A Grammar of Madurese / Mouton Grammar Library Bd.50 (PDF)

Chapter 3 Lexical categories (p. 61-62)


This chapter considers the issue of what lexical categories should be recognized in Madurese. As in any language, there are both open class categories– categories that readily admit new items either through coinage or borrowing– and closed class categories–those that resist new items. For the most part, the set of closed class categories identifiable in Madurese is similar to those in related languages: pronouns, demonstratives, numerals and quantifiers, prepositions, adverbs, auxiliaries, conjunctions and assorted particles.

An issue of potential contention in analyses of Austronesian languages is identifying the set of open class categories, basically the categories corresponding to noun, verb, and adjective in Indo-European languages. The majority of recent analyses posit a distinction between nouns and verbs. However, they are divided about whether to recognize a class of adjectives distinct from verbs. Although adjective has been recognized as a separate class in much early work, this may simply reflect the lens of the Western grammatical tradition through which they were viewed. Recently, a number of linguists have argued on the basis of morphological properties and syntactic distribution that in many Austronesian languages a category of adjective distinct from verbs is unwarranted (e.g. Donohue 1999, Klamer 1998, van den Berg 1989) Further, in some of these languages the line dividing nouns and verbs is somewhat blurred. For instance, Foley (1998) has proposed that the noun/verb distinction is irrelevant in Tagalog (and by extension other Philippine languages). Rather, roots are ‘precategorial’ and lexical classes are identifiable only from the syntactic environment in which the word occurs. Regardless of the correctness or incorrectness of this proposal for a particular language, sets of precategorial roots have been suggested for a number of Austronesian

William D. Davies, University of Iowa, USA.