ABSTRACT
Category neutrality has been an overlooked phenomenon in natural language. Few cases have been reported (to my knowledge, all in Sag et al. 1985), and have for the most part been analyzed in a way that did not require any word to have more than one category simultaneously. As expressed by linguists such as Bayer (1996) and Heylen (1997, 1999), the reason for disallowing category neutrality in a grammar was the problem that once multiple categories could be assigned to a given phonological form, then any two or more homophones could be neutralized, resulting in tremendous overgeneration.
