Flexible Word Classes

This book is the first major cross-linguistic study of 'flexible words', i.e. words that cannot be classified in terms of the traditional lexical categories Verb, Noun, Adjective or Adverb. Flexible words can - without special morphosyntactic marking - serve in functions for which other languages must employ members of two or more of the four traditional, 'specialised' word classes. Thus, flexible words are underspecified for communicative functions like 'predicating' (verbal function), 'referring' (nominal function) or 'modifying' (a function typically associated with adjectives and e.g. manner adverbs).

Even though linguists have been aware of flexible world classes for more than a century, the phenomenon has not played a role in the development of linguistic typology or modern grammatical theory. The current volume aims to address this gap by offering detailed studies on lexical word classes, investigating their properties and what it means for the grammar of a language to have such a word class. It includes new cross-linguistic studies of word class systems as well as original descriptive and theoretical contributions from authors with an expert knowledge of languages that have played - or should play - a role in the debate about flexible word classes, including Kharia, Riau Indonesian, Santali, Sri Lanka Malay, Lushootseed, Gooniyandi, and Late Archaic Chinese.

Jan Rijkhoff is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Aarhus University in Denmark. His books include The Noun Phrase (OUP 2002) and, with co-editor Daniel Garcia Velasco, The Noun Phrase in Functional Discourse Grammar (Mouton de Gruyter 2008). He has published on numerous topics - including word classes - in various international journals, including Journal of Linguistics, Linguistic Typology, Language and Linguistics Compass, Journal of Semantics, Linguistics, and Studies in Language.


Eva van Lier is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. Her publications include several journal articles on word class typology and the monograph Parts of Speech and Dependent Clauses: a typological study (Utrecht: LOT 2009). Currently she investigates properties of flexible word classes in Oceanic languages with a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).