Nouns, Verbs, and Verbal Nouns: Their Structures and their Structural Cases

One much-discussed question concerning the noun-verb distinction from a crosslinguistic, typological perspective is whether this distinction is continuous or discrete. Not surprisingly given their general commitments and styles of analysis, functionalist theorists have tended to see it as continuous (Bhat, 1994, Dixon, 1982, Hengeveld, 1992, Stassen, 1997, Wetzer, 1996), whereas formal generative linguists have seen it as discrete (Baker, 2003, Chomsky, 1970). However, it seems like this should be a relatively straightforward empirical question. One might wonder then, trying to put prejudices aside, why there has been so much disagreement about it. Considering the matter again, it seems clearer to me than ever that this is probably not such a straightforward empirical question after all. Rather, the answer depends on what we mean by the terms “noun” and “verb”, and that is largely a conceptual matter. Indeed, there are at least three distinct linguistic units that the question might reasonably be about, as listed in (1).