Download The noun/verb and predicate/argument structures

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.