Reviewed by Abhishek Kumar Kashyap, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

This book adds to the existing literature on the theoretical, empirical, and descriptive understanding of parts of speech (PoS). The book is comprised of twelve chapters, an introductory chapter, and eleven empirical studies, organized thematically. In the first chapter, the editors give a very brief introduction to the characteristic features of PoS, which stands as an overview of forthcoming chapters.

The following three chapters bear strong theoretical implications. In Ch. 2, Waldemar Schwager and Ulrike Zeshan propose semantic and structural criteria for identifying word classes in two different sign languages: German sign language and Kata Kolok, the sign language of a village in Bali. They examine the theoretical implication of previous works on the PoS system in sign languages and present an analysis of PoS in target sign languages. In Ch. 3, Christian Lehmann compares the roots and stems in a sample of six languages (English, German, Latin, Spanish, Yucatec Maya, and Mandarin Chinese) and makes a strong theoretical statement against the universality of the category of roots, arguing that the preconception of the categories as universal is a misleading approach. In Ch. 4, Walter Bisang presents a case against the universality of PoS in the Late Archaic Chinese (LAT) lexicon. Based on certain structural-conceptual and methodological criteria, he shows that LAT is a ‘precategorial’ language: formal lexical categories like noun and verb can be determined by the participant structure interpreted only in a full sentence.

Mark Donohue, in Ch. 5, and Yulia Koloskova and Toshio Ohori, in Ch. 6, show the split status of a common formal category, adjective, in Tukang Besi, an Austronesian language of Indonesia, and in the Miyako-Hirara dialect of Ryukyuan (Japan), respectively. In a similar vein, in Ch. 7 David Gil looks at the acquisition of categories by children in the Jakarta dialect of Indonesian where only two categories, noun and verb, can be distinguished. The following two chapters examine the noun. In Ch. 8, Jan Don and Marian Erkelens report an experiment on adult native speakers of Dutch to show that a native speaker is able to categorize the words of his or her language on the basis of phonological information. Lynn Nichols, in Ch. 9, presents a case of lexical borrowing in Zuni, a language spoken in the southwestern region of the United States, to show the grammatical complexity of nouns roots in the language that pose constraints on borrowability.

The final three chapters investigate the nature of PoS within the approach known as the Amsterdam model. In Ch. 10, Ventura Salazar-Garcia evaluates the model, arguing for a constituent-based taxonomy of PoS, first applying the analysis to Spanish quantifiers and then to ‘degree words’ expressing intensification in other modern Romance languages. In Ch. 11, Jan Rijkhoff discusses the dichotomy of flexible versus rigid classification of PoS and proposes that rather than one unified category of noun, there can be at least four subsets based on semantic and syntactic criteria. In the final chapter, Kees Hengeveld and Eva van Lier use the theoretical framework, discourse functional grammar, to compare the correlation between lexical and clausal constructs in a sample of twenty-three languages.

This volume crosslinguistically casts fresh light on the oversimplification of PoS. It will be a useful resource for linguists, researchers, and anyone interested in understanding grammar.