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Article published In: Lexical flexibility in Oceanic languages
Edited by Eva van Lier
[Studies in Language 41:2] 2017
► pp. 445–495

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Word classes and the scope of lexical flexibility in Tongan

 | Johannes Gutenberg Universitat Mainz
Published online: 5 October 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.41.2.06vol
Abstract
Tongan is an Oceanic language belonging to the Polynesian subgroup. Based on previous work (Churchward, Clerk. 1953. Tongan grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Tchekhoff, Claude. 1981. Simple sentences in Tongan (Pacific Linguistics Series B 80). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Broschart, Jürgen. 1997. Why Tongan does it differently. Categorial distinctions in a language without nouns and verbs. Linguistic Typology 11. 123–165. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), Tongan has been classified as a 'flexible' language by various typological approaches on word classes (Hengeveld, Kees. 1992. Non-verbal predication. Theory, typology, diachrony. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Rijkhoff, Jan. 1998. Verbs and nouns from a cross-linguistic perspective. Rivista di Linguistica 10 (2). 115–147.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2001. Radical construction grammar. Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). This means that lexical items are per se not categorised in terms of major word classes, but they can function as noun, verb, adjective and manner adverb without morphosyntactic derivation. However, not all lexemes are entirely flexible occurring within all these constructions. So the crucial issue of how flexible Tongan really is remains. This question will be addressed by a survey based on a combination of syntactic and semantic word class criteria – basically following Croft's prototype approach (Croft, William. 2000. Parts of speech as language universals and as language-particular categories. In Petra Vogel & Bernard Comrie (eds.), Approaches to the typology of word classes, 65–102. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2001. Radical construction grammar. Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) but also considering Hengeveld & Rijkhoff's work (Hengeveld, Kees. 1992. Non-verbal predication. Theory, typology, diachrony. Berlin: de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Hengeveld, Kees, Jan Rijkhoff & Anna Siewierska. 2004. Part-of-speech systems and word order. Journal of Linguistics 401. 527–570. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2013. Parts-of-speech systems as a basic typological determinant. In Jan Rijkhoff & Eva van Lier (eds.), Flexible word classes. Typological studies of underspecified parts of speech, 31–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) Evans, Nicholas & Toshiki Osada. 2005. Mundari: The myth of a language without word classes. Linguistic Typology 9 (3). 351–390.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. It reveals the scope of lexical flexibility for various lexemes and semantic groups.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Defining word classes & lexical flexibility
    • 2.1Hengeveld & Rijkhoff’s approach
    • 2.2Croft’s approach
    • 2.3Evans & Osada’s criteria of lexical flexibility
  • 3.Word classes and lexical flexibility in Tongan
    • 3.1Pragmatic versus syntactic criteria
    • 3.2Morphology and word classes
    • 3.3Syntactic & semantic criteria
    • 3.4Semantic considerations
    • 3.5Syntactic considerations
  • 4.Survey regarding the scope of lexical flexibility in Tongan
  • 5.Conclusion
    • 5.1Further research on lexical flexibility & prototypicality in Tongan
  • Notes
  • References
References (39)
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