William Croft, University of New Mexico: Language description: comparative concepts and language-specific categories

Most reference grammars introduce their description of syntax with a chapter on word classes, and word classes play an essential role in the description of the syntactic constructions of the language. Word-class-based approaches to language description presuppose a building-block model of syntax: syntactic constructions are built out of smaller syntactic units, ultimately word classes. The building block model also forms the basis of textbooks of syntax used to train linguistics students. However, the building block model is seriously problematic as a model of language description (and for teaching syntax). Both language descriptions and theoretical articles are preoccupied with debates as to whether a language has a particular word class, or whether a particular set of words belongs to a specific word class. The fundamental problem is that word classes are defined by constructions or sets of constructions, and language descriptions are not explicit about this fact. One consequence of this problem is that word class terms in language descriptions (and in grammatical terminology) are used ambiguously, to refer to categories defined by form, function, or both, and to refer to language-specific categories or comparative concepts (Haspelmath 2010). This ambiguity is not often recognized because word classes and the constructions that define them are assumed to be "formal".

A (radical) constructional approach to language description explicitly describes the basis for language-specific "word classes", and provides a framework for syntactic description in terms of the information-packaging functions of constructions, the forms that those constructions take, and the (complex) ways in which semantic classes of words occur in those constructions. Nevertheless, the vast majority of language descriptions, including those of languages that are now extinct or moribund, are cast in word-class terms. The identification of crosslinguistic patterns to advance language typology and language documentation requires understanding how grammatical terms have been used in existing language descriptions and theoretical analyses, as well as how best to use grammatical terminology in construction-based language descriptions and typological analyses.