Syntactic categories, cross-linguistic variation and universal grammar

The concern with word classes, parts ofspeech, or, as they are referred to in this paper, syntactic categories, dates back to antiquityfor better and for worse. For better, since in lingui stics, as in any other disc ipline, one sees further when standing on the shoulders of giants . But for worse, ifit is the case that the giants themselves are standing in the wrong place. Or, in the case at hand , in the wrong continent. My own interest in syntactic categories der ives from ongoing attempts to obtain a better understanding of the major syntactic patterns of some languages whose syntactic structures appear to be very different from those of the classical languages of antiqu ity, and the well-known and well-stud ied languages of Europe . Increasingly, these effo rts suggest that contemporary theories and frameworks do not provide the appropriate tools for a satisfactory description of such "exotic" languages. In general, ava ilable theories are of European origin, reflecting the peculiar properties of the particular European languages familiar to the ir progenito rs. Often, their application to languages spoken in other parts of the world is an exercise in Eurocentricity, involving the unwarranted impos ition of categories and structures that are simply irrelevant. ' In the past, grammar books of English informed us that English nouns have six cases, which was what prompted Alice, in her adventures in Wonderland , to muse: "A mouse-ofa mouse-to a mousea mouse-O mouse!".l Then it was Latin grammar that was being imposed on English; now it is English grammar that is being imposed on the rest of the world' s languages, through theories based largely on English data, constructed for the most part by English-speaking lingu ists, and disseminated almost invariably in the world language of science English . As an illustrat ion, consider the following garden-variety sentence in Tagalog: