Categorie grammaticali e classi di parole: qualche riflessione a margine

In the present paper the word “category” as a technical term of linguistics is claimed to be conceptually too broad and, eventually, even misleading. A more appropriate approach to the concept of category, whose content and definition go back to Kant and ultimately to Aristotle, would be to analyse it according to the its values and features. This procedure would enable us to describe processes that bring about changes in grammar according to more fine-grained traits. Some phenomena of transcategorisation or reanalysis would thus turn out to be less unusual and easier to describe (for instance, the example of the genitive singular ending -aafter the numeral for ‘two’ in Russian, originally the old ending of the dual). Another case briefly touched upon in the paper is the coming into being of evidentiality with the perfect tense in Old Georgian. These cases also show that the notion of continuum is hardly suitable to describe changes or birth of linguistic categories.