Chapter 1 Categories , Prototypes , and Default Inheritance

Researchers in typological and functional approaches to language have argued that the cross-linguistic properties of nominalizations follow from the univeral semantic properties of syntactic categories. Specifically, nouns denote objects and verbs denote actions in the prototypical case. In this paper I argue that this prototypical association of semantic type with syntactic category can be represented in an HPSG lexical type hierarchy as a default constraint. Unmarked words will inherit from the categorial default, while words that do not inherit from the prototype will be structurally or behaviorally marked. Thus, default constraints provide a way to import insights about grammatical prototypes from more cognitively oriented work on language into a formal theory of grammatical