Word Classes in Mande Languages

Abstract The Mande language family includes about 70 languages which show a high degree of typological homogeneity in most respects. In particular, all Mande languages have extremely rigid word order patterns, which facilitates the use of distributional criteria in the recognition of word classes. By contrast, most of them (but not all) have very reduced inflectional morphology, which may favour the development of lexical polycategoriality, in particular as regards the distinction between nouns and verbs. In some Mande languages, all the lexemes that can be used as verbs can also be used in the same underived form as action nominalizations (but not vice versa: all Mande languages have lexemes that can only be used as nouns in their underived form). Mande languages also provide interesting data about the possible criteria that can be used to delimit classes of adjectives, adverbs, postpositions, or copulas. Finally, in Mande languages, the so-called predicative markers (a kind of auxiliaries) constitute a highly salient class of grammatical words expressing TAM, polarity, sometimes also subject indexation and distinctions related to transitivity and/or information structure.