Theories of parts of speech

Analytical character of English

An analytic language is a language that conveys grammatical relationships without using inflectional morphemes. A grammatical construction can similarly be called analytic if it uses unbound morphemes, which are separate words, and/or word order. Analytic languages are in contrast to synthetic languages.

A related concept is the isolating language, which is about a low number of morphemes per word, taking into account derivational morphemes as well. A purely isolating language would be analytic by necessity, lacking inflectional morphemes by definition. However, the reverse is not necessarily true: a language can have derivational morphemes while lacking inflectional morphemes. For example, Mandarin has many compound words,^[1] giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, yet since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships it is a very analytic language.

The term "analytic" is commonly used in a relative rather than an absolute sense. English has lost much of the inflectional morphology of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic and Old English over the centuries and has not gained any new inflectional morphemes in the meantime, making it more analytic than most Indo-European languages. For example, while Proto-Indo-European had inflections for eight cases in its nouns, English has lost most of them, conserving only the genitive (possessive) -'s.

For comparison, nouns in Russian inflect for at least six cases, most of them descended from Proto-Indo-European cases, whose functions English translates using other strategies like prepositions, verbal voice and word order instead.

Analytic languages are not inflected, that is, nouns and adjectives are not declined and verbs are not conjugated. Instead, the order of the words determines grammatical relationships. English is an analytical language, though not perfectly so, because there are some agreement markers, tenses, etc in English. For example * he do is incorrect, because to do must be inflected to mark third person singular subject: he does.

Theories of parts of speech.

• Functional –Formal Principles of Classification (Non-Structural Descriptive Grammarians)
• Henry Sweet (1892), a prescriptivist divided words into

Indeclinables (particles): adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection. Declinables (nominative): noun-words (noun, noun-pronoun, noun-numeral, infinitive, gerund), adjective-words (adjective, adjective-pronoun, adjective-numeral, participle), verb (finite verb), verbals (infinitive, gerund, participle)

• 12. Functional –Formal Principles of Classification (Non-Structural Descriptive Grammarians)
• Henry Sweet speaks of three principles of classification: form, meaning, and function.
• However, the results of his classification of parts of speech into nominative and particles is a division based on form.
• Only within the class we can see the operation of the principle of function.
• 13. Functional-Formal Principles of Classification (Non-Structural Descriptive Grammarians)
• Otto Jespersen, a descriptivist, (1935)
• “ In my opinion everything should be kept in view, form, function and meaning...”
• He distinguishes:
• substantives,
• adjectives,
• pronouns,
• verbs,
• particles (adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections).
• 14. Functional-Formal Principles of Classification (Non-Structural Descriptive Grammarians)
• Otto Jespersen
• separates nouns (which he calls substantives) from noun-words, a class of words distinguished on the basis of function – a noun word is a word that can function as a noun;
• distinguishes pronouns as a separate part of speech, thus isolating them from Henry Sweet’s noun-words and adjective-words.
• Although the scholar speaks of form, function and meaning, in practice he gives preference to form.
• 15. Distributional Principles of Classification (Structural Descriptive Grammarians)
• Charles Fries (1956)
• rejected the traditional principle of classification of words into parts of speech
• replaced it with the methods of distributional analysis and substitution.
• The distribution of a word is the position of a word in the sentence (the ability of words to combine with other words of different types). At the same time, the lexical meaning of words was not taken into account.
• 16. Charles Fries’s substitution frames
• Frame A
• 1 2 3 4
• The concert was good (always).
• Frame B
• 1 2 1 4
• The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).
• Frame C
• 1 2 4
• The team went there.
• 17. Charles Fries’s classification
• 4 major classes of words
• They contain 67% of total instances of the vocabulary
• 15 form-classes
• These function words (numbering 154 in all) make up a third of the recorded material.
• 18. 4 major classes of words
• Class 1 words are words that can substitute for concert (e.g. food, coffee, taste, etc.) and words that can substitute for clerk, tax and team.
• Class 2 words are words that can substitute for was, remembered and went;
• Class 3 words are words that can substitute for good.
• Class 4 words are words that can fill the position of there.
• 19. 15 form-classes
• Group A words (determiners);
• Group B (modal verbs);
• Group C (the negative particle “not”);
• Group D (adverbs of degree);
• Group E (coordinating conjunctions);
• Group F (prepositions);
• Group G (the auxiliary verb “to”)
• Group H (the introductory “there”);
• Group I (interrogative pronouns and adverbs);
• Group J (subordinating conjunctions);
• Group K (interjections);
• Group L (the words “yes” and “no”);
• Group M (the so-called attention-giving signals: look, say, listen);
• Group N (the word “please”);
• Group O (the forms “let us”, “lets” in request sentences).
• 20. pro et contra
• Charles Fries was the first linguist to pay attention to some of function words (form-classes) peculiarities.
• He used the principle of function, or combinability (the position of a word in the sentence is the syntactic function of word).
• Not all relevant positions were tested.
• 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.

Parts of speech

English words have been classified into eight or nine parts of speech (and this scheme, or slight expansions of it, is still followed in most dictionaries):

Noun

a word or lexical item denoting any abstract or concrete entity; a person (police officer, Michael), place (coastline, London), thing (necktie, television), idea (happiness), or quality (bravery)

Pronoun

a substitute for a noun or noun phrase (them, he)

Adjective

a qualifier of a noun or pronoun (big, brave)

Verb

a word denoting an action (walk), occurrence (happen), or state of being (be)

Adverb

a qualifier of an adjective, verb, clause, sentence, or other adverb (very, quite)

Preposition

an establisher of relation and syntactic context (in, of)

Conjunction

a syntactic connector (and, but)

Interjection

an emotional greeting or exclamation (Hurrah, Alas)

Article

a grammatical marker of definiteness (the) or indefiniteness (a, an). Not always listed among the parts of speech. Sometimes determiner (a broader class) is used instead.

English words are not generally marked as belonging to one part of speech or another; this contrasts with many other European languages, which use inflection more extensively, meaning that a given word form can often be identified as belonging to a particular part of speech and having certain additional grammatical properties. In English, most words are uninflected, while the inflective endings that exist are mostly ambiguous: -ed may mark a verbal past tense, a participle or a fully adjectival form; -s may mark a plural noun or a present-tense verb form; -ing may mark a participle, gerund, or pure adjective or noun. Although -ly is a frequent adverb marker, some adverbs (e.g. tomorrow, fast, very) do not have that ending, while some words with that ending (e.g. friendly, ugly) are not adverbs.

Many English words can belong to more than one part of speech. Words like neigh, break, outlaw, laser, microwave, and telephone might all be either verbs or nouns. In certain circumstances, even words with primarily grammatical functions can be used as verbs or nouns, as in, "We must look to the hows and not just the whys. " The process whereby a word comes to be used as a different part of speech is called conversion or zero derivation.

6.

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