 However, it is not so clear for many Native American language families, particularly the Na-Dené family.Beck (2001) proposes that nouns should not be restricted to single words and compounds, at least for Native American languages, instead that any conventionalized expression that meets certain semantic and syntactic criteria of “nouniness” should be admitted to the class of nouns.These criteria for nominal entries in the lexicon are, per Beck (p. 19ff.