1244: Lack of Salish Lexical Classes May 6, 2018

Yesterday it was discussed how Salish does not distinguish between nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Salish does have the actual lexical classes—although nothing is impossible—there are not the same contextual limitations like in every other known language. What this means is not that the language relies on guessing, but for instance there is no distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, every element of those four categories can take verbal suffixes, nominal suffixes etc., and no contexts in which one word from those categories cannot be placed, for examples. This is not true of all dialects of Salish though, as for instance there is evidence to suggest that Klallam Straits Salish distinguishes between verbs and adjectives in the predicate, but this still acts as enough of an argument against Chomsky's notion that all languages have nouns and verbs.