Abstract
This paper examines ontological categories (OC), a type of category that seems to exist in all languages. Following current trends in linguistic research, we claim that these categories belong to a closed class of functional nouns and that they make up a particular functional domain in UG. Working within the nanosyntactic approach, we claim that such a functional domain should be seen as a functional sequence (fseq) of syntactico-semantic heads.
Our paper is organized as follows. In section 1.2 we present the main notion of ontological category. We then briefly introduce our theoretical framework, the main hypothesis, as well as the methodology behind our nanosyntactic analysis. In sections 1.3 and 1.4, we present and discuss the relevant data, namely syncretism and morphological containment, in more than 39 languages belonging to 23 different language families. Section 1.5 discusses the nature of some of the counterintuitive results we arrive at, with some implications of the fseq we are proposing.
Baunaz, Lena