Beginning in this chapter and continuing on through chapter 9, I will discuss various word classes in Kham – nouns, verbs, adjectives, locatives, and adverbs – together with their notional and grammatical characteristics. Nouns will be treated first, and I will show that they display all the prototypical characteristics expected cross-linguistically of that class. Not only is the old semantic schoolbook definition that ‘nouns denote persons, places, or things’ valid for Kham, but so is the structuralist's grammatical definition based on distribution, their ability to inflect for nominal categories, and their basic syntactic functions. The same kinds of prototypical semantic and syntactic criteria can be appealed to for a definition of ‘verb’ in chapter 5.

As I will show in chapter 6, a definition of adjective for Kham is not so simple. Apart from a very small class of true adjectives, there is no clear-cut grammatical status for a separate adjective class. Nevertheless, I will argue in that chapter for an ‘adjectival’ class based on typological criteria and covert behavioral properties.

In chapter 7, the chapter on locatives, I include what is, in fact, a special class of nouns, the so-called ‘relator nouns’ (Starosta 1985). I treat them with locatives not only because they are semantically related to the locative class, but also because they are quite clearly the source for the special class of grammaticalized locative/deictic roots in Kham.