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The Meaning of Lexical Classes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Gunlög Josefsson
Gunlög Josefsson
Affiliation:
Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University, Helgona-backen 14, SE-223 62 Lund, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Following the spirit of Relativized Extreme Functionalism, I argue that a set of grammatical features, traditionally thought of as devoid of semantics, lexical class (declension and conjugation), in fact has semantic content. Taking Josefsson (1995. 1997. 1998) as a point of departure, I suggest that the lexical class determines the word class of a word, hence relating the word to a major ontological category such as THING and EVENT. A certain lexical class may correspond to a semantic subclass of a major ontological category, but this does not need to be the case. The approach taken explains certain morphological phenomena in Swedish, such as stem vowels, and explains why the non-head part of a compound is undetermined for major ontological category.

Type
Articles
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , December 2001 , pp. 218 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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