Word classes

In every language, there are a limited number of types of lexical item. These different kinds of word are traditionally known as 'parts of speech', though in linguistic terminology the label word class is more common. Word classes are conventionally given labels, such as noun, verb, adjective.

Words are classified into word classes partly on account of their syn­tactic behaviour, partly on the basis of their morphological form. That is, words from the same word class are likely to fit into the same slot in a sentence, and to be inflected in similar ways. For example, the word class traditionally known as 'verb' can be recognized as a verb partly because it occurs after nouns (or phrases containing a noun), and partly because most verbs have an inflectional ending -ed to indicate the past:

Arabella detested snails.

Marianna smiled.

Careful analysis is needed, because in some cases, items which superficially appear to fit into the same slot in a sentence can turn out to be rather different in character. Consider the sentences:

Charlie ate caviare.

Charlie ate well.

At first sight, we might wrongly assume that caviare and well belong to the same word class. But a less superficial analysis reveals that they behave somewhat differently overall. If we tried altering the sentences around, we could say:

Caviare was eaten by Charlie.

What Charlie ate was caviare

• 58 ––

But we could not form the equivalent sentences with well:

• Well was eaten by Charlie.

• What Charlie ate was well.

These dissimilarities indicate that caviare and well are syntactically dif­ferent, and belong to different word classes.

It is not always easy to tell how many word classes a language con­tains. Many traditional textbooks claim that English has eight 'parts of speech'. But this claim turns out to be leased largely on old Latin gram­mars which were in turn translated from ancient Greek grammars, which mostly divided Greek words into eight word classes. If we look more closely, we find several discrepancies. For example, nouns and pronouns are traditionally classified as separate parts of speech, yet they have a large number of similarities:

Max laughed.

He laughed.

In fact, nouns and pronouns are more alike than the different types of word which are traditionally labelled adverbs. Words such as quickly and very are both usually classified as adverbs, but they behave quite differently:

He ran quickly.

*He ran very.

The number of word classes varies from language to language. Some word classes, such as noun and verb, may be universal. But others vary. In some languages, for example, there is no distinct class of adjectives. Where English says:

Petronella is happy.

a language such as Chinese might say, as it were:

Petronella happies.

using a verb instead of an adjective.

Major word classes

English is sometimes considered to have four major word classes: noun (N), adjective (A), verb (V), preposition (P) (Figure 24), as well as a number of minor ones, such as determiner (D) which covers

• 59 ––

words such as the, a, this, that.

Big A

frogs N

swim V

under P

water N

Fig. 24

Of these four major classes, nouns, verbs and prepositions behave fairly differently from one another, though adjectives are somewhat strange, in that they have some noun-like qualities, and some verb-like ones. In Blessed are the brave, brave seems to have become a noun. And in Mavis is asleep, asleep seems fairly verb-like, since it fits into the same slot as sleeping in a sentence such as Mavis is sleeping.

It has been suggested that we should describe these four word classes in a manner parallel to the distinctive feature descriptions used for sounds, which can show shared similarities:

Although not yet generally accepted, this seems to be a useful and eco­nomical way of capturing the similarities and differences between the major word classes.

This chapter has discussed words and morphemes. These fit into larger recurring patterns, which will be the topic of the next chapter.