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The noun/verb and predicate/argument structures Erkki Luuk Previously, establishing a correspondence between the noun/verb and first order predicate logic’s predicate/argument structures has been found problematic (Hurford 2003a,b). The thesis claims that the predicate/argument system of natural language includes up to three orders of predicates and arguments and a rule system for stipulating second- and third-order predicates and arguments and converting predicates to arguments and vice versa, which make it significantly more complex than the predicate/argument systems of first and second order logics. In this system, nouns are linguistic arguments and verbs are linguistic predicates but the set of linguistic arguments and predicates is not restricted to nouns and verbs. In addition, some properties of this system as well as some general properties of any predicate/argument structure suggest that linguistic arguments (e.g. nouns) may evolutionarily predate linguistic predicates (e.g. verbs). The thesis analyzes this hypothesis, originally proposed by Heine and Kuteva (2002, 2007), and concludes, with a number of new arguments from a variety of domains, that the evidence of linguistic arguments predating linguistic predicates is overwhelming. The thesis also claims that the most parsimonious hypothesis for stems that are ambiguous with respect to the noun/verb distinction (such as walk, love, kill etc.) is that they are neither nouns nor verbs but flexibles, i.e. either linguistic arguments or predicates depending on their marking. Given this inventory of lexical classes, together with the axiom that all languages have at least one lexical class that maps to argument and at least one that maps to predicate, the following five logically possible language types emerge: noun/verb/flexible, noun/flexible, verb/flexible, noun/verb, and flexible. After analyzing evidence for each of these types, it is concluded that type noun/verb/flexible is by far the most common, if not the only one present among the world’s languages, with type flexible ranking next in probability.