In this respect the most fundamental dichotomy is the one between language in which all lexical monemes can be found performing the same basic functions, and those, probably a clear majority in the world of today, in which some monemes, which we may designate as ‘verbal’, are specialized and restricted to predicative uses: on one hand we have languages in which the equivalent of ‘tree’ and ‘it stands upright’, of ‘leg’ and ‘it walk’ are identical and distinguished only by the predicative use of the latter, some non-predicative function for the former; on the other hand, forms of speech in which the equivalents of ‘tree’ or ‘leg’ may perhaps be found to act as predicates, whereas those of ‘it stands’ and ‘it walks’ can be predicate and nothing else. Languages with special ‘verbal classes’ restricted to predicative use can be further subdivided into languages in which non-verbal lexemes can normally be used with predicative function and those in which this is formally impossible.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.100-101