which they were viewed. Recently, a number of linguists have argued on the
basis of morphological properties and syntactic distribution that in many Aus-
tronesian languages a category of adjective distinct from verbs is unwarranted
(e.g. Donohue 1999, Klamer 1998, van den Berg 1989) Further, in some of
these languages the line dividing nouns and verbs is somewhat blurred. For
instance, Foley (1998) has proposed that the noun/verb distinction is irrelevant
in Tagalog (and by extension other Philippine languages). Rather, roots are
‘precategorial’ and lexical classes are identifiable only from the syntactic envi-
ronment in which the word occurs.^1 Regardless of the correctness or incorrect-
ness of this proposal for a particular language, sets of precategorial roots have
been suggested for a number of Austronesian languages in which the noun/verb
distinction is posited.
Section 1 examines open class items and proposes that Madurese includes
the categories noun and verb and a subcategory adjective. It also takes up the
issue of precategorial roots. The remaining lexical classes are briefly discussed
(^1) A debate has sprung up surrounding Foley’s proposal. Some such as Kroeger (1998)
and Himmelmann (2007) argue that noun and verb are important categorial distinctions
in Philippine languages while acknowledging the unusual nature of lexical items in
these languages.
and exemplified in section 2.