TY - JOUR AU - Jenks, Peter AU - Koontz-Garboden, Andrew AU - Makasso, Emmanuel-Moselly PY - 2019/05/13 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - On the lexical semantics of property concept nouns in Basaá JF - Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung JA - SuB VL - 21 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - UR - https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/159 SP - 643-660 AB - <p>This paper considers the link between lexical category and lexical semantics, examining variation in the category of property concept (PC) words (Dixon, 1982; Thompson, 1989)—words introducing the descriptive content in translational equivalents of sentences whose main predicate is an adjective in languages with large open classes of them. Francez and Koontz-Garboden (2015) conjecture that nominal PC words might only have mass-type denotation (conceived in the spirit of Link 1983), as diagnosed by possession in predication (e.g., <em>Kim has beauty/</em>#<em>Kim is beauty</em>). In Basaá, a class of PC nominals we call <em>substance nouns</em> trigger possession in predication, while a class we call <em>adjectival nouns</em> do not, thereby falsifying Francez and Koontz-Garboden’s conjecture. We offer several diagnostics that confirm the substance denotation for the substance nouns, and an individual-characterizing denotation for the adjectival nouns, speculating on whether such nouns have a degree semantics, and whether they represent a crosslinguistically rare category or not.</p> ER -