Talk:Grammatical category

expression of grammatical category (tone, syntax?)

"Grammatical categories are often expressed by affixes, but clitics and particles are also common."

I believe tone can do this as well - I can't give any specific examples but I remember coming across a language in western africa where verbal tense was indicated by a change in tone -

and what about syntactically? has anybody came across a grammatical category being expressed by word order?? that would be interesting indeed! 112ddd211 (talk) 11:07, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

help

this obviously needs help. – ishwar  (speak) 22:40, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

disambiguation page

I've added a disambiguation tag to this page. At the time I added it, the article consisted of no more than a skimpy definition of what a grammatical category might be, and a list of links to other articles that grammatical category might mean. That looks a lot like a disambiguation page to me.

I guess that if it's possible to distinguish the concept of grammatical categories from the things that this article links to, and build a proper encyclopedia article around it that consists of more than just a definition, then this will no longer be a disambiguation page. But at the moment, I think that trying to make other wikipedia articles which talk about grammatical categories more specific is the right thing to do. Squashy 09:56, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Countability?

Is countability a grammatical category? Although languages can have both countable and uncountable nouns, I haven't seen any examples of languages where individual nouns can be marked as countable or uncountable. If there are no examples of this, I don't think it meets the criteria for a grammatical category. —Umofomia (talk) 22:40, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

There are some examples, but how to categorize them seems a bit iffy. In Central and South-Central Italy there is a large area in which a remnant of the Latin neuter contrasts with what is presumably masculine (the two are sometimes referred to as subclasses of non-feminine). So-called neuter lo vinu is the general mass noun, 'the wine', and has no plural. Presumably masculine lu vinu is used to refer to a specific type or instance of wine, and can take a sortal plural, li vini, used to express, for example, 'the wines of this region' or 'the [various] wines we tasted'. Is there one noun vinu that is marked by article selection as count or non-count, and once that's selected, possibility of pluralization is decided (or locks in)? Or are there two phonologically identical nouns vinu, each assigned its article, one pluralizable, one not? (Details and discussion here: Haase, Martin. 2000. Reorganization of a gender system: The Central Italian neuters. in Gender in Grammar and Cognition, ed. by Barbara Unterbeck et al., pp. 221-236. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.42.57.164 (talk) 16:55, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

I think it is a semantic category, which has some repercussions on other forms in the sentence (agreement, classifiers, sortal plural). I agree that it is not in the textbook lists of grammatical categories. I will remove it for now. Jasy jatere (talk) 11:53, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

While it's definitely semantic, a grammatical category is, by definition, a semantic category with a morphological manifestation. Even English implicitly marks all words as count or non-count, since the latter doesn't ever take a plural morpheme (a defeasible rule, but it's still a difference in marking). However, a more general consideration is quantization, which helps to explain the count/non-count distinction, as well as telicity, bounded/unbounded, etc. See below. 66.59.249.107 (talk) 20:42, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Telicity and/or quantization?

I was going to put telicity up for suggestion as a grammatical category, but after running across the above, now I wonder whether it would be worthwhile to skip both telicity and countability, and put quantization instead. I think it's valid to put it up, since it does have morphosyntactic consequences (e.g. the plural doesn't apply to non-count nouns; telicity can be interpreted as aspectual, which often does have morphological marking). Or all three could be included as a grammatical category, though I think quantization is probably best alone, since it explains both. The articles for count and telicity could be merged into the quantization article, which would beef up the stub, too. What do others think? 66.59.249.107 (talk) 20:42, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Article is unclear and confusing

First sentence: "A grammatical category is an analytical class within the grammar of a language, whose members have the same syntactic distribution and recur as structural unit throughout the the language..." - but it doesn't say what the members are! Are they words and phrases? (This is interpreting "categories" and "classes" as something with members, which may be completely wrong. As you can see, I find this confusing.) For example, what are the members of the category "grammatical number"? Count Truthstein (talk) 23:29, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Syntax versus morphology

The article links to (for example) Grammatical mood - but on that page, it says that mood is specifically a morphological concept. But grammar is wider than just morphology. So does mood even count as a grammatical category, given that if modality (what mood is supposed to denote) is expressed by means of syntax, the syntactic patterns won't count as moods? Count Truthstein (talk) 23:39, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Truth - regarding this and your comment in the previous section above, these observations reflect a repeating conflict within the discussions of wikipedia linguistics articles in which some things are given very vague and rule-bending definitions and seem to push an overtly ambiguous and counterintuitive viewpoint. At the same time, other concepts are artificially limited to very narrow domains and have unsystematic constraints placed on them which allow these views to be seen as valid while locking out any potential contradictions.

The proponents of both of these sorts of changes seem to cite an oddly similar limited number of authors in their sourcing and seem to share some common yet distinct sets of beliefs on linguistics and language that appear almost as if they're students of the same school of thought or at the least prescribe to a like dogma. These sorts of thinking have very narrow viewpoints and are opinionated in strikingly similar ways that seem to suggest that a younger generation of linguistic students are being taught an alarmingly simplistic and scope-limited view of the linguistic world and that along with this set of teachings, they are being trained not to think, not to question, and not to deviate (or entertain thoughts or proposals that deviate) from these teachings. It's an oddly static set of values that seem to suggest a common belief that whatever we (theoretical we as an agreed whole) think we know today is now fully correct and that we have no need to acknowledge alternative viewpoints or to continue to question the validity of our linguistic understanding. AKA whatever there is now, is all there needs to be, stop looking, don't question, just work with it.

This seems to reflect the opposite of what is at the core of our science -- critical thinking. I have been increasingly encountering this sort of thing on various online linguistics forums and it seems to be becoming increasingly common among current and recent undergrads and graduate students, particularly those attending universities in the midwest and upper midwest (US) as well as certain universities in the UK (but rarely those known for linguistics). Certainly, there is nothing wrong with some new common way of thinking, but what strikes me as odd and alarming is that these same people seem to subscribe almost unquestioningly to what they've been taught or to what they read from a conceived 'prestige' author in a nearly drink the linguistic Jim Jones Kool-Aid manner and not only do they seem to embrace these views with full faith, but adamantly and vehemently oppose anyone who dare question their views or oppose them. And, when I say adamantly and vehemently, I mean to the point that any alternate view is met with absolute violent rage with there appearing to be en masse shock at the audacity of questioning their perceived authority (as in the linguistic authorities prescribing the tenets of whatever view they've been taught).

Here in Wikipedia, the sad present condition is that those falling into the group I've described seem to be subscribing to the linguistic equivalent of evangelical proselytizing by going into sites such as this and painstakingly rewriting articles to reflect their shared views as if whatever their version is, is and always has been the one and only true way and then after making sometimes drastic changes and having those changes challenged, seem to circle the wagons and demand that anyone supporting more traditional wording or views or at least suggesting that these new alternative views be listed as such rather than superseding the established content provide overwhelming evidence (judged to be valid of not by the members of this clique only) that their new view is not the one true way.

I fear the result shall continue to be the degradation of quality within linguistics articles, the pushing of new not-widely held views as if they were the only accepted view, and the deletion of anything they don't agree with, and of course, resulting in oddly worded ambiguous and confusing articles that have been overly and obscurely worded and reworded (and 'big-worded' if that makes sense) with the intention of promoting these specific ideologies over standard views at all cost.

Who knows what's going to happen, but it seems certain that unless you prescribe to the tenets of whatever this newfound linguistic faith is, that there is very little point on Wikipedia in bothering to argue against whatever it is they are pushing at the time.Drew.ward (talk) 01:30, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

Related discussion

Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Linguistics#Propose_move_of_certain_articles_from_Grammatical_Categories_to_Lexical_Categories Count Truthstein (talk) 23:49, 14 April 2012 (UTC)