Why the Morphosyntax/Semantics Interface Matters for Nouns

Although the category of nouns, or “substantives” (for a long time, the word “noun” was used for a broader category that included more subparts of speech, especially adjectives), has been described in grammars since at least Dionysius Thrax c. 100 BC (Robins 1989: 39), the exact relationship between formal and semantic characteristics, both in language and discourse, still requires investigation. This is the aim of the present volume. This relationship matters because nouns, along with verbs, are commonly regarded as a universal linguistic category. In the 1980s and 1990s, a few typological studies questioned the existence of a class of “nouns” in a small minority of languages such as Salish, Wakasham, Austronesian or Iroquoian languages (Mithun 2000; Baker 2003; Lobeck and Denham 2013). But crucially, linguists found that this conclusion was due to an understanding of parts of speech that was too restrictive: a multi-criterial approach shows evidence that the noun/verb distinction is indeed robust in these languages (ibid.). Nouns stand at the interface of morphology, syntax and semantics, and there might be misalignments of these levels. These misalignments trigger a definitional complexity that requires further theorization. Understanding how morphology, syntax and semantics interact is also crucial for nominal interpretation in discourse, which is under-researched to date as well. A number of effects of context on interpretation have been made out; for instance, a generic reading might yield a kind interpretation of the NP (e.g. The dinosaur is now extinct). The dynamic interaction of nouns with their syntactic and semantic environment is central to language processing.