What class of word is very

This word is categorized as an adverb if it is used to modify a verb, an adjective, or another adverb in a particular sentence. Furthermore, this adverb is typically used to emphasize that something is of a high degree or intensity. For instance, in the sample sentence below: She worked very quickly.

Is a very or is very?

The word “very” is irrelevant. “nice evening” takes a determiner, in this case “a”. Putting “very” in front of it doesn’t change that; it still needs the “a”.

What part of grammar is very?

Adverb

Is very a superlative?

We can use very before superlative adjectives that end in -est (including best and worst), but we don’t use it before superlatives which use the most, we usually use by far: Kristin is the very oldest child in the class. This is the very lowest price I can offer.

What is a superlative example?

Superlative adjectives are used to compare three or more nouns. They’re also used to compare one thing against the rest of a group. Superlative adjectives demonstrate a higher level of comparison between entities. For example, “She’s the prettiest princess in all the land.”

What is a superlative person?

The definition of superlative is expressing the very highest degree, or the very best example of something. An example of superlative is having the highest level of talent. An example of superlative is “smartest,” referring to the person who is the most intelligent.

What is Bury?

verb (used with object), bur·ied, bur·y·ing. to put in the ground and cover with earth: The pirates buried the chest on the island. to put (a corpse) in the ground or a vault, or into the sea, often with ceremony: They buried the sailor with full military honors.

What is a buried verb?

Buried verbs are those that are needlessly converted to wordy noun expressions. Such nouns often end in –tion, -ment, and –ance. Zombie nouns cannibalize and suck the life out of active verbs.

What is another word for buried?

Buried Synonyms – WordHippo Thesaurus….What is another word for buried?

hidden	concealed
covered	interred
entombed	secreted
underground	inhumed
obscured	private

Is burying a word?

What’s the opposite of buried?

What is the opposite of buried?

exhumed	disinterred
unearthed	uncovered
dug up	dredged up
turned up	dug out
disentombed	unburied

How do you spell buried?

Correct spelling for the English word “buried” is [bˈɛɹɪd], [bˈɛɹɪd], [b_ˈɛ_ɹ_ɪ_d] (IPA phonetic alphabet)….Similar spelling words for BURIED

1. Bribed,
2. bread,
3. bared,
4. burped,
5. burred,
6. barred,
7. buries,
8. burned,

How do you say buried in present tense?

View the pronunciation for bury….bury ​Definitions and Synonyms ​‌‌

present tense
he/she/it	buries
present participle	burying
past tense	buried
past participle	buried

How do you spell burried or buried?

The word listed above (buried) is probably the correct spelling for the word that you entered (burried).

Is it Burry or bury?

The main difference between Burry and Bury is that the Burry is a family name and Bury is a town in Greater Manchester, England. Bury is the administrative centre of the Metropolitan Borough of Bury, and had a population of 78,723 in 2015; the borough had a population of 187,474 in 2011.

How do you bury an animal in your yard?

If you must bury a pet, secure them in a plastic bag (like a trash bag) and tie it so it won’t open. Bury them at least three feet deep, and again, away from any potential flooding area or you might end up living out a scene from Pet Sematary.

How do you bury someone alive?

How to Survive Being Buried Alive

1. Conserve your air supply. If you are buried in a typical coffin, you will have enough air to survive for an hour or two at most.
2. Press up on the coffin lid with your hands.
3. Remove your shirt.
4. Break through the coffin.
5. Use your hands to push the dirt toward your feet.
6. Sit up.
7. Stand.

What does to bury the hatchet mean?

Bury the hatchet is an American English idiom meaning “to make peace”. The phrase is an allusion to the figurative or literal practice of putting away weapons at the cessation of hostilities among or by Native Americans in the Eastern United States.

What does to hit below the belt mean?

To say something that is often too personal, usually irrelevant, and always unfair: “To remind reformed alcoholics of their drinking problem is to hit below the belt.” The expression comes from boxing, in which it is illegal to hit an opponent below the belt.

What does pie in the sky mean?

: an unrealistic enterprise or prospect of prosperity.

What do you call someone who has their head in the clouds?

head-in-the-clouds. airy-fairy. utopian. sentimental. over-optimistic.

For those interested in a little info about this site: it’s a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for — just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn’t be too much more work to get this up and running.

The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary — which is now in the public domain. However, after a day’s work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.

Finally, I went back to Wiktionary — which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it’s not properly structured for parsing. That’s when I stumbled across the UBY project — an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I’m happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.

Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).

Just like many words in the English language, the word ”very” also serves a double function. It can be used as an adverb or an adjective depending on the context.

1. Adverb

This word is categorized as an adverb if it is used to modify a verb, an adjective, or another adverb in a particular sentence. Furthermore, this adverb is typically used to emphasize that something is of a high degree or intensity. For instance, in the sample sentence below:

She worked very quickly.

The word “very” is considered as an adverb because it modifies another adverb “quickly.”

Definition:

a. to a great degree

• Example:
• It is the very best store in the city.

1. Adjective

There are also other times wherein the word “very” is considered as an adjective because it can modify a noun. When used as an adjective, this word typically means “exact” or “precise.” Take for example, the sentence:

Those were her very words.

The word “very” is categorized under adjectives because it describes the noun “words.”

Definition:

a. actual; precise

• Example:
• I found it at the very heart of the city.

b. being the same one

• Example:
• That is the very woman you were looking for.

c. emphasizing an extreme point in time or space

• Example:
• I knew it from the very beginning of the movie.

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In English grammar, a word class is a set of words that display the same formal properties, especially their inflections and distribution. The term «word class» is similar to the more traditional term, part of speech. It is also variously called grammatical category, lexical category, and syntactic category (although these terms are not wholly or universally synonymous).

The two major families of word classes are lexical (or open or form) classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and function (or closed or structure) classes (determiners, particles, prepositions, and others).

Examples and Observations

• «When linguists began to look closely at English grammatical structure in the 1940s and 1950s, they encountered so many problems of identification and definition that the term part of speech soon fell out of favor, word class being introduced instead. Word classes are equivalent to parts of speech, but defined according to strict linguistic criteria.» (David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• «There is no single correct way of analyzing words into word classes…Grammarians disagree about the boundaries between the word classes (see gradience), and it is not always clear whether to lump subcategories together or to split them. For example, in some grammars…pronouns are classed as nouns, whereas in other frameworks…they are treated as a separate word class.» (Bas Aarts, Sylvia Chalker, Edmund Weiner, The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2014)

Form Classes and Structure Classes

«[The] distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning determines the first division in our classification: form-class words and structure-class words. In general, the form classes provide the primary lexical content; the structure classes explain the grammatical or structural relationship. Think of the form-class words as the bricks of the language and the structure words as the mortar that holds them together.»

The form classes also known as content words or open classes include:

• Nouns
• Verbs
• Adjectives
• Adverbs

The structure classes, also known as function words or closed classes, include:

• Determiners
• Pronouns
• Auxiliaries
• Conjunctions
• Qualifiers
• Interrogatives
• Prepositions
• Expletives
• Particles

«Probably the most striking difference between the form classes and the structure classes is characterized by their numbers. Of the half million or more words in our language, the structure words—with some notable exceptions—can be counted in the hundreds. The form classes, however, are large, open classes; new nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs regularly enter the language as new technology and new ideas require them.» (Martha Kolln and Robert Funk, Understanding English Grammar. Allyn and Bacon, 1998)

One Word, Multiple Classes

«Items may belong to more than one class. In most instances, we can only assign a word to a word class when we encounter it in context. Looks is a verb in ‘It looks good,’ but a noun in ‘She has good looks‘; that is a conjunction in ‘I know that they are abroad,’ but a pronoun in ‘I know that‘ and a determiner in ‘I know that man’; one is a generic pronoun in ‘One must be careful not to offend them,’ but a numeral in ‘Give me one good reason.'» (Sidney Greenbaum, Oxford English Grammar. Oxford University Press, 1996)

Suffixes as Signals

«We recognize the class of a word by its use in context. Some words have suffixes (endings added to words to form new words) that help to signal the class they belong to. These suffixes are not necessarily sufficient in themselves to identify the class of a word. For example, -ly is a typical suffix for adverbs (slowly, proudly), but we also find this suffix in adjectives: cowardly, homely, manly. And we can sometimes convert words from one class to another even though they have suffixes that are typical of their original class: an engineer, to engineer; a negative response, a negative.» (Sidney Greenbaum and Gerald Nelson, An Introduction to English Grammar, 3rd ed. Pearson, 2009)

A Matter of Degree

«[N]ot all the members of a class will necessarily have all the identifying properties. Membership in a particular class is really a matter of degree. In this regard, grammar is not so different from the real world. There are prototypical sports like ‘football’ and not so sporty sports like ‘darts.’ There are exemplary mammals like ‘dogs’ and freakish ones like the ‘platypus.’ Similarly, there are good examples of verbs like watch and lousy examples like beware; exemplary nouns like chair that display all the features of a typical noun and some not so good ones like Kenny.» (Kersti Börjars and Kate Burridge, Introducing English Grammar, 2nd ed. Hodder, 2010)

Video Transcript
Section 1
Well hey there! I’m Emma from mmmEnglish and in this lesson today, I’m going to help you to break some bad habits. Hopefully we can stop you from being  a little lazy at times with your word choice. There are so many interesting and intelligent ways of expressing your ideas in English.

In fact, we’re going to take a lot of these kind of dull boring English words and replace them with better ones. More colourful, more impressive language.

We’re going to be focused on expanding your vocabulary and as always, I’ve got a mini quiz for you at the end of this video to make sure that all these exciting new words actually stick in your mind and become part of your regular everyday vocabulary.

So hang around till the end and test what you know.

So we all have bad habits, don’t we? And we tend to get stuck in those bad habits because they just become familiar and really easy.

So many of my students get stuck in the habit of using basic vocabulary because it’s easy and yeah you can communicate your message with basic English vocabulary right and that’s awesome.

But there’s gonna come a time when either you notice or other people around you start to notice that actually you’re just using the same words on repeat again and again. To be interesting, to impress and influence people, you’ve got to keep expanding your vocabulary and it’s not just the vocabulary that you understand. It’s the vocabulary that comes to you instantly as you’re using it as you’re speaking, as you’re writing so we want to activate that broader vocabulary today.

And one surefire way to expand your vocabulary and sound more impressive as you use English is to use better adjectives, better descriptive words in your sentences.

And you can train yourself to stop using really dull and boring adjectives just by avoiding one little word very. Very happy, very good, very bad.

And a little hint. Some other words that you might be using with dull adjectives are words like so, such and really.

And the cool thing is, this one simple rule will help you to become more conscious and more aware of the words that you choose when you speak and this is really important because using very regularly is a habit that you need to break.

So then I said he was very…

Maybe it’s too late to fix it in that moment but you will be more likely to remember next time and to change the words that you’re using and that’s really what being conscious of your mistakes means. Being aware that it’s happening and this will help you to change your behaviour. If you practise this skill while you’re writing, you have the opportunity to think of a better word in that moment or even look one up and grow the vocabulary that you’re using that way.

Very happy

So let’s start with very happy.

Now there’s lots of different ways to express this idea in English, isn’t there?

• overjoyed
• thrilled
• ecstatic
• elated

If we look at some examples we should be able to make it a little clearer when to use each one.

• She just found out she’s pregnant. She’s very happy.

We can add more meaning by saying:

• She’s overjoyed. She’s full of happiness and joy.

We could say that she’s thrilled especially if she’s really happy and excited.

We can say she’s ecstatic or she’s elated and that’s even stronger again. That’s joyful excitement you know, an overwhelming feeling of happiness in a really positive way.

So if you want to add even more meaning, choose one of those two.

There are so many better and more meaningful ways to say that you’re very sad and I think this lesson is gonna be like a roller coaster it’s gonna be full of highs and lows.

Happy, sad, good, bad but we’re just gonna ride it out okay?

Very sad

The truth is we can be sad for lots of different reasons and we can be sad in lots of different ways.

So as you start expanding your vocabulary, you really need to become more aware of the little nuances between words like heartbroken, devastated, disappointed and dejected. Because all of them are more meaningful ways to talk about that feeling of being very sad.

• His girlfriend just left him. He’s very sad.

So in this context, she left him means that she broke up with him. So he’s probably heartbroken and heartbroken is the perfect adjective to use when love is involved in sadness.

You could also say that he’s devastated too, especially if he wasn’t expecting it you know, and it was a bit of a shock.

So when you have sadness together with shock and surprise, these emotions together, devastated is a really good choice.

Let’s look at a different example.

• Sara looked very sad. She’d been so confident she would win the competition, but then she came fifth.
• She looked disappointed.
• She’s unhappy because she wasn’t as good as she thought she’d be.

But you could also say that Sarah looks dejected. Using dejected suggests that in that moment, she’s lost hope that she’ll ever compete again. It’s that sad, she’s just lost all hope.

There are several other really great words that you can say if you’re very sad. You might use:

• ashamed
• melancholy
• crestfallen

I mean you’re gonna have so much fun with a thesaurus but the trick with these new words is studying how they’re used, making sure that you’re using them accurately with the appropriate verbs and prepositions that they often get used with.

And the second thing you need to be aware of is the context in which they’re used because those nuanced meanings are ever so slightly different and makes one more appropriate to use in one situation while another perhaps not.

A great way to practise this is to write sentences using these words down in the comments below so that I can check them for you, help you to choose the right one for the right context and that sentence when you’re practising with this activity, it can be really simple.

It can just be he or she looked with that adjective because and then include a short description of the situation.

• He looked devastated because he lost the competition.

Very good

Stop saying very good, there are so many other better ways of saying very good in English.

Very good should be banned because instead, we can say:

• amazing
• fantastic
• fabulous
• magnificent
• excellent
• wonderful
• splendid
• exceptional
• and awesome. Did I say awesome already?

All these words are so similar, you can use them in almost any situation.

• That’s a very good idea.
• That’s a marvellous idea.
• That’s an excellent idea.
• I thought your performance was very good.
• Your performance was exceptional.
• Your performance was amazing.
• It was a splendid performance.

Very bad

Okay brace yourself. We’re going down again, we’re gonna think of some alternatives for very bad. Can you think of any because there are lots of them? I’m sure some are popping into your mind already.

• horrible
• terrible
• awful
• dreadful
• atrocious

Can you hear that stressed syllable in those words when I pronounce it? I’m exaggerating the stressed syllable to add emphasis and even more meaning.

Horrible. Atrocious.

You can do that with all adjectives whether they’re positive or negative adjectives to add even more meaning.

• It tasted very bad.
• It tasted awful! Yuck!
• It tasted disgusting!

Disgusting can be used when food tastes really bad or when something smells really bad.

• That smells disgusting!
• The weather’s been very bad lately.
• The weather’s been terrible lately.
• It’s been dreadful!

If you’re talking about someone’s behaviour and you’re saying that they behaved very badly, you might say that their behaviour was atrocious.

• His behaviour was atrocious.

I love that word, atrocious. There’s not a lot of things in the world that are atrocious but it is a very good adjective to use when you’re saying that something is very bad.

• The weather was atrocious.

You have to be careful about how you use these negative adjectives because they have a really strong meaning and they can be offensive, especially if you’re using them to talk about a person or something that they do or something that they care about, that can hurt.

Can you think of any other ways to say very bad? This is a really good activity to practise, to activate words that you don’t use so often. So if you can think of some other ways to say very bad add them down in the comments below.

Very big

If you catch yourself talking about something that is very big then you can replace this kind of average adjective with a more sophisticated one like:

• huge (obviously)
• enormous
• massive
• gigantic
• monstrous.

We walked through a very big gate at the entrance.

• It was an enormous gate.
• The gate that we walked through was massive.

Gigantic and monstrous are very, very big – exceptionally large.

• Some of the ships that pull in and out of the port near my house are monstrous.

Very small

• When I’m walking past these gigantic ships, I feel very small.

Can you think of a better way to say very small?

• tiny
• minuscule
• minimal

• Paul was quite angry about the damage even though the scratch on his car was very small. It was tiny, minuscule. We could hardly see it.
• The chances of losing all our money are very small.
• They’re minimal. The chances are minimal.

Very dirty

Let’s keep going. What can you think of that’s very dirty? Your kitchen, your dog after it’s rolled in dirt.

• Don’t let that dog inside, it’s very dirty!
• It’s filthy!

Filthy is a great word for very dirty.

• Your bedroom is filthy.

If you’re talking about a room or maybe a car that is very clean, you could say it was:

• spotless
• immaculate
• perfect – not a single thing was out of place.
• We were so impressed when we got home, the house was very clean.
• The house was spotless.
• It was immaculate. They must have spent hours cleaning it.

Very pretty

And we can definitely improve on very pretty, can’t we? And I’m sure, absolutely certain that you have at least one alternative in mind.

Hopefully, it was beautiful but we can also use:

• stunning
• elegant
• exquisite
• She looked very pretty as she came down the stairs in a blue dress.
• She looked stunning as she came down the stairs.

Very ugly

And lastly, as we come off the high of very pretty of course we need to have very ugly right.

So instead of very ugly, you could say hideous. So it’s not heidis which is a common mistake that I often hear my students make. It’s hideous.

And you can also say grotesque.

Now obviously, I don’t need to remind you again but I feel like I have to, these adjectives are extremely strong and negative so please don’t use them to describe people. That’s awful!

• Some of the big houses up on the hill are very ugly. They’re grotesque.
• Their driveways are lined with very ugly statues.
• The statues are hideous. They’re hideous.

Just because people have lots of money, doesn’t mean they have good taste, right?

Grotesque houses and hideous statues.

Practice Quiz

Okay so it’s time to test everything you know with a little quiz, I’m going to read out a sentence and you need to improve the words that are highlighted in the sentence.

There might be more than one option that you can choose from so that makes it a little bit easier but I’m going to go through them quite quickly because I want to test your recall, I want to test how quickly are these new words popping into your head all right?

So we’re going for speed this time.

Usually your car’s full of rubbish, but today it’s very clean!

• Today it’s spotless.
• Today it’s immaculate.

A very ugly monster emerged from the cave.

• A hideous monster.
• A grotesque monster.

Have you seen her engagement ring? It’s very pretty.

• It’s beautiful.
• It’s elegant.
• It’s stunning.
• It’s exquisite.

We were very sad to hear the fire destroyed their family home.

• We were devastated to hear that.

They’re getting married this afternoon but unfortunately, the weather looks very bad!

• The weather looks awful.
• Terrible.
• Dreadful.
• Atrocious.

Look at the queue of people waiting to get in, it’s very big!

• It’s huge.
• It’s enormous.
• The queue is massive.
• Monstrous.
• Gigantic.

It rained the entire weekend we were away camping, so when we got home on Sunday, everything was very dirty.

• Everything was filthy.

They suggested we meet them in France which, I thought, was a very good idea!

• Was a marvellous idea.
• An excellent idea.
• An exceptional idea.
• A splendid idea.

John and Kate were very happy when they found out they won the grand prize!

• John and Kate were overjoyed.
• They were thrilled.
• They were ecstatic.
• They were elated.

Let me know how you went with the quiz down in the comments below. If there are a couple of words that you got wrong or maybe they took you a little while to think of, hit the pause button now and practise writing a few more sentences like these down in the comments below.

Another really great way of practising these adjectives is if you have a speaking partner that you practise speaking English with regularly or maybe you have a tutor or someone else you meet up with ask them to listen out for very. Every time you use very when you’re speaking, ask them to stop you and let you know that you’ve used very and give you the chance to think of a better word to describe that situation or that thing.

There is no better way to improve your vocabulary and the way that you’re using it than to stop in that moment and get you to self-correct, correct that or improve that adjective as you’re using it.

I hope that you enjoyed this lesson. If you did, make sure you subscribe by hitting the subscribe button just down there. I make new mmmEnglish lessons every week. In fact, here’s a couple that I prepared earlier. I’ll see you inside the next one.

Bye for now!

3) Lexical and Grammatical Word Classes

Compound Words

We know, that lexical morphemes carry the main meaning (or significance) of the word it belongs to. The morpheme ‘ready’ in ‘readiness’ carries the meaning of the word, as does ‘bound’ in ‘unbound’, or ‘cran’ in ‘cranberry’. These morphemes, because they carry the lexical meaning, are lexical morphemes.

Grammatical morphemes can become attached to lexical morphemes. The ‘ing’ in ‘singing’ carries no lexical meaning, but it does provide a grammatical context for the lexical morpheme. It tells us that the ‘sing’ is ‘ing’ (as in ‘on-going’). In the same way, the morpheme ‘ely’ in ‘timely’ carries no meaning, but it does turn the noun ‘time’ into a word more frequently used as an adverb. Time the thing becomes the description of an action – as in ‘his intervention was timely’.

Of course, as with so many things in life, these definitions are by no means uncomplicated. For example, if we were to consider the lexical meaning of the words ‘stand’ and ‘under’, then they would be distinctive and straightforward. ‘Stand’, means to be upright, and ‘under’ means to be beneath something. However, when we put these two lexical morphemes together (although technically ‘under’ is actually a preposition), we get the word ‘understand’ which has an entirely different lexical meaning.

The combining of morphemes in order to create a new lexis is known as compounding, and words which are formed by the combination of such morphemes are known as compound words. Compound words do not necessarily have to be the consequence of combining lexical morphemes alone. Certainly, the lexical morphemes ‘earth’ and ‘quake’ combined create ‘earthquake’, but the combination of grammatical morpheme ‘to’ and the lexical morpheme ‘day’ creates ‘today’.

Here is a list of compound words. See if you can identify the lexical and grammatical morphemes:

lifetime	elsewhere	upside	grandmother
cannot	backbone	fireworks	passport
together	become	became	sunflower
crosswalk	basketball	scapegoat	superstructure
moonlight	football	railroad	rattlesnake
anybody	weatherman	throwback	skateboard
meantime	earthquake	everything	peppermint
sometimes	also	backward	schoolhouse
butterflies	upstream	nowhere	bypass
fireflies	because	somewhere	spearmint
something	another	somewhat	airport
anyone	today	himself	grasshopper
inside	themselves	playthings	footprints
therefore	uplift	without	homemade

Whether these compound words are composed of grammatical or lexical morphemes, the compound itself is almost always lexical. ‘Therefore’ is composed of two morphemes which in some ways can both be considered grammatical, but the compound carries a lexical meaning of ‘as a consequence of’.

Word Classes

It is useful to be able to distinguish between lexical and grammatical morphemes, because by doing so we are able to understand that words are constructed using specific mechanisms. Understanding those mechanisms means that we understand more clearly not only how we use words today, but how new words are formed.

If this is true of the morphemes in relation to the construction of words, then is is true also of words in relation to the construction of sentences. This is our next topic: the categorisations of words.

Words are divided into various classes (or ‘parts of speech’), each of which has a specific function in relation to creating meaning within sentences. The first and easiest distinction is that between open-class words (or lexical words) and closed-class words (or grammatical words).

Open-class words, or Lexical words

Open-class words, as Leslie Jeffries writes, are “those which contain the main semantic information in a text, and they fall into the four main lexical word classes: noun, verb, adjective and adverb” (Jeffries, 2006, p. 83). Stott and Chapman, in their book Grammar and Writing (2001) define these classes as:

• Verb: A word or phrase which expresses the action, process or state in the clause (e.g. I’m eating my favourite meal right now; I will go to that football match; I went quietly)

• Adverb: Single words that modify verbs by adding to their meaning (e.g. The choir sang sweetly). Words or phrases that modify or give extra definition to the verb in terms of place, manner and time (e.g. I’m eating my favourite meal right now; I’m eating my favourite meal in my favourite restaurant), are often referred to as adverbial.

• Noun: Words that names persons / places / things or abstractions (e.g. Edward, Tanzania, guitar, happiness). In earlier centuries all nouns in the English language were given a capital letter. In German, they still do the same. In English now, only proper nouns are given capital letters.

• Adjective: Words that modify nouns by adding to their meanings (e.g. That was a long film). Most adjectives have comparative (I’m glad it wasn’t any longer) and Superlative forms (It was the longest film I’ve ever seen).

They classes are referred to as open-class because “they are open-ended and can be added to readily” (Jeffries, 2006, p. 83), but they are also often referred to as lexical words because they carry a lexicial meaning (sometimes they are even referred to as semantic words, for the same reason). Sara Thorne goes on to say:

New words can be added to nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs as they become necessary, developing language to match changes in the society around us. The computer age, for example, has introduced new words like hardware, software, CD-Rom and spreadsheet; the 1980s introduced words like Rambo, kissogram and wimp; the 1990s introduced words like babelicious, alcopop and e-verdict; and the twenty-first century words like bling, chav, sudoko, bluetooth, chuggers (‘charity muggers’), mediatrics (‘media dramatics’ i.e. a story created from nothing), and doorstepping (journalists catching celebrities on their doorsteps to question them about incidents they would prefer not to discuss). Open-class words are often called lexical words and have a clearly definable meaning. (Thorne, 2008. p. 4)

Closed-class words, or Grammatical words

If open-class words tend to change frequently, then closed-class words tend not to change very often. Closed-class or grammatical words (sometimes referred to as function words) have less meaning than open-class or lexical words, but do useful jobs in language. They are the ‘little words’ that act as the glue, or connectors, inside a sentence. Without them, lexical words might still carry meaning but they do not make as much sense.

Grammatical words include articles, prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns.

• Articles: There are only two articles in English: the definite article, the, and the indefinite article a(n) (Jeffries, 2006. p. 96).

• Prepositions: Define the relationships that exist between elements. This includes relationships of place (at, on, by, opposite), of direction (towards, past, out, of, to, through), of time (at, before, in, on), of comparison (as, like), of source (from, out of), and of purpose (for) (Thorne, 2008. p. 20). Prepositions are by no means uncomplicated – you will have noticed from this list that the word ‘at’ can function as both a preposition of place and of time, depending on its contexts.

• Conjuntions: The function of conjunctions is to link together elements of sentences and phrases. They come in two forms. Co-ordinating conjunctions are words that join two clauses in a sentence, where each clause is of equal importance (i.e., ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘either’, ‘or’, ‘neither’, ‘nor’). Subordinating conjunctions are words that link sentences where one half is a consequence of the other (‘although’, ‘as’, ‘because’, ‘if’, ‘since’, ‘that’, ‘though’, ‘until’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘while’, etc.).

• Pronouns: Pronouns come in two forms. Firstly, the pronoun itself, where words are “used instead of a noun or noun phrase (e.g. it, he, who, theirs)”. Secondly, there is the personal pronoun, in which “[w]ords identify speakers, addressees and others (I, you, she, it, we, they)” (Stott and Shapman, 2001).

What is the significance of word classes?

Note: I am indebted to Dr. Geoffrey Finch for his help with much of this next section, to which I have added some additional notes and material. This means that some parts of this section have doubtless either already appeared in one of Dr. Finch’s book, or will imminently do so – but without the details I have been unable to reference them properly.  See here for published works, and buy them all — ‘cos they’re great.

Word classes are important in the acquisition of language because they enable us to construct sentences with a maximum of economy. Knowing that only a verb can complete the following sentence:

	loved
The boy	…………..	the dog
	hit

or an adverb the one below,

	badly
The boy wrote the essay very	………..
	easily

means that we don’t have to try out every word in our mental lexicon to see whether it will fit or not.

So classifications of words and grammar enable us to communicate much more efficiently. Not only this, such systems enable us to communicate with much more variety. Humans simply could not memorise a lexicon which contained a different word for every thing they wanted to express. This means that there are only two options – either make do with a limited range of expression, or develop a system which allows for individual words to mean more than one thing. Word classes are part of that very system – as we shall discover more of in a moment.

Bauer, Holmes and Warren (2006) argue that word class systems are like the assembly instructions for language:

Kit-sets for furniture (and other construction toys for older children) generally come with a parts list and a set of instructions. If the parts list of a language is the set of words used by that language, then the grammar is the instruction set. If your build-it-yourself bookcase arrives with a parts list and no instructions, then the construction of a well-formed piece of furniture may be more difficult, if not impossible. If we have a set of words but no grammar then the construction of well-formed sentences is similarly compromised.

The language instruction set is useful not only in constructing sentences, but also in deconstructing them, in understanding what someone is saying to us. And understanding what someone is saying is not just understanding the words they use. Compare, for instance, Tama would like to speak to you and you would like to speak to Tama. These sentences share the same words, and the result of the situation expressed might be the same (i.e. the people referred to as you and Tama get together to talk), but our understanding of these sentences involves not just knowing what each word means but also recognizing how the words, as components of sentences, are combined. After all, Max loves Alice does not mean Alice loves Max. Success in communicating the message depends on speakers and listeners working with the same instruction set. It is this type of shared knowledge which constitutes part at least of what we call grammar. (Bauer, Holmes and Warren, 2006. p. 104)

Problems with classifications

The criteria by which linguists assign words to particular classes, however, are less certain. Most people if asked to say what a verb or a noun are rely on what is called ‘notional’ criteria. These are broadly semantic in origin. They include referring to a verb as a ‘doing word’, i.e. a word that denotes an action of some sort (go, destroy, eat), and a noun as a ‘naming word’, i.e. one that denotes an entity or thing (car, cat, hill). Similarly, adjectives are said to denote states or qualities (ill, happy, rich), and adverbs, the manner in which something is done (badly, slowly, well).

As a rule of thumb this works reasonably well, but it’s not subtle enough to capture the way in which word classification essentially works. Not all verbs are ‘doing’ words. The verbs ‘to be’, and ‘to have’ clearly aren’t. And neither are all nouns necessarily ‘things’. Nouns such as ‘advice’, and ‘consequence’ are difficult to conceive as entities. We’re forced to call them ‘abstract’ nouns, a recognition that in some way they are not typical. Indeed, notional criteria only work for prototypical class members, but there are many others for which such criteria are not adequate. The word ‘assassination’, for example, seems like a verb since it describes a process or action, but it is in fact a noun.

The Lawlessness of English

The English language is flexible. It has, over the centuries developed from a corruption of Latin — the twisting and changing of ‘proper’ Latin with local jargon and slang. “From at least the time of Shakespeare”, Measham says, “the English language has not been overly hampered by rules” (Measham, 1965. P. 83).

To use an example from Measham — look at these three sentences:

• Gardening is a good way of getting blisters.
• I was gardening at the time the wall fell down.
• I had on my gardening boots.

The word ‘gardening’ appears three times. But does it serve the same function each time?

• Gardening is a good way of getting blisters

here ‘gardening’ functions as a noun.

• I was gardening at the time the wall fell down

here ‘gardening’ functions as a verb: it describes an action.

• I had on my gardening boots

here ‘gardening’ functions as an adjective.

Of course, for native English speakers the meaning of these sentences might appear plain, despite the fact that the same word operates in very different functions. 

So how can we classify words at all?

The only secure way to assign words into word classes is on the basis of how they behave in the language. If a word behaves in a way characteristic of a noun, or a verb, then it’s safe to call it one. This, of course, means recognising that words can belong to more than one class. It also means recognising that words may be more or less noun-like or verb-like in behaviour.

Word classes are similar to family groupings in that some members are more recognisably part of their class than others. Basic to word behaviour are two sets of criteria, namely, the morphological, and the syntactic. Morphological criteria, as we have seen, are concerned with the structure of words. Important here are such processes as inflection. Most verbs will inflect to show tense (show + ed), most nouns to indicate plurality (bat + s), and many adjectives to show the comparative and superlative (fat > fatter > fattest). But there is no one criterion which all words in a particular class will obey. As a consequence, linguists also use syntactic criteria, in particular, the distribution of a word in an individual string. This is the topic we will be considering in my next post: Whereabouts a word can occur in a phrase or sentence is an important indication of its class.

Using the behaviour of individual words as an indication of word class means that our approach is descriptive rather than prescriptive. And we shall also find that, because of the variable character of words, each class will contain within it several sub-classes. So there are sub-classes of nouns, verbs, and so on. And because the different classes have features in common it is possible to cross-classify them into larger groups. Linguists, therefore, differentiate between lexical and grammatical classes. The former contain words which have a meaning outside the context in which they are used, and include nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives and adverbs, whilst the latter consist of words which are only meaningful as part of the syntactic frame for example, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns and auxiliary verbs.

Bibliography

Jeffries, L. (2006). Discovering Language: The Structure of Modern English. Basingstoke, Palgrave.

Thorne, S. (2008). Mastering Advanced English Language. Basingstoke, Palgrave.

Sott, R. and Chapman, J. (2001). Grammar and Writing. Harlowe, Longman

Measham, D. C. (1965). English Now and Then. Cambridge, Cambridge

Bauer, L., Holmes, J. and Warren, P (2006). Language Matters. Basingstoke, Palgrave