Heterogeneity

Notionals and Functionals

Both traditionalists and descriptivists divide parts of speech into notionals (major, autosemantic words, variables, semantically full words) and functionals (synsemantic words, invariables, semantically empty words).

Notionals are open classes, indefinitely extendable. It’s impossible to inventory all the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. It is transposition (conversion) which makes nouns and verbs limitlessly open (I’m wifed, aunted and cousined. There’s no one manning or womaning the camera. I’ve been anniversaried several times). Nouns can be limitlessly verbalized, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, forms of verbs, whole phrases, prefixes and suffixes can be nominalized (His life was all blacks and whites. There was smth on it…two somethings actually: a white something and a dark something. What time is it now? – It’s half past now). Lexically full words have a paradigm. They are communicatively important, serve as members of a sentence.

Functionals are closed classes, we cannot invent new prepositions and conjunctions. They can be easily listed. But in reality the situation is not that rigid. There appear new functionals. Such is the conjunction like, derived from the adjective like(Never do like he has done). Such is the intensifiers bloody, that (Why bloody not? It was not t hat good). The form given of the verb to give is often used as a preposition, meaning considering, provided, on account of (Given the circumstances, we could not ask for better treatment). Functionals have no paradigm. They are communicatively unimportant, they are never members of a sentence. Their meaning is generalized, contextually dependent.

Parts of speech in traditional interpretation are heterogeneous. Nouns can be distinguished into those with a developed paradigm (the plural, the genitive case, articles, any function in a sentence), but still there are nouns used only in the singular or only in the plural, nouns singular in form but plural in combinability(Police are; The New York police is one of the best polices in the world). We find notionals with a developed paradigm, auxiliaries and modals with a defective paradigm, substitutes (do), link verbs, verbs with a double syntactic capacity (Flying can be dangerous; The chicken eats well). Pronouns are heterogeneous: there are pronouns with nounal and adjectival properties, etc. Pronouns do not name anything, they only represent. Some pronouns are declinable, but some of them are indeclinable. They possess properties of both notional and functional words. According to N. Chomsky, adverbs are most heterogeneous.

Though a greater homogeneity was achieved by Ch. Fries’s classification as compared with traditional classifications, his classes of words are still very heterogeneous. Nouns and pronouns are analysed together as they often function in the same way. Substitution is a mechanistic procedure, it can’t be relied upon. There’s much illogical and paradoxical in each class, but each class is communicatively unique and specific. It’s quite natural as a natural language is not a rigid inflexible system. There should be hybrid formations, syncretical phenomena, transitions from class to class.

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