When we’re talking about grammatical categories like “noun” and “verb”, it is VERY important that we make a sharp distinction between language-internal categories and categories that are useful for making comparisons across languages. If you are trying to say that some languages don’t have verbs, you better have a very clear criterion for what counts as a “verb” that can be applied to any language, otherwise you’re just going to get yourself hopelessly confused.
The best way to define “noun”, “adjective” and “verb” in a cross-linguistically valid way is actually the naive schoolboy approach of defining a noun as a word for an object, an adjective as a word for a property, and a verb as a word for an activity. A refinement of this idea is that a noun is a linguistic form used to refer to an object concept, an adjective is a form used to attribute a property concept, and a verb is a form used to predicate an action concept. All languages have ways of expressing these functions, but they can differ widely in the kinds of forms they use. I’m getting this way of talking from the linguist William Croft’s excellent textbook Morphosyntax: Constructions of the World’s Languages.
This definition has some unintuitive consequences. For example, in the sentence “the man is a doctor”, the word “doctor” is actually not a noun in the crosslinguistic sense. This is because it is being used to predicate an object concept, not to refer to it. You might see this as pathological, but this kind of thing is unavoidable when we’re defining categories neutrally across languages. In English, when we predicate object concepts, we use a construction with an indefinite article and a copula. In Nahuatl, the roots denoting objects take agreement markers like verbs—they would say something like “the man doctors”. Does that mean that in Nahuatl, “they don’t have nouns, only verbs”? Well, you could say something like that, but not all languages have indefinite articles or agreement marking, so how are you going to define what you even mean by “noun” and “verb”?
Spinoza is pointing out something important and interesting about the Hebrew infinitive (a form used to refer to an action concept) when he says that it doesn’t carry tense like the Latin infinitive. But not all languages have tense! The point I’m trying to make isn’t that languages are actually all pretty similar, they all really have nouns and verbs “deep down”. Actually, languages differ widely in the strategies they use, and the parts-of-speech categories that come naturally to them, even in the same language family (English is actually pretty flexiblewhen it comes to parts-of-speech). They differ so much, in fact, that if we’re going to make comparisons between them, we need good, language-neutral definitions of grammatical categories.
I looked into it a little and the Greek word rhema that the Romans translated as verbum originally seems to have been used simply to mean predicate, something you say about something else, in contrast with onoma, which while literally “name” seems to refer gramatically to the subject. This lines up well with your characterization of Croft’s proposal, and with Aristotelian logic.
Around 100 BC, in his book Art of Grammar, Dionysius Thrax seems to have redefined rhema to mean something more like the modern colloquial sense of “verb”: a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person, and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone. This is the distinction the Roman grammarians inherited, and defines the semantic context in which Spinoza is writing.
This probably needs to be edited in somewhere as it’s an important link in the chain.
But from the perspective of predicate logic, it’s all just predication and quantification, except for proper nouns, which are usually modelled as constants.
That’s true, but when we’re looking at natural languages that’s not a super useful perspective to take because natural languages care a lot about how information is packaged. From a linguistic point of view, predication is a way of packaging information with a topic-comment structure. The topic can be thought of as a ”discourse file” and the comment can be thought as information that is being added to that file. Reference can be thought of as opening a new file or accessing a pre-existing one.
I slightly mispoke earlier when I paired adjectives with “attributing”, the function Croft pairs it with is actually “modification”. Modification is like adding supplementary information to a file.
It‘s a linguistic universal that when it comes to concrete material object concepts like “being a cat“, “being a rock” etc, there is a strong preference for packaging this information as a topic in the discourse rather than a comment. On the other hand, for action concepts like “walking”, there is a strong preference for packaging this information as a comment that is explicitly being added to a discourse file. All languages allow you to use nonprototypical combinations of semantic class and information packaging function though—It is possible to add the info that something is a cat to a pre-existing discourse file, it’s just not as common.
Predicate logic doesn’t really have discourse files, unless you think of quantification as opening an empty file.
When we’re talking about grammatical categories like “noun” and “verb”, it is VERY important that we make a sharp distinction between language-internal categories and categories that are useful for making comparisons across languages. If you are trying to say that some languages don’t have verbs, you better have a very clear criterion for what counts as a “verb” that can be applied to any language, otherwise you’re just going to get yourself hopelessly confused.
The best way to define “noun”, “adjective” and “verb” in a cross-linguistically valid way is actually the naive schoolboy approach of defining a noun as a word for an object, an adjective as a word for a property, and a verb as a word for an activity. A refinement of this idea is that a noun is a linguistic form used to refer to an object concept, an adjective is a form used to attribute a property concept, and a verb is a form used to predicate an action concept. All languages have ways of expressing these functions, but they can differ widely in the kinds of forms they use. I’m getting this way of talking from the linguist William Croft’s excellent textbook Morphosyntax: Constructions of the World’s Languages.
This definition has some unintuitive consequences. For example, in the sentence “the man is a doctor”, the word “doctor” is actually not a noun in the crosslinguistic sense. This is because it is being used to predicate an object concept, not to refer to it. You might see this as pathological, but this kind of thing is unavoidable when we’re defining categories neutrally across languages. In English, when we predicate object concepts, we use a construction with an indefinite article and a copula. In Nahuatl, the roots denoting objects take agreement markers like verbs—they would say something like “the man doctors”. Does that mean that in Nahuatl, “they don’t have nouns, only verbs”? Well, you could say something like that, but not all languages have indefinite articles or agreement marking, so how are you going to define what you even mean by “noun” and “verb”?
Spinoza is pointing out something important and interesting about the Hebrew infinitive (a form used to refer to an action concept) when he says that it doesn’t carry tense like the Latin infinitive. But not all languages have tense! The point I’m trying to make isn’t that languages are actually all pretty similar, they all really have nouns and verbs “deep down”. Actually, languages differ widely in the strategies they use, and the parts-of-speech categories that come naturally to them, even in the same language family (English is actually pretty flexible when it comes to parts-of-speech). They differ so much, in fact, that if we’re going to make comparisons between them, we need good, language-neutral definitions of grammatical categories.
I looked into it a little and the Greek word rhema that the Romans translated as verbum originally seems to have been used simply to mean predicate, something you say about something else, in contrast with onoma, which while literally “name” seems to refer gramatically to the subject. This lines up well with your characterization of Croft’s proposal, and with Aristotelian logic.
Around 100 BC, in his book Art of Grammar, Dionysius Thrax seems to have redefined rhema to mean something more like the modern colloquial sense of “verb”: a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person, and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone. This is the distinction the Roman grammarians inherited, and defines the semantic context in which Spinoza is writing.
This probably needs to be edited in somewhere as it’s an important link in the chain.
But from the perspective of predicate logic, it’s all just predication and quantification, except for proper nouns, which are usually modelled as constants.
That’s true, but when we’re looking at natural languages that’s not a super useful perspective to take because natural languages care a lot about how information is packaged. From a linguistic point of view, predication is a way of packaging information with a topic-comment structure. The topic can be thought of as a ”discourse file” and the comment can be thought as information that is being added to that file. Reference can be thought of as opening a new file or accessing a pre-existing one.
I slightly mispoke earlier when I paired adjectives with “attributing”, the function Croft pairs it with is actually “modification”. Modification is like adding supplementary information to a file.
It‘s a linguistic universal that when it comes to concrete material object concepts like “being a cat“, “being a rock” etc, there is a strong preference for packaging this information as a topic in the discourse rather than a comment. On the other hand, for action concepts like “walking”, there is a strong preference for packaging this information as a comment that is explicitly being added to a discourse file. All languages allow you to use nonprototypical combinations of semantic class and information packaging function though—It is possible to add the info that something is a cat to a pre-existing discourse file, it’s just not as common.
Predicate logic doesn’t really have discourse files, unless you think of quantification as opening an empty file.