The article deals with the notion of category and the linguists operations for delimiting linguistic categories. A threefold organization is suggested that subdivides categories into features and features into values. Every word of a natural language can be categorically described via a matrix of values that represent the implementation of features that, in their turn, are categorial properties. Since there exist many nonclearcut cases, that is, items that may paradigmatically belong to more than one category, it is necessary to use both a functional and a formal approach in order to get a categorial definition of the items. The traditional parts of speech still seem to be the best categorization, in spite of the fact that typology has become acquainted with languages that show very different morphosyntactic structures.
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