Against grammatical categories (and what to replace them with) [Guest talk at the University of Potsdam]

The term “grammatical category” is used frequently by linguists, but what exactly does it mean? This seems to be unclear in many cases, and we can distinguish at least three different senses: (i) a set of mutually exclusive inflectional meanings; (ii) an inflectional meaning that is expressed by inflected forms; (iii) a set of grammatical forms that express an inflectional meaning. Because of this ambiguity, linguists sometimes talk about categories “expressing meanings”, and also about forms “expressing categories”, which is very confusing. A related problem is that linguists talk about inflected forms sometimes as consisting of a root and affixes, and sometimes as coming into being by “realizing inflectional features”. These two ways of talking are sometimes treated as competing schools of thought: “morph-based” vs. “word-based/paradigm-based” approaches. In this presentation, I suggest that we do not need concepts such as “category” and “feature realization”, at least in the context of general linguistics.