Without any information about the categories of meanings, can PanLex work?
The effects of the arbitrary identification of meanings will be discovered with experience. If meanings were classified, it might be difficult for users to contribute to PanLex. Semantic categories, such as mass/count for nouns and participant lists for verbs, are often complex, controversial, and varying. However, while PanLex doesn’t assign categories to meanings, it does not prohibit its users from doing so. Users can assign categories in at least three ways. First, a user can classify any expression by assigning a metadatum to it, and the categories of expressions’ meanings can be inferred from such metadata. Second, it is possible for a user to create an artificial language variety devoted to meaning classification, i.e. a variety whose expressions are symbols designating categories, and a user who assigns a meaning to an expression in such a variety is actually classifying the meaning. Third, some language varieties expose grammatical or semantic categories in the citation (dicti
