11. The field-theory approach to parts-of-speech classification. Classification of parts of speech in English. Ch. Fries’s classification.

The field theory was invented be professor Admoni: there are linguistic units in every part of speech which possesses al the properties of the given class. This is the nucleus of this part of speech. But there are also units which possess not all the properties of it though they belong to this part of speech. The field includes both the central part and the periphery . The task of the linguists is to reveal all the central and all the peripheral elements.

For example: nucleus (satisfy all the characteristics of the class) – qualitative adjectives, periphery- relative adjective eg., wooden (doesn`t form degrees of comparison), statives

A field theory applying to nouns:

nucleus – common concrete nouns denoting living beings

periphery- abstract material nouns or proper nouns (don`t regularly build plural or genitive), verbal nouns

substantivised elements (It is a must)

Traditional classification of words (dating back to ancient times) – 8 parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections.

Objections:

The definitions are largely notional and often extremely quite vague; e.g. A pronoun is a word used instead of a noun (John came this morning – a man, someone, you-know-who, the aforementioned).

The number of parts of speech in the traditional grammars seems to be arbitrary. Why 8? Prof. Ilyish – 12 (+ numerals, statives, modal words and particles), prof. Khaimovich and Rogovskaya – 14 (+ articles and response words).

Thus, meaning can’t be the only criterion for classifying words. Compare:

The last train was at 7.

When did you last get a letter from her

She was faithful to the last.

How long will the fine weather last?

That’s why to classify words we must take into consideration morphological characteristics of words. For instance, H.Sweet: declinables (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and indeclinables (adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections). One more classification (based on syntactic functions of word classes): noun-words (nouns, noun-numerals, noun-pronouns, Infinitives, Gerunds), adjective-words (adjectives, adjective-pronouns, adjective-numerals, Participles), verb-words (verbs, verbals). O.Jespersen (his theory is between syntax and morphology):

substantives (including proper nouns)

adjectives (In some respect (1) and (2) may be classed together as nouns)

pronouns (including numerals and pronominal adverbs)

verbs (with doubts as to the inclusion of verbals)

particles (adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections) characterized negatively as made up of all those that cannot find any place in any of the first 4 classes.

J.Sledd: inflexional classes (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives – based on inflexion, adverbs – based on derivation) and positional classes (4 main positional classes – nominals, verbals, adjectivals, adverbials – and 8 smaller positional classes – determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, relatives, interrogatives, intensive-reflexives, auxiliaries and adverbials of degree). He uses the method of substitution:

e.g. Cash/money/the money/the big money talks.

An adjective is usually an adjectival but it may be a nominal, etc.:

The poor boy became president. The poor can afford no vacations.

The strong points: 1) emphasis on inflexions as indicators of parts of speech 2) the idea of heterogeneity of word-classes

Charles Fries`s classification:

For his material he chooses tape recorded spontaneous conversations comprising about 250,000 word entries (50 hours of talk). The words are tested on three typical sentences and used as substitution test-frames

Frame A – The concert was good (always).

Frame B – The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).

Frame C – The team went there.

As a result of successive substitution test on these frames the following list of positional words are established.

Class 1. (A) concert, coffee, taste etc. (B) clerk, husband etc. (C) team, husband etc.

Class 2 (A) was, seemed, became (B) remembered, wanted…(C)went, came….

Class 3 (A) good, large, new

Class 4 (A) here, always… (B)clearly, especially… (C) there, back,out…

Fries establishes 4 classes (class 1, 2, 3 4) and 15 groups of structural words (group A, B, C, D, E, etc.) – e.g. group A comprises all the words which may occupy the position of concert …

all these words can fill in the positions of frames without affecting their general structural meaning. Words in different collocations determine their morphological characteristics, i.e. characteristics referring them to various subclasses of the identified lexemic classes.

Functional words are exposed in the cited process as being unable to fill the positions of the frames without destroying their structural meaning.(154 units)

These groups of functional words can be distributed into 3 main sets.1 set –specifiers of notional words, 2 set- play the role of interpositional elements, determining relations of notional words to one another, 3 set- refer to the sentence as a whole (question words, attention words etc.)

Main drawbacks:

morphological characteristics are ignored completely;

syntactical characteristics are not always taken into consideration (e.g. modal verbs are isolated from Class 2);

the classes are heterogeneous (one and the same word may happen to be in different classes and groups).

Strong points:

special accent is laid on distribution of words and their syntactic valency (another name for the classification is syntactico-distributional);

his materials comprise 250 000 word entries which provide information on frequency of occurrence.