How Universal are Linguistic Categories?

Abstract

From the arbitrary (though sensible) definition of language as “(phonic) system used to say something about someone or something” it follows that to say (i.e. to predicate) something about someone or something (i.e. about entities or states of affairs conceived in our mind) belongs to the basic activities of our brain. In Edward Sapir’s words “There must be something to talk about and something must be said about this subject once it is selected” (sapir 1921; repr. 1949: p. 119). If we understand the Aristotelian terms hypokeímenon and katēgoroúmenon (Lat. subjectum and praedicatum respectively) not in the grammatical meaning they acquired in the Western grammatical tradition but, in a functional sentence perspective, as ‘topic’ and ‘comment’, or ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’, we may affirm that they constitute the basic sentence structure, the essential part for the semantic interpretation of the sentence. Consequently, many linguists see NOUN and VERB as universal categories that all languages must have. But the discussion concerning whether the distinction NOUN/VERB is valid everywhere, for instance among the Iroquoian languages, is far from being settled. At the other end of the extant typological structures, the same could be said for the so-called precategorial languages of South East Asia, in which the functional value of a word (and hence its categorial status) is often determined only by its syntactic context (see Walter Bisang’s many contributions on the subject). We need multiple criteria in order to assign a category to a lexeme, or better, a given lexeme to a category. Accordingly, the present paper tries to make a distinction between semantic function and morphosyntactic functioning of words and shows that both viewpoints are necessary and complementary to define the linguistic status of a word. The concept of ‘tertium comparationis’ will help to clarify the point.