Lecture 4- Design

Notional and functional (formal) parts of speech

Traditionally, parts of speech are divided into notional (самостоятельные, знаменательные) and functional (служебные). Notional parts of speech are open classes – new items can be added to them, they are indefinitely extendable. Functional parts of speech are closed systems, including a limited number of members. As a rule, they cannot be extended by creating new items.

The main notional parts of speech are nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Members of these four classes are often connected by derivational relations: strength – strengthen; strong – strongly.

Functional parts of speech are prepositions, conjunctions, articles, particles. The distinctive features of functional parts of speech are: 1) very general and lexical meaning; 2) obligatory combinability; 3) the function of linking and specifying words.

Pronouns constitute a class of words which takes an intermediary position between notional and functional words. On the one hand, they can substitute for nouns and adjectives, on the other hand, pronouns are used as connectives and specifiers.

There may be also groups of closed-system items within an open class (notional, functional and auxiliary verbs).

A word in English is very often not marked morphologically and it is easy for words to pass from one class to another (round as a noun, adjective, verb, preposition). Such words are treated either as lexico-grammatical homonyms or as words belonging to one class.

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