530 Mostly Medieval It is worth mentioning that again, unlike in verbs, the noun referring function is signaled by more than one linguistic means: articles and stress in some languages, stress and word order in others, plus demonstrative pronouns in both categories. Such an accumulation of means for one category is a clear evidence of the importance of referent identification in communication. The importance of nouns is cognitively grounded in the fact that nouns represent objects which, as Langacker (1987) pointed out are conceptually independent, while relations, represented by verbs, are conceptually dependent, a relation that was obvious in the structure of Chomsky’s (1965) selectional restrictions in which verbs are described in terms of accompanying noun features. In my 2012 paper I argued for the primacy of the noun over other categories on the basis of linguistic (selectional restrictions, clefting, American Sign Language), cognitive (metaphorical process of objectification26) and psychological (language acquisition) phenomena. The determining role of the contextual information value of nouns in stress assignment in neutral intonation is yet another evidence for the uniqueness of nouns among other categories. References Barcelona, Antonio ([2000] 2003) “On the Plausibility of Claiming a Metonymic Motivation for Conceptual Metaphor.” [In:] Antonio Barcelona (ed.) Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective. (Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL] 30). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter; 31–58. DOI: 10.1515/9783110894677.31 Barsov, Anton, A. ([1783–1788] 1981). Rossijskaja grammatika [Russian Grammar]. Text prepared and commented by M.P. Tobolov; edited by B. A. Uspenskij. Moskva, USSR: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta. Bogusławski, Andrzej (1977) Problems of the Thematic–Rhematic Structure of Sentences. Warszawa, Poland: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Bolinger, Dwight (1972) “Accent is Predictable (if You’re a Mind-reader).” [In:] Language 48(3), 633–644. DOI: 10.2307/412039 Chafe, Wallace (1976) “Giveness, Contrastiveness, Definiteness, Subjects, Topics, and Points of View.” [In:] Charles N. Li (ed.) Subject and Topic. New York, NY: Academic Press; 25–55. 26 For metaphorical conceptualization of abstract entities (mental, emotional, relations, etc.) as objects cf. Reddy (1979), Jäkel (1995), and Szwedek (2011).
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