Parts of speech as lexico-grammatical classes of words. 3 principles of classifying words into parts of speech

Parts of speech are grammatical classes of words distinguished on the basis of 3 criteria: semantic, morphological and syntactic, i.e. meaning, form and function.

1. 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.)

This general meaning is understood as the categorial meaning of a class of words, or the part-of-speech meaning.

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.

2. Form (Morphological Properties)

The formal criterion concerns the inflexional and derivational features of words belonging to a given class, i.e. the grammatical categories (the paradigms) and derivational (stem-building, lexico-grammatical) morphemes.

This 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; -tion can end a noun and a verb: to position.

Because of the limitation of meaning and fonn as criteria we mainly rely on a word's function as a criterion of its class.

3. Function (Syntactic Properties)

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

The three criteria of defining grammatical classes of words in English may be placed in the following order: function, form, meaning.

Parts of speech are heterogeneous classes and the boundaries are not clearly cut especially in the area of meaning. Within a part of speech there are subclasses which have all the properties of a given class and subclasses which have only some of these properties and may have features of another class. So a part of speech may be described as a field which includes both central, most typical members, and marginal, less typical members. Marginal areas of different parts of speech may overlap and there may be intermediary elements with contradictory features (statives, modal words, pronouns). Words belonging to different parts of speech may be united by a common feature and constitute a class cutting across other classes (f. ex., determiners). So the part-of-speech classification involves overlapping criteria and scholars single out from 9 to 13 parts of speech in Modern English.

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