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How do you tell whether a certain word belongs to a certain word class/part of speech?

A conversation like this may capture a situation that's not unheard of in the conlanging community:

Conlanger: "Hey, here is my new conlang, it has no nouns.
Reviewer: "But what about this word here. You use it to refer to stones. Couldn't you just translate it as 'stone', and say it's a noun?
Conlanger: "No, it's really a predicate meaning 'it's stone-like thing' (or something similar)"

Or:

Conlanger: "Here is my new conlang, it has no verbs".
Reviewer: "But what about that word there. It behaves in manner that looks suspiciously similar to how verbs typically behave."
Conlanger: "It's not really a verb. The sentence literally translates as 'Peter stabbing John', not as 'Peter stabs John'."

Could it in any way be proven that the conlanger is right or wrong? How does one decide whether, for example, the contested word in the first example above 'really' is a verb/predicate meaning 'it's a stone-like thing', or simply a noun meaning 'stone'?

A related situation would be where someone claims not that a language (constructed or natural) lacks a certain part of speech, but that there is no clear boundary between for example nouns, verbs and adjectives. At least for adjectives, it is not uncommon that the distinction between those and either verbs or nouns is at least blurred in some way. But could we still say, for example, that even if there is no morphological difference between a word used as a verb and a same (or at least, morphologically identical) word used as an adjective, we can still say that the word is an an adjective if it comes - say - after the noun, and a verb when it comes before it? So that there is at least a syntactical difference between verbs and adjectives.

What about the distinction between nouns and verbs? Would it be possible that a language lacked a distinction between nouns and verbs on a 'deeper' level? (Not just that the same stem could be used either as a noun or a verb, like in English 'to kiss' and 'a kiss'.)

Some of my intuitions on the issue are:
-A word is a verb if it assigns abstract case to other word.
-The words receiving abstract case, and which modifies the verb, are nouns.
-Nouns have a referential index, they so to speak 'connects' the utterance with some entities or states of affairs in the world.
-A verb is a necessary condition to form a clause, expressing a proposition that may have a truth value.

These are just my spontaneous intuitions; don't take them for established scientific facts.

How do you think about it?

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constructedlanguages.net

I simply refer to the words as they are in English and note that they act like other word classes in the discussed language.

So I'd say:
Adjectives in Iriex act like verbs and are thus treated as verbs. e.g. 'aox kum' means 'I am large' (literally 'I am being large') and the question 'am I large?' will be formed as with normal verbs, i.e. 'aox kumku?'.

I think the terms need to refer to a specific language to retain their meaning.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

It's often the case that a certain class of words in some language share some, but not all, of the characteristics of a word class in - say - English. Suppose that the 'adjectives' (or 'nouns', or 'verbs', or whatever) in language behave like adjectives (or nouns, or verbs, or whatever) in English. But they also differ in some respects. The question is, are the similarities still enough to justify us labelling them 'adjectives' (or 'nouns', 'verbs', etc)? Or perhaps rather: Are they similar in the right respects?

It seems to be a possible stance in linguistics to say that word class labels like 'nouns', 'verbs', 'adjectives' etc. are merely pragmatical notions, that only make sense within a specific language. But it's surely not the only possible stance. At least not since it seems like certain features of human languages are re-occurring, in language after language. It seems like all human natlangs seems to be made up of phrases, with heads and modifiers, which in turn make up clauses. The head of the clause is the word we refer to as the 'verb'. (Or are there other definitions of 'verb'?? I don't know... I'm not a professional linguist... My only formal linguistics training is like half a semester of Biblical Hebrew). The question is whether such universal (or at least near-universal) definitions are possible for all parts of speech.

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constructedlanguages.net

Word classes are not exact.

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What do you mean by that?

That the very notions of 'head' and 'clause' are fuzzy? Or that it's not a very good definition to say that a 'verb' is any word that heads a clause?

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constructedlanguages.net

Well, simply put:


If two words have identical morphological behavior and identical syntactic behavior, then the two words belong to the same word class. If two words have distinct morphological behavior or distinct syntactic behavior, then the two words belong to different word classes.

Once you have your words separated into different word classes, you can compare them cross-linguistically. If the words in Word Class A have similar morphosyntactic behavior to the words in the classes called "verbs" in a lot of other languages, then it's probably useful to call Word Class A "verbs" in your language.

The question, then, is what morphological and syntactic behavior looks like.


Morphological behavior is usually pretty straight forward. This set of words inflects for number/case/etc., but that set of words inflects for tense/aspect/mood, so this set of words is one word class and that set is another.

Where people trip up, I think, is that they consider only morphological behavior while ignoring syntactic behavior.

For example, a common spin you see is to let any given root take noun inflections or verb inflections or whatever other inflections—e.g., you can take a root meaning "rock" and conjugate it like a verb so it means "it was a rock." Then the conlanger claims that this means there is only one word class, because every root can take any morphological inflection.

But this ignores syntactic behavior. In the vast majority of systems that I've seen like this, the language still has syntactic verbs and syntactic nouns, and roots can only take verb inflections when they're being used as verbs, and they can only take noun inflections when they're being used as nouns. Such languages are cases of highly productive derivational systems, not single word classes.


The problem, I think, is that syntax is tricky and subtle—it tends to be more invisible than morphology, so conlangers (especially beginners) aren't as conscious of it. Morphology has to do with the actual shape of the word, which is easily visible. Syntax, on the other hand, has to do with the relationships of words to each other. You can't just look at a word and see that—you have to see how it works in relation to other words.

One issue in syntax is how words fit into phrases. Can they act as the heads of independent clauses, or do they have to be arguments of overarching phrases? What kinds of phrases can they serve as arguments for? To oversimplify, words which can head independent clauses are often called the "verbs" class, while words which head phrases that serve as arguments for verb phrases are called the "nouns" class. So if, for a particular language, it's possible to say "When a word goes here/does this/looks like that, then it's the head of the independent clause, and when a word goes here/does this/looks like that, then it's an argument of the phrase," then you probably have a basis for a "verb" class and a "noun" class.

(For this reason, if it's possible to say that a language is SVO or SOV or VSO or whatever, then it almost certainly has a distinction between verbs and nouns.)


One approach that is not sufficient for making claims about word classes (or most other claims about a language's morphosyntax) is this kind of "argument by translation":


I don't much care how you "literally" translate any particular thing in your language into English—you must give evidence based on the actual behavior of the language itself to show how it does what you say it does. Just translating a verb as a participle doesn't actually say anything besides "It isn't a verb because I say it's a participle, so there."

There's a reason why we call things verbs, and other things nouns. Unfortunately, these reasons are rather subtle when you really get down to it. If you want to create a language with an unorthodox set of lexical categories, you have to read up on syntax, analysis, phrase structure, and related topics.

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To back up an idea Micamo sort of said,
There do appear to be languages* in which nearly any word that could be used as a verb could also be used as a noun, and nearly any word that could be used as a noun could also be used as a verb.

But, to back up an idea Trailsend sort of said,
In any language, in most clauses there is one word (or short phrase) that functions semantically and/or syntactically as that clause's verb.

Usually conlangers who claim their conlang* has no verbs, or has no nouns, or whatever, are wrong in the way Trailsend just said.
Frequently they are also wrong in thinking that none of their clauses have any just-for-this-clause "lieutenant verbs" or "vice-verbs", that is, words that are the verb for that clause, even though it may not be sensible to list the word as a verb but not a noun in the language's lexicon.

*Possibly one valid analysis of at least some such languages might be that there is widespread "zero-derivation" of nouns from verbs and vice-versa.

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