The following list is a classification of the grammatical concepts (or functions) figuring in this work, where the term concept is used in a pretheoretical sense. Since we will be dealing with concepts, terms such as ABLATIVE or COMPLEMENTIZER stand for semantic-functional, rather than morphological or syntactic, categories. No attempt is made here to trace a boundary between “grammatical concepts” and nongrammatical or “lexical concepts.” If one finds concepts such as ONLY or TOGETHER, for example, which one might not be inclined to treat as grammatical concepts, then we simply wish to say that these items exhibit more grammatical properties, or fewer lexical properties, than the concepts from which they are historically derived. Such properties relate in particular to the productivity, applicability to various contexts, and syntactic and paradigmatic status of the items. For example, grammatical forms are closed-class items, and whenever we found that a given concept is regularly derived from some closed-class item we decided to consider it a candidate for inclusion. Both ONLY and TOGETHER have the numeral ONE as one of their historical sources, and although numerals have a fairly large membership in some languages, they normally can be described as closed-class paradigms; hence we decided to tentatively include items such as these two in our treatment.

Furthermore, the characterizations and taxonomic labels that we propose are not intended to be definitions of the concepts; rather, they are meant to assist the reader in narrowing down the range of meanings that a given grammatical marker may convey (see, e.g., Bybee et al. 1994 for more details); in a number of cases, such characterizations consist of nothing but English translational equivalents – a procedure that certainly is far from satisfactory.