Parts of Speech(Word-class theory)

10 Parts of Speech(Word-class theory)

The term “part of speech” is rather conventional, because it is borrowed from classical ancient Greek grammar.
What is understood under this notion is a big class of words that differs from other classes in some gr.features. The classification is based on 3 criteria: meaning, form, function. Descriptivists added the 4^th criterion – distribution.

MEANING – semantic criterion is connected with categorical meaning of the whole part of speech. (substantivity – nouns, process/action – v, quality – adj.)

FORM – formal (morphological) criterion is connected with possible ways of form building. (Gr.categories of these parts of speech).

FUNCTION – this criterion describes syntactic roles of some word in the sentence.

DISTRIBUTION – this criterion describes each part of speech from the viewpoint of its environment.

Actually, none of these criteria is absolute, as they work not for all words of the same part of speech, e.g. within nouns we find words with the categorical meaning of quality, But still such words are referred to nouns on the basis of all the rest criteria.

The same is true about the form, as within the same part of speech we can find words that behave in a different way. Not all nouns change their form (какаду, кенгуру). In English words of singularia and pluralia tanta have the same form. Functions, as well as distributions, cannot be regarded as absolute criterion, as many parts of speech can be used in the same function and distribution.

Only the whole complex of these criteria helps us identify some parts of speech correctly.

⇐ Предыдущая 12