The project bridges together historical and typological linguistics. Its main results concern parts of speech (PoS) typology, Indo-European (IE) and Semitic studies, as well as linguistic terminology, theoretical morphology and the history of language science.
It is well-know that a cross-linguistically agreed and consistent theory of PoS classification has never been proposed so far (Bisang 2013 for discussion). Moreover, quite a few scholars think that such theory is not only lacking at present; rather it is impossible in principle (Croft 2001, Haspelmath 2012 and Alfieri 2021 for discussion). The project will counter such view bringing in two results. It will: i) propose a new and consistent theory of PoS classification across languages, testing such theory against a balanced variety sample of 60 languages; ii) use such theory to describe two enormous and previously neglected or understudied typological changes at the level of the PoS which occurred in two of the most ancient language families of the world, namely Indo-European and Semitic.
These families were selected due to their long and unbroken tradition, which allows to detect long run typological changes.
Moreover, either of these families attests a new type of change which has never been discussed in the literature. Calquing the label of grammaticalization, we term such change as lexicalization that is, the emergence of a class primary adjectival morphemes in the lexicon of a language or, more specifically, the passage of a “major” PoS from the level of constructions (that is, from the “grammar” and, specifically, of word-formation) to the level of the lexicon (Alfieri 2020). The PoS subject to the lexicalization process is the adjective class in either of the two families under scrutiny.
Identifying such change will improve our understanding of general-typological linguistics, but it will also allow to propose a new cross-linguistically valid, functional definition of the most important unit of historical linguistics, namely the root. Nobody has ever linked the presence of the root and the typology of PoS. Rather, most scholars exclude this link, assuming that the root is only a diachronic notion, only a formal notion (that is, a pure consonantal template), or that it represents a simple verb stem termed differently as a homage to the Indian or Arabic indigenous grammarians who first used this label (Skt. dhātu- ‘base, fundament’, Ar. ’aṣl- or mādda ’aṣliyya ‘root, trunk’, Heb. šoreš ‘id.’). In the project, we will counter such view showing that the Sanskrit and Arabic root is neither of these units: rather, it is the lexical morpheme of a language in which only two major classes of morphemes are found (verbal roots and nouns) and the most typical “adjective” is a derived stem (that is, a nominalization) built on a “verb” meaning a quality (that is, a verb-like adjective in Dixon’s terms).