The roots of nominality, the nominality of roots

AbstractThis chapter explores a perspective on nominal meaning, which does not take noun referents for granted but instead focuses on the conceptualization of entity types as the distinctive property of nouns. This perspective on the lexical semantics of nouns is descriptively useful and allows a characterization of nominality as a primitive lexical property. This leads to the question whether concepts are the content of lexical roots. The evidence from nouns, then, is that roots do not encapsulate core lexical information, but are best seen as morphological atoms, as opposed to atomic mappings of sound and meaning.