Some background information
Lexical Categories in Linguistic Theory
Spring 2004


How it started: Phonology and lexical categories

My primary research area is phonology. Several years ago, I began to collect and analyze cases of languages where words belonging to different lexical categories also showed differences in their phonological behavior.

I looked at about a dozen languages, from different language areas and families, and interesting patterns seemed to emerge.

  • If a language had phonological differences between nouns and verbs, then nouns were generally less restricted in their phonological patterning than verbs. ("Less restricted" means, depending on your theoretical framework, "subject to fewer phonological rules" or "protected by more faithfulness constraints.")
  • Adjectives seemed to go along with nouns in some languages and with verbs in others. Moreover, this seemed to correlate with the type of morphology found on adjectives in the individual language -- whether adjectives were marked for noun-type information like number and gender, or verb-type information like tense and aspect.

In this earlier work, I modeled the privileged phonological behavior of nouns in terms of noun-specific (i.e., positional) faithfulness constraints, and I did some preliminary investigation into psycholinguistic and morphological differences between nouns and verbs that might explain why nouns qualify to have these special protective constraints but verbs do not.

More information on the earlier findings
  • A brief overview
    Smith, J.L. (2001). Lexical category and phonological contrast. In R. Kirchner, J. Pater, and W. Wikely, eds., PETL 6: Workshop on the Lexicon in Phonetics and Phonology. Edmonton: University of Alberta, 61-72.
    Download:    PDF

  • A longer paper; section 4 is a discussion of noun/verb differences outside phonology
    Smith, J.L. (1997). Noun faithfulness: On the privileged behavior of nouns in phonology. Ms., University of Massachusetts. Rutgers Optimality Archive #242.
    Download:    from ROA    |    PDF

  • Additional references can be found on my research and publications page


The current project: Do the patterns hold up, and if so, why?

The Lexical Categories research group in Spring 2004 will explore many different aspects of lexical category differences, with the ultimate goal of trying to answer these two questions:

  • What kinds of phonological differences are found between words of different lexical categories when additional languages are investigated?

    In particular, do nouns consistently show privileged behavior? Is the adjective pattern consistent? If the preliminary generalizations do not hold up when additional languages are examined, what other generalizations can be made instead?

    • Students who are interested in phonology could consider an individual research project that investigates noun/verb/adjective phonology in one language or in a group of languages.

  • If different lexical categories do show different phonological behavior, can this be traced back to some other difference among the lexical categories?

    • This is where student researchers' individual projects on lexical categories in all different areas of linguistics fit into the overall project -- they will be helping me look for clues about why nouns/verbs/adjectives might have different behavior in phonology.


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