Noun adjective and verb types

The lexical words of a language can be grouped into a number of semantic types, each of which has a common meaning component and a typical set of grammatical properties. One of the grammatical properties of a type is its association with a grammatical Word Class, or Part of Speech.

One preliminary point should be stressed: semantic types are not mutually exclusive. The central representatives of a type tend to be frequently used words with a simple, general meaning; these do have unequivocal membership. But words of more specialized meaning may combine the semantic properties of more than one type. Offer, for instance, relates both to GIVING (the most frequent kind of offer is an offer to give something) and to SPEAKING (the person offering will usually employ words, although gestures could be used instead). Bite is basically a CORPOREAL verb, alongside eat, chew and swallow, but it can also be used—like cut—as an AFFECT verb, e.g. He bit/cut through the string; it has slightly different grammatical properties in the two senses—a direct object when CORPOREAL and preposition through when AFFECT. Generally, when a verb shares the semantic characteristics of two types, it will also blend their syntactic properties.