- •Theoretical Grammar in the Systemic Conception of Language
- •9. Parts of Speech problems. Word classes
- •Principal sentence parts
- •Subject
- •Predicate
- •11. Classification of sentences. Types of sentences.
- •The complex sentences
- •The compound sentences
- •Semi-composition sentences
- •Secondary sentences Parts
- •Independent elements of the sentences
9. Parts of Speech problems. Word classes
The parts of speech are classes of words, all the members of these classes having certain characteristics in common which distinguish them from the members of other classes.
Word classes refers to a group of words which have similar functions. Word classes are divided into open classes and closed classes.
Open classes include lexical words such as
nouns (dinner, place, Francis),
verbs (meet, drive, go, pick),
adjectives (old, angry, helpful),
adverbs (quickly, carefully, fast).
Open classes admit new words.
Closed classes have limited membership. They include function words such as
pronouns (it, he, who, anybody, one),
determiners (a, the, that, some, each, several),
modal verbs (may, could, must),
auxiliary verbs (be, have, do),
conjunctions (and, but, if, unless),
prepositions (in, at, of, by, with).
They do not admit new words.
The problem of word classification into parts of speech still remains one of the most controversial problems in modern linguistics.
There are four approaches to the problem:
Classical (logical-inflectional)
Functional
Distributional
Complex
Theory |
Origin/author |
Criterion/criteria |
Result |
Drawback/advantages |
Classical |
Based on Latin grammar |
Morphological form of the word |
1) Declinable (nouns, pronouns, verbs, participles, adjectives) 2) Non-declinable adverbs, prepositions,conjunctions, interjections, articles) |
It cannot be applied to English, because it is an analytical language and the principle of declinability/ indeclinability is not relevant for analytical languages. |
Functi onal |
The author is Henry Sweet (1892), |
Function (Nominative) |
1)nominative (noun-words, adjective-words, verb (finite verb), verbals) 2) particles, can’t perform nominative: adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection. |
Henry Sweet failed to break the tradition and classified parts of speech into declinable and non-declinable |
Distribu tional |
Charles Fries (1956) |
Combinability (the position of a word in the sentence is the syntactic function of word). |
1) 4 major classes of words (They contain 67% of total instances of the vocabulary) 2) 15 functional classes (These function words (numbering 154 in all) make up a third of the recorded material) |
He was the first linguist to pay attention to functional parts of speech and their peculiarities, but His functional classes are very much broken into small groups. Being deprived of meaning, his word-classes are “faceless”, i.e. they have no character. |
Complex (traditi onal) |
- |
It’s based on 3 criteria: 1) meaning 2) form 3) function |
1) notional (are those denoting things, objects, notions, qualities, etc. – words with the corresponding references in the objective reality): nouns, pronouns, numerals, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. 2) functional (are those having no references of their own in the objective reality; most of them are used only as grammatical means to form up and frame utterances): articles, particles, prepositions, conjunctions,modal words, the interjection. |
The advantages of complex theory is that it discriminates parts of speech on the basis of several criteria and describes the parts of speech from every aspect |