Word Categoriestwo cats (if you think about it this sentence might mean that anything between two and
six cats got bitten, which is not predictable from the meaning of the words).
Let us assume that these different types of linguistic knowledge are separate. We
can call the part of I-language which is to do with words the Lexicon. This might be
imagined as a kind of mental dictionary in which we store specific information about
all the words that we use: how they are pronounced, what they mean, etc.
2.2 Categories
Lexical knowledge concerns more than the meaning and pronunciation of words,
however. Consider the examples in (2) and (3) again. The word cat is not the only one
that could possibly go in the positions in (2), so could the words dog, mouse and
budgerigar:
(4) a the dog slept
b he fed Pete’s mouse
c I tripped over a budgerigar
This is perhaps not so surprising as all these words have a similar meaning as they
refer to pets. However, compare the following sets of sentences:
(5) a the hairbrush slept
b he fed Pete’s algebra
c I tripped over a storm
(6) a the if slept
b he fed Pete’s multiply
c I tripped over a stormy
There is something odd about both these set of sentences, but note that they do not
have the same status. The sentences in (5), while it is difficult to envisage how they
could be used, are not as weird as those in (6). Given that neither sets of sentences
make much sense, this does not seem to be a fact about the meanings of the words
involved. There is something else involved. It seems that some words have something
in common with each other and that they differ from other words in the same way.
Hence, the set of words in a language is not one big homogenous set, but consists of
groupings of words that cluster together. We call these groups word categories. Some
well known categories are listed below:
(7) nouns
verbs
adjectives
prepositions
The obvious question to ask is: on what basis are words categorised? As pointed
out above, it is not straightforward to categorise words in terms of their meaning,
though traditionally this is a very popular idea. Part of the problem is that when one
looks at the range of meanings associated with the words of one category, we need to
resort to some very general concept that they might share. For example, a well known
definition for the category noun is that these are words that name people, places or