PDF #30 – Croft – Beyond Aristotle
Aarts (2004) argues that the best way to model grammatical categories is a compromise preserving Aristotelian form classes with sharp boundaries on the one hand, and allowing gradience in terms of the number of syntactic properties that a category member possesses on the other.
But the assumption of form classes causes serious theoretical and empirical problems. Constructions differ in their distributional patterns, but no a priori principles exist to decide which constructions should be used to define form classes.
Grammatical categories must be defined relative to specific constructions; this is the position advocated in Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). Constructionally defined categories may have sharp boundaries, but they do not divide words into form classes.
Nevertheless, the most important traditional intuitions for parts of speech (Aarts’ chief examples) are reinterpretable in terms of crosslinguistic universals that constrain distributional variation but do not impose Aristotelian form classes, gradable or not, on the grammars of particular languages.
What is the nature of grammatical categories? The answers to this question have mirrored the answers to the more general question of categorization. For many centuries, the answer has been the Aristotelian one: categories have sharp boundaries, and are defined by individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. In the last century, however, a new approach arose, partly based on philosophical considerations, partly on the basis of psychological experiments.
In these experiments, gradient category behavior is consistently observed. This model goes under the name of ‘prototype theory’. But the theoretical interpretation of gradient category behavior has been a matter of controversy. A common view is to take it as denying the existence of sharp boundaries.
Aarts (2004; henceforth MLG) proposes a model of grammatical categories that includes both gradience and Aristotelian grammatical categories with
sharp boundaries.
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