Principles of the classification of words suggested by Charles Fries

Interjection.

Conjunction

Adverb

Preposition

Verb

Adjective

Pronoun

Noun

What this classification does not take into account is the peculiar grammatical system of each language. It uses the pattern worked out for Latin and forces it down onto other languages. The representatives of English classical grammar made an attempt to describe English and to build such a classification which would reflect the peculiarities of the English language. The first problem they faced in this respect was the problem of sorting out the basic principles of this classification.

2. Classification of parts of speech suggested by Henry Sweet

The first scholar who established the principles of the parts of speech classification in application to the English language was the founder of Classical English Grammar Henry Sweet, the author of “New English grammar, Logical and Historical”, which saw light in 1891. Henry Sweet described the three main features characterizing parts of speech, namely meaning, form and function. Nevertheless the classification he worked out reveals considerable divergence between theory and practice.

According to H. Sweet there are two large groups of words:

· declinable, i.e. capable of inflection,

· indeclinable, i.e. incapable of inflection.

The declinable parts of speech fall under the three main divisions: NOUNS, ADJECTIVES, and VERBS.

PRONOUNS are a special class of nouns and adjectives, and are accordingly distinguished as NOUN-PRONOUNS (e.g.: I, they) and ADJECTIVE-PRONOUNS (e.g.: my, that).

NUMERALS are another special class of nouns and adjectives: three in three of us is a NOUN-NUMERAL, in three men it is an ADJECTIVE-NUMERAL.

VERBALS are considered to be a class of words intermediate between VERBS on the one hand and NOUNS and ADJECTIVES on the other: they do not express predication, but keep all the other meanings and grammatical functions of the verbs from which they are formed. NOUN-VERBALS comprise INFINITIVES, such as go in I will go, I wish to go, and GERUND, such as going in I think of going.

ADJECTIVE-VERBALS comprise various participles, such as melting and melted in melting snow and the snow is melted.

INDECLINABLE WORDS or PARTICLES comprise ADVERBS, PREPOSITIONS, CONJUNCTIONS, and INTERJECTIONS.

Table 1. Henry Sweet’s classification of parts of speech in English

DECLINABLE	NOUN-WORDS: noun, noun-pronoun, noun-numeral, infinitive, gerund. ADJECTIVE-WORDS: adjective, adjective-pronoun, adjective-numeral, participle. VERB: finite verb, verbals (infinitive, gerund, participles)
INDECLINABLE (PARTICLES)	Adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection.

In spite of the fact that H. Sweet declared that three principles should be taken into account when distinguishing parts of speech, his own classification was based partially on the only criterion, that of form. That was one of the drawbacks of his classification. Another one consisted in the fact that there was obvious overlap: e.g., verbals could be found in the subclass of the adjective as well as in the subclass of the noun. In other words, H. Sweet’s classification was not strict enough; it was rather inconsistent.

But it has evident strong points as well. In the light of the problem of modern development of structural theory some of Sweet’s ideas, especially those expounded in his article “Words, Logic and Meaning” (1875-1876) seem to indicate the anticipation of views characterizing modern linguistics. Thus, the purely synchronic approach towards the description of the phenomena of modern languages initiated by F. de Saussure is expressed by H. Sweet: “before history must come knowledge of what now exists. We must learn to observe things as they are without regard to their origin ”.

The priority of oral speech over written proclaimed by structuralists was also stated by H. Sweet who was an eminent phonetician.

3. O. Jespersen’s classification of parts of speech

Another significant classification of the parts of speech is that given by Otto Jespersen. Of all the authors of scientific grammars of the classical type Otto Jespersen is the most original. His morphological system differs from the traditional as he lists only five parts of speech – substantives, adjectives, verbs, pronouns (the latter include pronominal adverbs and articles) and “particles” in which he groups adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. Like Henry Sweet he proposes three principles of classification, according to which everything should be kept in mind – meaning, form and function. Nevertheless in practice only one of these features is taken into account, and that is primarily form and in a few cases, the origin of a given form. O. Jespersen described hic classification of the parts of speech in his famous book “The Philosophy of Grammar” which was published in 1924.

What is curious about O. Jespersen’s classification is the fact that he gives the traditional list of parts of speech “for the dictionary” as he puts it. But he produces the theory of “ The three ranks ” based on mutual relations of words in a sentence in order to differentiate between the words in speech. Thus, he analyses the groups extremely hot weather or a furiously barking dog and singles out primary words (weather, dog), secondary words (hot, barking) and tertiary words (extremely, furiously). Such an interpretation rests on O. Jespersen’s general outlook that all the categorial, morphological properties of English parts of speech (verb and noun, first of all) go under the general title of syntax. Though quite innovative and contributing to the development of linguistics, this theory did not cover the relations of all the main word-classes, leaving out the verb. So, O. Jespersen’s grammar rested neither on formal, nor on meaningful criteria in parts-of-speech analysis.

In spite of some drawbacks of his theory it can be stated that among the authors of the 20^th century scientific grammars of the older school O. Jespersen was the only one who, like Henry Sweet, elaborated such general concepts of grammatical theory as the correspondence of grammatical and logical categories and the definition and delimitation of morphology and syntax. His criticism of the traditional definitions of the sentence and the parts of speech also deserves attention. His efforts to describe the peculiarities of modern English should be also noted.

Quite a different approach to the problem of parts of speech can be illustrated by the theoretical conception suggested by Charles Fries, an American linguist. Charles Fries represents structural (descriptivist) grammar. Structural grammarians began treating the problems of the structure of English criticizing the traditional, or the so-called conventional grammar. Ch. Fries expressed his ideas on the nature of the language in his book “The Structure of English, An Introduction to the Construction of English Sentences” which was published in 1952. Ch. Fries claims the necessity of a new approach to the process of language study implying the application of some of the newly developed techniques, i.e. distributional analysis and substitution. Distribution is the set of contexts within sentences in which a unit or class of units can appear (e.g. the distribution of hair in written English is the set of contexts I combed my ----. Give me the --- spray, My --- is too long, etc., in any of which the blank (---) can be filled by it). Substitution is understood as the replacement, in the process of analyzing a language, of one unit or sequence of units by another. This enabled Charles Fries to avoid the traditional terminology, dispense with the usual eight parts of speech and establish a completely new classification based on the ability of words to combine with other words of different type.

Charles Fries begins his analysis with the criticism of the traditional approach to the division of words into parts of speech. He believes that traditional definitions of parts of speech are mainly based on intuition, which has little if nothing in common with scholarly principles. He holds that a native speaker refers words to different parts of speech according to the signals of structural meaning. Words are ascribed this or that status according to the position they take in a sentence. “A part of speech in English […] is a functioning pattern”[46]. He arrives at the conclusion that the signals of structural meaning in English consist of patterns of arrangement of classes of words. Due to this fact one does not need to know the lexical meanings of the following words to understand which of them are “thing” or “action” words:

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