Conclusions and Consequences

Despite its crosslinguistic frequency, noun classification is commonly conceived of as an arcane and arbitrary feature of language, something possessed of little less arbitrariness than the Saussurean sign itself. The preceding chapters, investigating one such system, that of Kiowa, have shown that, far from being an isolated fact about individual lexical items, the mechanisms of noun classification are deeply embedded in the grammar, exhibiting effects in the semantics, syntax, and morphology. In this final chapter, I wish to consider what Kiowa suggests for the treatment noun classification more generally.