Nouns and verbs:a set-theoretical comparison
Borut Pretnar
September 2024 

Nouns and verbs are the key syntactic and semantic elements of human language. A set-theoretical comparison, based on their negation behaviour, is proposed and compared to existing essays on their different roles, mostly based on their syntactic and – to a lesser extent - semantic characteristics. A few elementary applications of set theory are demonstrated as an appropriate means to expose the distinguishing characteristics of nouns and verbs. Based on the preliminary set-theoretical investigation a hypothesis is proposed about the general capability of nouns to define members of sets. The hypothesis provides the base for a tentative definition of some lexical categories appended to nouns.

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Reference:	lingbuzz/008414 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	nouns, verbs, negation, set theory, lexical categories defined, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [September 2024]
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