2010/01/01 by William Croft · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Adjective #Artificial intelligence #Cognition #Cognitive grammar #Computer science #Conflation #Generative grammar #Grammar #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies #Linguistics #Linguistics and Discourse Analysis #Noun #Part of speech #Perspective (graphical) #Philosophy #Psychology #Sociology #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation #Theoretical linguistics
paper · doi:10.1515/ling.2010.024
openalex publication_date 2010/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Smith offers a critique of the theory of parts of speech in Croft (Syntactic categories and grammatical relations: The cognitive organization of information, University of Chicago Press, 1991, Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective, Oxford University Press, 2001) inter alia. Smith tries to make a functionally-based universal-typological theory of parts of speech provide an answer to the problem of defining word classes and giving those classes the same names across languages (“noun”; “adjective”); this is not possible and not what I intended. Smith conflates semantic properties with pragmatic properties, and he conflates different pragmatic properties that cannot be conflated. There are challenging issues in defining pragmatic functions and their linguistic reflexes, but Smith's critique only briefly touches on them.