Major category

In generative grammar, the term major category used to be used for the syntactic categories noun, verb and adjective (Chomsky 1965, 1973). Currently, the term lexical category is more commonly used.

References

• Chomsky, Noam A. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Chomsky, Noam A. 1973. Conditions on transformations. In: S.R. Anderson & Paul Kiparsky (eds.) A festschrift for Morris Halle. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Links

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics