Semantic transparency and Oneida morphological parts of speech

Abstract North American languages have figured prominently in discussions about parts of speech. This paper examines more closely the evidence for morphological parts of speech in one Northern Iroquoian language, Oneida, and asks what semantic properties underlie its parts of speech. We make two claims. First, inflected parts of speech in Oneida are semantically transparent in that a part of speech can be determined solely on the basis of well-established semantic distinctions. Oneida parts of speech are, in this respect, canonical, in Canonical Typology’s sense. Second, Oneida morphological parts of speech are organized along two orthogonal dimensions, an ontological dimension, i.e., the sort of entity that members of the category describe, and a semantic type dimension, i.e., the kind of semantic relation conveyed by members of the category. We show that Oneida inflection is sometimes sensitive to distinctions along the ontological semantic dimension, sometimes to distinctions along the semantic type dimension, and sometimes a single inflectional process is sensitive to distinctions along both dimensions at the same time. We then show that our bi-dimensional semantic classification of stems accounts for the mixed properties of kinship terms, i.e., which “noun”-like and which “verb”-like properties they have.