62 Chapter 3 Lexical categories
- Open class categories
As stated above, determining how many major lexical classes to recognize is
not always a straightforward task. There are some lexical roots that can appear
in a nominal syntactic frame or a verbal syntactic frame without any obvious
derivational morphology. An example is given in (1).
(1) a. Sengko' adhi' tokol.
I have hammer
‘I have a hammer.’
b. Tokol kaju rowa!
hammer wood that
‘Hammer that board!’
In (1a) tokol ‘hammer’ is used nominally, an object that can be possessed. In
(1b) tokol occurs as the imperative verb in precisely the same form. Thus, based
solely on these sentences, it is impossible to determine whether tokol is a noun
root or a verb root. Of course, one can say exactly the same of the word ‘ham-
mer’ in the English sentences in the translations. Thus, this particular example
is not very revealing. However, leaving aside potentially precategorial roots
(which are taken up in section 1.4), establishing a distinction between nouns
and verbs (and adjectives) is relatively straightforward.
1.1 The category noun
The need for a category noun as opposed to verbs and adjectives can be estab-
lished on morphological as well as syntactic grounds.
Morphologically, only nouns can occur with the prefix sa-, which means
‘all X’, ‘same X’ or ‘one X’. From the set in (2) bengko ‘house’, saba ‘field’,
and bapa' ‘father’, prototypical nominal concepts, can be distinguished from the
other roots, which denote actions and states, prototypically verbal and adjectival
notions.
(2) bengko ‘house’ sabengko ‘all the houses’/‘same house’
saba ‘field’ sasaba ‘all the fields’/’same field’
bapa' ‘father’ sabapa' ‘all the fathers’/‘same father’
baca ‘read’ sabaca
toles ‘write’ satoles
entar ‘go’ saentar
sala ‘bad’ sasala