Abstract

Smith offers a critique of the theory of parts of speech in Croft (Syntactic categories and grammatical relations: The cognitive organization of information, University of Chicago Press, 1991, Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective, Oxford University Press, 2001) inter alia. Smith tries to make a functionally-based universal-typological theory of parts of speech provide an answer to the problem of defining word classes and giving those classes the same names across languages (“noun”; “adjective”); this is not possible and not what I intended. Smith conflates semantic properties with pragmatic properties, and he conflates different pragmatic properties that cannot be conflated. There are challenging issues in defining pragmatic functions and their linguistic reflexes, but Smith's critique only briefly touches on them.