18 Parts of speech(Gram. Classes of Words)

The words of language, depending on various formal & semantic features, are divided into classes. The traditional gram. classes of words are called “parts of speech”, since the word is distinguished not only by gram., but also by semantico-lexemic properties, some scholars also refer to parts of speech as lexico-gram. categories (Смирницкий). It should be noted that the term “parts of speech” is purely traditional & conventional. This name was introduced in the gram. teaching of Ancient Greece, where no strict differenciation was drawn between the word as a vocabulary unit & the word as a functional element of the sentence.

In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of the three criteria: (Щерба).The semantic criterion expresses the generalized meaning of all the words of a given part of speech. The formal criterion exposes the specific inflexional & derivational (word-building) features of part a part of speech. The functional criterion concerns the syntactic role of words in the sentence, typical of a part of speech. These 3 factors of categorical characterization of words are referred to as 'meaning', form & function.The three-criteria characterization of parts of speech was developed & applied to practice in Soviet linguistics. Vinogradov in connection with the study of Rus. Grammar, Smirnitsky, Ilyish in connection with their study of E. Grammar. Alongside of the 3-criteria principle of dividing the words into gram. classes modern linguistics has developed another, narrower principle based on syntactic featuring of words only.

On the material of Rus., the principle of syntactic approach to the class-n of word-stock were outlined in the works of Peshkovsky. The principles of syntactic class-n of E. words were worked out by L. Bloomfield, Harris & esp. Ch. Fries. He chooses tape-recorded spontaneous conversations which lasted 50 hours. The 3 typical sentences are: Frames:A The concert was good (always).B The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).C The team went there. As a result he divides the words into 4 classes: class I, II, III, IV, which correspond to the traditional nouns, verbs, adj.s & adverbs. class I includes all words which can be used in the position of the words 'concert' (frame A), clerk & tax (frame B), team (frame C), subject & object. Class II - have the position of the words 'was', 'remembered', 'went' in the given frames, i.e. in the position of the predicate or part of the predicate. Class III - the position of 'good', & 'new', i.e. in the position of the predicative or attribute. & the words of class IV - in the position of 'there' in Frame C, i.e. of an adverbial modifier. These classes are subdivided into subtypes.Ch. Fries sticks to the positional approach. such words as man, he, the others, another belong to class I as they can take the position before the words of class II, i.e. before the finite verb. Besides the 4 classes, Fries finds 15 groups of function words. Following the positional approach, he includes into one & the same group the words of quite different types. group A includes all words, which can take the position of the definite article 'the', such as: no, your, their, both, few, much, John's, our, four, twenty. But Fries admits, that some of these words may take the position of class I in other sentences. Thus, this division is very complicated, one & the same word may be found in different classes due to its position in the sentence. So Fries' idea doesn't reach its aim to create a new classification of classes of words.

Today scholars believe that it is difficult to classify E. parts of speech using one criterion. Some Soviet linguists class the E. parts of speech according to a number of features. 1)Lexico-gram. meaning: (noun - substance, adj. - property, verb - action, numeral – number, etc).2)Lexico - gram. morphemes: (-er, -ist, -hood - noun; -fy, -ize - verb; -ful, -less - adj., etc). 3)Gram. categories & paradigms. 4)Syntactic functions 5)Combinability (power to combine with other words). In accord with the described criteria, words are divided into notional & functional. To the notional parts of speech of the E. language belong the noun, the adj., the numeral, the pronoun, the verb, the adverb. To the basic functional series of words in E. belong the article, the preposition, the conjunction, the particle, the modal word, the interjection. The difference between them may be summed up as follows:) Notional parts of speech express notions & function as sentence parts (subject, object, attribute, adverbial modifier). 2) Notional parts of speech have a naming function & make a sentence by themselves: Go! 3) Functional words (or form-words) cannot be used as parts of the sentence & cannot make a sentence by themselves. 4) Functional words have no naming function but express relations. 5) Functional words have a negative combinability but a linking or specifying function. E.g. prepositions & conjunctions are used to connect words, while particles & articles - to specify them.

Pr. Ilyish objects to the division of words into notional & functional parts of speech. He says that prepositions & conjunctions are no less notional than nouns & verbs, as they also express some relations & connections existing independently. Each part of speech is further subseries in accord with various particular semantico-functional & formal features of the words. Thus, nouns are subdivided into proper & common, animate & unanimate, countable & uncountable, conctrete & abstract. E.g. Mary-girl, man-earth, can-water, stone-honesty. This proves that the majority of E. parts of speech has a field-like structure.

The theory of gram. fields was worked out by V.G. Admoni on the material of the German language. Every part of speech has words, which obtain all the features of this part of speech. They are its nucleus. But there are such words which don't have all the features of this part of speech, though they belong to it. Consequently, the field includes central & peripheral elements. Because of the rigid word-order in the E. sentence, E. parts of speech have developed a number of gram. meanings & an ability to be converted. E.g. It's better to be a has-been than a never-was. He grows old. He grows roses. The convertion may be written one part of speech. She took off her glasses. Give me a glass of water.