Abstract

Verbs are different from;nouns in ways that go beyond chair syntactic privileges . Verbs are harder to remember, more broadly defined, more prone to be altered in meaning when conflict of meaning occurs, less stable in translation between languages, and slower to be acquired by children than nouns . In this paper I argue that the differences stem in part from a basic cognitive distinction that, in perceptual domains, is correlated with the noun-verb distinctioq :. the distinction between object-reference concepts and relational concepts .' Object-reference concepts are typically lexicalized as concrete or proper nouns such as dog, collie, or Lassie . Relational concepts from the same concrete level a' ' typically lexicalized as predicates, usually verbs (e.g ., push, float, or move) or prepositions