Workshop: Effects of Grammatical System on the Lexicon

Date: 13-Nov-2025 - 14-Nov-2025
Location: Hermosillo, Mexico
Meeting URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EmrSs_wmhbBPjCMWT24WmKfmBIZdY61Q/view?usp=drive_link

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax; Typology
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
Spanish (spa)

Submission Deadline: 05-Sep-2025

Addition to the Workshop Announcement

Throughout the history of linguistics, the prevailing assumption has been that the lexicon is an independent component of language, and that syntax operates on the lexicon. One characteristic of the lexicon across languages is that the types of lexical categories and subcategories differ from one language to another. For example, some languages have the category adjective, while others do not (Dixon, 1977, 1982); some languages have the category adjectival predicate distinct from adjectives, while others do not (Frajzyngier, forthcoming); and some languages have distinct categories for noun and verb, while others rely solely on syntactic means to indicate the category of a lexical item.

In this workshop, we propose to address the following hypothesis: lexical categories and subcategories are an economical means of realizing functions encoded in a language’s grammatical system. In some cases, a single lexical category can satisfy multiple functions encoded in the grammatical system. Accordingly, we invite papers discussing languages in which the number of lexical categories and subcategories is greater or smaller than in the “Average Indo-European” system of Noun, Verb, Adjective, and Adverb. Beyond lexical categories, the existence of certain lexical items may also be motivated by a language’s grammatical system. This is the case, for example, with so-called copulas in a variety of languages, existential affirmative and negative predicates distinct from verbs, purely locative predicates, and certain verbs of motion (Frajzyngier, 2024). We therefore also invite papers that demonstrate the grammatical motivation for the existence of specific lexical items. These two hypotheses have important consequences for our understanding of utterance formation in the world’s languages.
Zygmunt Frajzyngier

Description of the workshop:
Preamble: Many contemporary studies treat the lexicon as an autonomous entity not affected by other components of a given language (Jeżek 2016, Pustejovsky and Batiukova 2024, Talmy 2007, 2023).

The aim of the workshop is to examine how functions encoded in the grammatical systems, and the forms used to encode them (i.e. syntax), interact with the lexicon. The following are some of the manifestations of the grammatical system on the lexicon that will be examined at the workshop:

(i) One manifestation of the effects of the grammatical system on the lexicon includes syntactic categories such as ‘noun’, ‘verb’, ‘adjective’, ‘adverb’, etc. Some linguists take the existence of these categories as given and not requiring any explanations, as is the case in many works in the generative tradition (for a recent discussion see Chomsky et al. 2023). Some studies of syntactic categories have sought the motivation for their existence in the roles they play in larger structures or their functions in grammatical systems (Dixon 1977, Frajzyngier 1986, Hengeveld 1992, Croft 2000). Despite many studies of lexical categories, several questions remain unanswered, including: (1) Why do languages have lexical categories? and (2) Why do languages differ in the number and types of their lexical categories?

(ii) Some languages may have the categories ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’, ‘adjectives’, ‘adverbs’, as attested in many Indo-European languages. Other languages may have more lexical categories, as demonstrated in Frajzyngier, Johnston, with Edwards (2005). In some languages, categories are distinguished in specific constructions (Croft 2022). Other languages may have fewer categories, as demonstrated in Dixon (1977), Frajzyngier, Gurian and Karpenko (2021). In other languages lexical items are not formally distinguished for their categoriality, as in Mandarin Chinese, (Chao 1968), while other languages demonstrate omnipredicativity (Launey, 2004). The workshop gives the opportunity to examine reasons for which languages have different inventories of lexical categories.

(iii) The very presence of some lexical items in a language is motivated solely by the functions encoded in the grammatical system. Lexical items belonging to this group may include predicators, not verbs, in equational, existential, and locative predications.

(iv) The presence of some lexical items is motivated by constraints on the syntactic structures available in the language. For example, the coding of non-default tense and non-assertive modality in Gidar (Central Chadic, Frajzyngier 2008) is marked by auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary verbs require another verb to follow them. In equational and existential predications in Gidar there are no verbs. Consequently, Gidar inserts a ‘dummy’ verb sa, glossed as ‘be’, which enables the coding of non-assertive modality and non-default tense. The verb sa itself is not inflected for modality and tense.

(v) Some semantic and syntactic properties of lexical items, rather than being completely non- predictable, are in fact determined by functions encoded in the grammatical system. Here is an example: Although all languages can indicate where an event happens or the directionality and other parameters of motion, only some languages encode the locative domain in their grammatical systems while other languages do not. Languages that encode the locative domain in their grammatical system have inherently locative nouns and inherently locative verbs whose syntactic behavior is different from other verbs and nouns in the language. Languages that do not code locative domain as a distinct domain in the grammatical system do not make the lexical distinction between inherently locative nouns and verbs and inherently non-locative nouns and verbs (Frajzyngier 2024).

We are looking for studies that discuss effects of grammatical systems on lexical items and for studies that draw broader implications and open questions generated by such facts.

Please send an abstract of 500 words, plus one page of examples and references, by August 15 to:
Zygmunt Frajzyngier at [email protected]
Zarina Estrada Fernández at [email protected]
Albert Alvarez Gonzalez at [email protected]

References:
Chomsky, Noam, T. Daniel Seely, Robert C. Berwick, Sandiway Fog, M. A. C. Huybregts, Hisatsugu Kitahara, Andrew McInnerney, and Yushi Sugimoto. 2023. Merge and strong Minimalist thesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Croft, William. 2000. Parts of speech as language universals and as language-particular categories.  Approaches to the Typology of Word Classes, ed. by Petra M. Vogel and Bernard Comrie, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 65–102. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110806120.65
Dixon, R.M.W. 1977. Where have all the adjectives gone? Studies in Language 1: 19-80.
Dixon, R.M.W. 1982. Where have all the adjectives gone? and Other Essays in Semantics and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 1986. Propositional characterization of categories. In Papers from the First Pacific Linguistic Conference, ed. by Scott DeLancey and Russell Tomlin, 108-119.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2008. A Grammar of Gidar. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2019. An integrated approach to lexicon, syntax, and functions. Te reo- The Journal of the Linguistic Society of New Zealand, 62(2): 1–23.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2023. A Typology of Reference Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2024. Locative Predications in Chadic Languages: Implications for Semantic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. (submitted). Semantic structures of grammatical systems and their realizations.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Eric Johnston with Adrian Edwards. 2005. A Grammar of Mina. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, Natalia Gurian, and Sergei Karpenko. 2021. Language Formation by Adults: The Case of Sino-Russian Idiolects. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Hengeveld, Kees. 1992. Non-verbal predication: Theory, typology, diachrony. Berlin: Mouton
Jeżek, Elisabetta. 2016. The Lexicon: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Launey, Michel 2004. The features of omnipredicativity in Classical Nahuatl. STUF. Language Typology and Universals, 57(1): 49–69.
Pustejovsky, James, and Olga Batiukova. 2024. The Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ramchand, Gillian Catriona. 2024. Generativity, comparative grammar, and the syntax vs. the lexicon debates. Nordlyd, 48(1): 93–114. https://munin.uit.no/bitstream/handle/10037/36222/article.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
Talmy, Leonard. 2007. Lexical typologies. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Volume III: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, 66–168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Talmy, Leonard. 2023. Forward: A taxonomy of cognitive semantics. In Thomas Fuyin Li (ed.), Handbook of Cognitive Semantics, Vol. 1, 1–73. Leiden and Boston: Brill.