Since Argument Is First: A Morphosyntactic Reading of Categories

Linguists have traditionally classified words into syntactic categories using morphological and syntactic evidence, often treating phonology as a separate domain concerned only with sound patterns. This article argues for an integrated phono-morphosyntactic approach to category classification in English, positing that suprasegmental features such as stress and intonation can serve as evidence for determining syntactic categories and that ambiguity in written form is often resolvable through phonological representation. The study also challenges the classical assumption that reflexive pronouns are a straightforward diagnostic for syntactic relations by demonstrating that anaphors occurring in prepositional phrase distributions behave differently from canonical reflexives. A questionnaire administered to five native English speakers at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh examined gender assignment patterns, revealing that English speakers show no systematic agreement in pronoun choice for occupational nouns, in contrast to Arabic speakers who operate under a more rigid grammatical gender system. The findings support the view that category classification must account for phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic evidence in an integrated manner.