#word classes

What makes nouns and verbs sound real? According to psychologists Thomas Farmer, Morten Christiansen, and Padraic Monaghan, some nouns and verbs are perceived to be more nouny and verby than others. When Thomas Farmer and his colleagues considered more than 3,000 English nouns and verbs, they found that nouns have a different (but overlapping) set of probabilistic phonological features than do verbs. That is, when plotted in multidimensional “sound space” (where the dimensions are phonological features, as well as where these features occur within words), nouns tended to cluster with other nouns, and verbs tended to cluster with other verbs.

While looking at a range of views by grammarians on word-class distinctions (noun, verb, adjective etc.) and word division in two recent papers (Haspelmath 2011; 2012a), I was struck by what appears to have been a major shift of perspective: While the first half of the 20th century emphasizes the uniqueness of languages and the categorial differences between them, the second half starts out from the assumption that languages do not differ in their basic categories. (Elsewhere I called this distinction categorial particularism and categorial universalism; Haspelmath 2010.) There are some signs that the perspective adopted in the first half of the 20th century is now getting more attention again.

automatic Part-of-speech tagging of texts