Chapter 1 - Grammatical Foundations: Wordsthings. While this may give us a useful rule of thumb to identifying the category of a
lot of words, we often run into trouble as the notion is not particularly precise: in what
way do nouns ‘name’ and what counts as a thing, for example? While it may be
obvious that the word Bartók names a particular person, because that is what we call
the thing that this word refers to, it is not clear why, therefore, the word think is not
considered a name, because that is what we call the thing that this refers to. Moreover,
the fact that the words:
(8) idea
weather
cold
friendliness
diplomacy
are all nouns means that the concept thing must extend to them, but how do we
therefore stop the concept from extending to:
(9) conceptualise
atmospheric
warm
friendly
negotiate
which are not nouns?
Fortunately, there are other ways of determining the category of words, which we
will turn to below. But it is important to note that there are two independent issues
here. On the one hand is the issue of how the notion of word category is instantiated in
the linguistic system and on the other hand is the issue of how we, as linguists, tell the
category of any particular word. As to the first issue, word categories are simply
properties of lexical elements, listed in the lexical entry for each word, and, as we have
pointed out, lexical information is arbitrary. Therefore, word categories are whatever
the linguistic system determines them to be. While there may be some link between
meaning and category established by the linguistic system, for now it is not important
that we establish what this link is or to speculate on its nature (does meaning influence
category or does category influence meaning, for example?). More pressing at the
moment is the issue of how we determine the category of any given word. Before
looking at specific categories, let us consider some general ways for determining
categories.
2.3 Morphological criteria for determining category
Consider the set of words in (8) again. Alongside these we also have the related words:
(10) ideas
weathers
colds
friendlinesses
diplomacies