The Even Yearbook 4 (2000)
#35
volume: 4 (2000)
pages: 39–82
author: Lajos Marosán
title: Meaning and word classes
abstract: There have been two opinions relating to the semantic properties of the parts of speech. The older, which dates back to the earliest linguistic investigations, claims that word classes as such have some meaning; (the term meaning — it seems — should be taken in an intuitive pre-theoretical sense). This view has received some attention in the past two millenia and there have been sporadic attempts at articulating a theory of word classes in which the meaning of the parts of speech plays an important role. The other opinion, which is far more recent and less articulated, asserts that word classes only have structural or grammatical meaning and this is very much like grammatical categories, such as case, tense, aspect &c. This view contrasts lexical to structural meaning. (For instance, Fries (1952) introduces these terms without an explanation. In general, descriptivists (cf. Hockett, Gleason) deny that the parts of speech may have any semantic properties.) A word form taken out of context, therefore, can be analysed as an entity complete with lexical and grammatical meaning. The examination of lexical meaning falls within the province of linguistic semantics while the explication of the latter, that is, grammatical meaning, remains undeveloped. In the following pages I wish to show that the claim for the meaning of word classes leads to contradictions and, therefore, one might adopt the more current view about the parts of speech.
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