Beck David. The Typology of Parts of Speech Systems: The Markedness of Adjectives

Routledge, 2017. — 229 p. — (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics). — ISBN10: 0415864992. — ISBN13: 978-0415864992.Ask a layperson what they know about grammar and you are likely to get an answer that has something to do with parts of speech; ask a linguist what they know about parts of speech and the answer is quite likely to be much less enlightening. Parts of speech systems or, as I will refer to them here, lexical classes are among the most frequently overlooked aspects of linguistic analysis, yet they are at the same time among the most fundamental elements of language.
Lexical classes play a key role in most-if not all-syntactic theories, they are the cornerstones of lexicography and lexical semantics, and they are crucial elements in morphological analysis, yet precise and rigorous definitions of these classes have never been successfully formulated. More often than not, lexical classes are treated merely as primitives, either in terms of input to rules, determinants of underlying phrase structure, governors of inflectional patterns, or as sources of valency and subcategorization frames. Thus, class-designations such as "verb," "adjective," and "noun" are the linchpins of semantic, syntactic, and morphological structure, but the terms themselves are rarely defined and their properties, both formal and functional, are often taken for granted. While it is certainly possible to carry out linguistic analysis without a clear definition of the basic units involved (as long as the identity of these units can be agreed upon), any theory which proceeds without a full understanding of its own primitives rests on uncertain foundations.