Uggs woggled digs

Woggles ugged diggles

3. Woggs diggled uggles [47].

He classifies words into four form-classes, designated by numbers, and fifteen groups of function words, designated by letters. The form-classes correspond roughly to what most grammarians call (1) nouns and pronouns, (2) verbs, (3) adjectives, and (4) adverbs, though Fries especially warns the reader against the attempt to translate the statement which the latter finds in his book into the old grammatical terms. The group of function words includes 154 items and contains not only prepositions and conjunctions, but also certain specific words that more traditional grammarians would class as a particular kind of pronouns, adverbs, and verbs. The function words are distributed among 15 groups.

The book by Ch. Fries The Structure of English (1952) deals exclusively with syntax, whereas morphology is completely ignored. He tries to base his description of the parts of speech on the syntactic behaviour of words, i.e. words which can occupy the same syntactic position may be classed together, which is the main principle of analysis. Thus his main assumption is that all the words that can occupy the same set of position in a sentence belong to the same part of speech. For his material he chose tape-recorded spontaneous conversations comprising about 250 000 word entries (50 hours of talk). The words isolated from this corpus were tested on the three typical sentences which were isolated from the record too, and used as substitution test-frames. A substitution frame is the rest of a sequence in which substitutions are made (e.g. in the frame The _____ have left, a word such as men (The men have left) can be replaced by any of elephants, young people, workers next door, and so on).

Frame A. The concert was good (always).

Frame B. The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).

Frame C. The team went there.

Ch. Fries started with the minimum free utterance The concert was good as his first test-frame and set out to find in his materials all the words that could be substituted for the word concert with no change of structural meaning. The words of this list can be called Class I words. Thus in his classification Ch. Fries makes an emphasis on classes. Such an approach to the description of linguistic phenomena is called taxonomic.

Though Ch. Fries’ classification of words shows obvious overlap, it has a number of indisputable strong points. Ch. Fries analyses speech, giving priority to oral speech in its synchronic state. He is quite consistent in the application of strict linguistic procedures (distribution and substitution) thus trying to avoid intuitions in linguistic description. Due to Charles Fries the principle of distributional analysis got its legal status in linguistics [Лайонз 1974: 159]. For his analysis Ch. Fries makes use of a large corpus of linguistic material, subsequently laying foundations for further corpus linguistics. The disadvantages and weak points of Ch. Fries’ theory consist mainly in the draft character of the work which needed more refinement and perfection of the scheme. His colleagues called Fries’ work a small timid step in the right direction and criticized Ch. Fries for lack of detail[48]. The fact that he overlooked semantics also had its negative toll on the overall classification though structuralists never thought much about meaning. There is obvious overlapping between classes which never contributes to the strength of any classification.

5. Classifications of parts of speech developed

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