7. Parts of speech. Principles of classification.

Parts of speech are grammatical classes of words distinguished on the basis of three criteria: semantic, morphological and syntactic, i.e meaning, form and function.

MEANING (Semantic Properties).

Each part of speech is characterized by the general meaning which is an abstraction from the lexical meanings of constituent words. The general meaning of nouns is substance, the general meaning of verbs is process, etc. Semantic properties of a part of speech find their expression in the grammatical properties. To sleep, a sleep, sleepy, asleep refer to the same phenomenon of objective reality, but they belong to different parts of speech, as their grammatical properties are different.So meaning is a supportive criterion which helps to check the purely grammatical criteria, those of form and function.

FORM (Morphological Properties).

This criterion concerns the inflexional and derivational features of words belonging to a given class.

The formal criterion is not always reliable as many words are invariable and many words contain no derivational affixes. Besides, the same derivational affixes may be used to build different parts of speech.

-ly can end an adjective, an adverb, a noun: a daily: )

FUNCTION (Syntactic Properties)

Syntactic properties of a class of words are the combinability of words (the distributional criterion) and typical functions in the sentence.

We distinguish between lexical, grammatical and lexico-grammatical combinability: between lexemes (a wise man but not milk), between grammemes (students sing but not sings), between parts of speech (sing beautifully, but not beautifully singer).When speaking of the combinability of parts of speech, lexico-grammatical meanings are to be considered first. Owing to the lexico-grammatical meanings of nouns (“substance”) and prepositions (“relation of substances”) these two parts of speech often go together.

Scholars single out the following parts of speech:noun,adj.,pronoun,numerals,verb,adv.,adlinks,modal words,prepositions,conjunctions,particles,interjections,articles,response words.

8. H.Sweet’s classification of words into parts of speech.

The founder of English scientific grammar H. Sweet finds the following classes of words: “declinables” - noun-words, adjective -words, verbs and “indeclinables” - particles. The term particles denotes words of different classes which have no categories.Alongside of this classification H. Sweet suggests a grouping based on the syntactical functioning of certain classes of words. Thus, the group of noun-words includes, besides nouns, noun-pronouns, noun-numerals, infinitive and gerund; the group of adjectives, besides adjectives, includes adjective-pronouns, adjective-numerals, participles. The verb group includes finite forms and verbals; here the morphological principle seems to dominate again: all non-finite as well as finite forms possess the categories of tense and voice. Thus, verbals – infinitive and gerund - turn to belong to noun-words owing to their syntactical function, and to verb-words, owing to their morphological properties.

As far as the group of indeclinables is concerned, H. Sweet attributes to it quite different elements: adverbs which may be parts of sentences and conjunctions, prepositions and interjections which can’t be parts of sentences: prepositions, functioning within predicative units, and conjunctions, linking predicative units. O. Jespersen, the Danish linguist, (Philosophy of Grammar) was fully aware of the difficulty to reconcile 2 main principles – form and function, morphology and syntax. He states that if we take the morphological principle (“declinables” and “indeclinables”), then such words as must, the, then, for, enough must be attributed to one class – this is the weakest point of Sweet’s classification.