Which part of speech is the word some

A part of speech is a term used in traditional grammar for one of the nine main categories into which words are classified according to their functions in sentences, such as nouns or verbs. Also known as word classes, these are the building blocks of grammar.

Every sentence you write or speak in English includes words that fall into some of the nine parts of speech. These include nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles/determiners, and interjections. (Some sources include only eight parts of speech and leave interjections in their own category.)

Learning the names of the parts of speech probably won’t make you witty, healthy, wealthy, or wise. In fact, learning just the names of the parts of speech won’t even make you a better writer. However, you will gain a basic understanding of sentence structure and the English language by familiarizing yourself with these labels.

Open and Closed Word Classes

The parts of speech are commonly divided into open classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) and closed classes (pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, articles/determiners, and interjections). The idea is that open classes can be altered and added to as language develops and closed classes are pretty much set in stone. For example, new nouns are created every day, but conjunctions never change.

In contemporary linguistics, the label part of speech has generally been discarded in favor of the term word class or syntactic category. These terms make words easier to qualify objectively based on word construction rather than context. Within word classes, there is the lexical or open class and the function or closed class.

Read about each part of speech below and get started practicing identifying each.

Noun

Nouns are a person, place, thing, or idea. They can take on a myriad of roles in a sentence, from the subject of it all to the object of an action. They are capitalized when they’re the official name of something or someone, called proper nouns in these cases. Examples: pirate, Caribbean, ship, freedom, Captain Jack Sparrow.

Pronoun

Pronouns stand in for nouns in a sentence. They are more generic versions of nouns that refer only to people. Examples:​ I, you, he, she, it, ours, them, who, which, anybody, ourselves.

Verb

Verbs are action words that tell what happens in a sentence. They can also show a sentence subject’s state of being (is, was). Verbs change form based on tense (present, past) and count distinction (singular or plural). Examples: sing, dance, believes, seemed, finish, eat, drink, be, became

Adjective

Adjectives describe nouns and pronouns. They specify which one, how much, what kind, and more. Adjectives allow readers and listeners to use their senses to imagine something more clearly. Examples: hot, lazy, funny, unique, bright, beautiful, poor, smooth.

Adverb

Adverbs describe verbs, adjectives, and even other adverbs. They specify when, where, how, and why something happened and to what extent or how often. Examples: softly, lazily, often, only, hopefully, softly, sometimes.

Preposition

Prepositions show spacial, temporal, and role relations between a noun or pronoun and the other words in a sentence. They come at the start of a prepositional phrase, which contains a preposition and its object. Examples: up, over, against, by, for, into, close to, out of, apart from.

Conjunction

Conjunctions join words, phrases, and clauses in a sentence. There are coordinating, subordinating, and correlative conjunctions. Examples: and, but, or, so, yet, with.

Articles and Determiners

Articles and determiners function like adjectives by modifying nouns, but they are different than adjectives in that they are necessary for a sentence to have proper syntax. Articles and determiners specify and identify nouns, and there are indefinite and definite articles. Examples: articles: a, an, the; determiners: these, that, those, enough, much, few, which, what.

Some traditional grammars have treated articles as a distinct part of speech. Modern grammars, however, more often include articles in the category of determiners, which identify or quantify a noun. Even though they modify nouns like adjectives, articles are different in that they are essential to the proper syntax of a sentence, just as determiners are necessary to convey the meaning of a sentence, while adjectives are optional.

Interjection

Interjections are expressions that can stand on their own or be contained within sentences. These words and phrases often carry strong emotions and convey reactions. Examples: ah, whoops, ouch, yabba dabba do!

How to Determine the Part of Speech

Only interjections (Hooray!) have a habit of standing alone; every other part of speech must be contained within a sentence and some are even required in sentences (nouns and verbs). Other parts of speech come in many varieties and may appear just about anywhere in a sentence.

To know for sure what part of speech a word falls into, look not only at the word itself but also at its meaning, position, and use in a sentence.

For example, in the first sentence below, work functions as a noun; in the second sentence, a verb; and in the third sentence, an adjective:

• Bosco showed up for work two hours late.
  • The noun work is the thing Bosco shows up for.
• He will have to work until midnight.
  • The verb work is the action he must perform.
• His work permit expires next month.
  • The attributive noun [or converted adjective] work modifies the noun permit.

Learning the names and uses of the basic parts of speech is just one way to understand how sentences are constructed.

Dissecting Basic Sentences

To form a basic complete sentence, you only need two elements: a noun (or pronoun standing in for a noun) and a verb. The noun acts as a subject and the verb, by telling what action the subject is taking, acts as the predicate. 

• Birds fly.

In the short sentence above, birds is the noun and fly is the verb. The sentence makes sense and gets the point across.

You can have a sentence with just one word without breaking any sentence formation rules. The short sentence below is complete because it’s a command to an understood «you».

• Go!

Here, the pronoun, standing in for a noun, is implied and acts as the subject. The sentence is really saying, «(You) go!»

Constructing More Complex Sentences

Use more parts of speech to add additional information about what’s happening in a sentence to make it more complex. Take the first sentence from above, for example, and incorporate more information about how and why birds fly.

• Birds fly when migrating before winter.

Birds and fly remain the noun and the verb, but now there is more description. 

When is an adverb that modifies the verb fly. The word before is a little tricky because it can be either a conjunction, preposition, or adverb depending on the context. In this case, it’s a preposition because it’s followed by a noun. This preposition begins an adverbial phrase of time (before winter) that answers the question of when the birds migrate. Before is not a conjunction because it does not connect two clauses.

AN-244

Phrasal Syntax
seminar

Marosán Lajos

Parts of Speech

Tarr Dániel

1995

Parts of Speech

Parts
of Speech are words classified
according to their functions in sentences, for purposes of traditional
grammatical analysis. According to traditional grammars eight parts of speech
are usually identified: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions,
pronouns, verbs, and interjections.

                          
Noun                                    girl, man, dog,
orange, truth …

  
                        Pronoun                               I, she, everyone,
nothing, who …

                          
Verb                                     be, become,
take, look, sing …

                          
Adjective                              small, happy, young,
wooden …

                          
Adverb                                 slowly, very,
here, afterwards, nevertheless

                          
Preposition                           at, in, by, on, for,
with, from, to …

                          
Conjunction                         and, but, because,
although, while …

                          
Interjection                           ouch, oh, alas, grrr,
psst …

Most
of the major language groups spoken today, notably the Indo-European languages
and Semitic languages, use almost the identical categories; Chinese, however,
has fewer parts of speech than English.[1]

The
part of speech classification is the center of all traditional grammars.
Traditional grammars generally provide short definitions for each part of
speech, while many modern grammars, using the same categories, refer to them as
“word-classes” or “form-classes”. To preface our discussion, we will do the
same:

Nouns

A noun
(Latin nomen, “name”) is usually defined as a word denoting a thing, place,
person, quality, or action and functioning in a sentence as the subject or
object of action expressed by a verb or as the object of a preposition. In
modern English, proper nouns, which are always capitalized and denote
individuals and personifications, are distinguished from common nouns. Nouns
and verbs may sometimes take the same form, as in Polynesian languages. Verbal
nouns, or gerunds, combine features of both parts of speech. They occur in the
Semitic and Indo-European languages and in English most commonly with words
ending in -ing.

Nouns
may be inflected to indicate gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), number,
and case. In modern English, however, gender has been eliminated, and
only two forms, singular and plural, indicate number (how many perform or
receive an action). Some languages have three numbers: a singular form
(indicating, for example, one book), a plural form (indicating three or more
books), and a dual form (indicating, specifically, two books). English has
three cases of nouns: nominative (subject), genitive
(possessive), and objective (indicating the relationship between the
noun and other words).

Adjectives

An
adjective is a word that modifies, or qualifies, a noun or pronoun, in
one of three forms of comparative degree: positive (strong, beautiful), comparative
(stronger, more beautiful), or superlative (strongest, most beautiful).
In many languages, the form of an adjective changes to correspond with the
number and gender of the noun or pronoun it modifies.

Adverbs

An
adverb is a word that modifies a verb (he walked slowly), an adjective
(a very good book), or another adverb (he walked very slowly). Adverbs may
indicate place or direction (where, whence), time (ever,
immediately), degree (very, almost), manner (thus, and words
ending in —ly, such as wisely), and belief or doubt (perhaps,
no). Like adjectives, they too may be comparative (wisely, more wisely, most
wisely).

Prepositions

Words
that combine with a noun or pronoun to form a phrase are termed prepositions.
In languages such as Latin or German, they change the form of the noun or
pronoun to the objective case (as in the equivalent of the English
phrase “give to me”), or to the possessive case (as in the phrase “the
roof of the house”).

Conjunctions

Conjunctions are the words that connect sentences, clauses,
phrases, or words, and sometimes paragraphs. Coordinate conjunctions
(and, but, or, however, nevertheless, neither … nor) join independent clauses,
or parts of a sentence; subordinate conjunctions introduce subordinate
clauses (where, when, after, while, because, if, unless, since, whether).

Pronouns

A pronoun
is an identifying word used instead of a noun and inflected in the same way
nouns are. Personal pronouns, in English, are I, you, he/she/it, we, you
(plural), and they. Demonstrative pronouns are thus, that, and such.
Introducing questions, who and which are interrogative pronouns; when
introducing clauses they are called relative pronouns. Indefinite pronouns
are each, either, some, any, many, few, and all.

Verbs

Words
that express some form of action are called verbs. Their inflection,
known as conjugation, is simpler in English than in most other
languages. Conjugation in general involves changes of form according to person
and number (who and how many performed the action), tense (when
the action was performed), voice (indicating whether the subject of the
verb performed or received the action), and mood (indicating the frame
of mind of the performer). In English grammar, verbs have three moods: the indicative,
which expresses actuality; the subjunctive, which expresses contingency;
and the imperative, which expresses command (I walk; I might walk;
Walk!)

Certain
words, derived from verbs but not functioning as such, are called verbals.
In addition to verbal nouns, or gerunds, participles can serve as adjectives
(the written word), and infinitives often serve as nouns (to err is human).

Interjections

Interjections are exclamations such as oh, alas, ugh, or well (often
printed with an exclamation point). Used for emphasis or to express an
emotional reaction, they do not truly function as grammatical elements of a
sentence.[2]

    
It is useful to make a distinction and consider words as falling into two broad
categories; closed
class words and open class words. The former consists of classes that are finite (and
often small) with membership that is relatively stable and unchanging in the
language. These words play a major part in English grammar, often corresponding
to inflections in some other languages, and they are sometimes referred to as
‘grammatical words’, ‘function words’, or ‘structure words’. These terms also
stress their function in the grammatical sense, as structural markers, thus a
determiner typically signals the beginning of a noun phrase, a preposition the
beginning of a prepositional phrase, a conjunction the beginning of a clause. Closed
classes are: pronoun /she, they/, determiner /the, a/, primary
verb /be/, modal verb
/can, might/, preposition /in, of/, and conjunction /and, or/. Open classes are: noun /room, hospital/, adjective /happy, new/, full verb /grow, search/, and adverb /really, steadily/. To these two lesser
categories may be added: numerals /one, first/, and interjections /oh, aha/; and finally a small number of words
of unique function which do not easily fit into any of these classes /eg.: the negative particle not and the infinite
marker to/.

Quirk
and Greenbaum[3]point out the ambiguity of the term word, for
words are enrolled in their classes in their ‘dictionary form’, and not as they
might appear in sentences when they function as constituents of phrases. Since
words in their various grammatical forms appear in sentences that are normal
usage, it is more correct if we refer to them as lexical items. Thus, a lexical item is a word as it occurs in a
dictionary, where work, works, working, worked will all be counted as
different grammatical forms of the word work. This distinction however
is not always necessary, for it is only important with certain parts of speech
that have inflections; that is endings or modifications that change the
word-form into another. These are nouns /answer,
answers/, verbs /give, given/, pronouns /they, theirs/, adjectives
/large, largest/, and a few adverbs
/soon, sooner/ and determiners /few,
fewer/.

A word may belong to more than one class; for example round
is also a preposition /”drive round the corner”/ and an adjective
/”she has a round face”/. In such cases we can say that the same morphological form is a realization of more than one lexical item. A
morphological form may be simple, consisting of a stem only /eg.: play/,
or complex, consisting of more than one morpheme /eg.: playful/. The morphological form of a word is
therefore defined as composition of stems and affixes.

We
assign words to their various classes according to their properties in entering
phrasal or clausal structure. For example, determiners link up with nouns to
form noun phrases /eg.: a soldier/;
and pronouns can replace noun phrases /eg.:
him/. This is not to deny the general validity of traditional
definitions based on meaning. In fact it is impossible to separate grammatical
form from semantic factors. The distinction between generic /the tiger lives/ and specific /these tigers/, unmarked and marked
forms prove that.

Another
possible assignment is according to morphological characteristics, notably the
occurrence of derivational suffixes, which marks a word as a member of a
particular class. For example, the suffix -ness, marks an item as a noun
/kindness/, while the suffix  -less marks an item as an adjective
/helpless/. Such indicators help to identify word classes without
semantic factors.

For
the sake of completeness, it should also be added that a word also has a phonological and an orthographic form. Words which share the same phonological or
orthographic “shape”, but are morphologically unrelated are called homonyms /eg.: rose
(noun) and rose (past tense verb)/. Words with the same pronunciation
are specified as homophones, and words with the same spelling are determined as homographs. Words which partake the same morphological form are
called homomorphs /eg.: meeting
(noun) and meeting (verb)/. There is also a correspondence between words
with different morphological form, but same meaning. These are called synonyms. Of the three major kinds of equivalence, homonymy is
phonological and/or graphic, and synonymy is semantic.

      
We have to go back to the distinction of closed-class items and open-class
items, because this introduces a peculiarity of great importance. That is, closed-class items are ‘closed’ in the sense that they cannot normally
be extended by the creation of additional members. For example, it is very
unlikely for a new pronoun to develop. It is also very easy to list all the
members in a closed class. These items are said to be constitute a system in
being mutually exclusive: the decision to use one item in a given structure
excludes the possibility of using any other /the book or a
book, but not *a the book/. These items are also reciprocally
defining in meaning: it is less easy to state the meaning of any individual
item than to define it in relation to the rest of the system.

By
contrast open
class items belong to a class in that
they have the same grammatical properties and structural possibilities as other
members of the class (that is, as other nouns or verbs or adjectives or
adverbs), but the class is ‘open’ in the sense that it is indefinitely
extendible. New items can be created and no inventory can be made that would be
complete. This ultimately affects the way in which we attempt to define any
item in an open class; because while it is possible to relate the meaning of a
noun to another with which it has semantic affinity /eg.: house = chamber/,
one could not define it as not house, which is possible with closed
class items /this = not that/.

However,
the distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ parts of speech or word classes
must not be treated incautiously. On the on hand, it is not very easy to create
new words, and on the other, we must not overstate the extent to which we speak
of ‘closedness’, for new prepositions like by way of [4]are no means impossible. Although parts of speech have
deceptively specific labels, words tend to be rather heterogeneous. The adverb
and the verb are especially mixed classes, each having small and fairly well
defined groups of closed-system items alongside the indefinitely large
open-class items. So far as the verb is concerned, the closed-system subgroup
is known be the well established term “auxiliary”…

Some
mention must be finally made of two additional classes, numerals and interjections,
which are common in the difficulty of classifying them as either closed or open
classes. Numerals whether the cardinal numerals /one, two, three/,
or the ordinal numerals /first, second, third/, must be placed somewhere
between open-class and closed-class items: they resemble the former in that
they make up a class of infinite membership; but they resemble the latter in
that the semantic relations among them are mutually exclusive and mutually
defining. Interjections might be considered a closed class on the
grounds that those that are fully institutionalized are few in number. But
unlike the closed classes, they are grammatically peripheral — they do not
enter into constructions with other word classes, and they are only loosely
connected to sentences with which they may be orthographically or
phonologically associated.

       
A further and related contrast between words, is the distinction between stative
and dynamic. Broadly speaking, nouns can be characterized naturally
as ‘stative’ in that they refer to entities that are regarded as
stable, whether these are concrete /house, table/ or abstract /hope,
length/. On the other hand verbs and adverbs can equally naturally be
characterized as ‘dynamic’: verbs are fitted to indicate action, activity and
temporary or changing conditions; and adverbs in so far as they add a
particular condition of time, place, manner, etc. to the dynamic implication of
the verb.

But
it is not uncommon to find verbs which may be used either dynamically or
statively. If we say that “some specific tigers are living in a cramped
cage”, we imply that this is a temporary condition and the verb phrase is dynamic
in its use. On the other hand, when we say that “a species of animal known as
tiger lives in China”, the generic statement entails that this is not a
temporary circumstance and the verb phrase is stative. Moreover some verbs
cannot normally be used with the progressive aspect /*He is knowing English/
and therefore belong to the stative rather than the dynamic category. In
contrast to verbs, most nouns and adjectives are stative in that they denote a
phenomena or quality that is regarded for linguistic purposes as stable and
indeed for all practical purposes permanent /Jack is an engineer — Jack
is very tall/. Also adjectives can resemble verbs in referring to
transitionary conditions of behavior or activity. /He is being a nuisance
— He is being naughty/.

       
The names of the parts of speech are traditional, however, and neither in
themselves nor in relation to each other do these names give a safe guide to
their meaning, which instead is best understood in terms of their grammatical
properties. One fundamental relation is that grammar provides the means of
referring back to an expression without repeating it. This is achieved by means
of pro-forms. Participles and pronouns can serve
as replacements for a noun /the big
room and the small one/, more
usually, however, pronouns replace noun phrases rather than nouns /their beautiful new car was badly damaged when it was struck be a
falling tree/.

The
relationship which often obtains between a pronoun and its antecedent is not
one which can be explained by the simple act of replacement. In some
constructions we have repetition, which are by no means equivalent in meaning /Many students
did better than many students expected/. In some constructions repetition can be avoided by ellipsis /They hoped they would play a Mozart quartet and
they will/. Therefore the general term
pro-form is best applied to words and word sequences which are essentially
devices for rephrasing or anticipating the content of a neighboring expression,
often with the effect of grammatical complexity.

Such
devices are not limited to pronouns and participles: the word such can
described as a pro-form as there are pro-forms also for place, time and other
adverbials under certain circumstances /M.is
in London and J. is there too/.
In older English and still sometimes in very formal English we find thus and so
used as pro-forms for adverbials /He
often behaved silly, but he did not always behave thus/so/. But so has a more important function in
modern usage, namely to substitute with the ‘pro-verb’ do for a main
verb and whatever follows it in the clause /He
wished they would take him seriously for his ideas, but unfortunately
they didn’t do so/. Do can also
act as pro-form on its own /I told him
about it — I did too/.

Some
pro-forms can refer forward to what not been stated rather than back to what
has been stated. These are the wh-items. Indeed, wh-words,
including what, which, who and when, may be
regarded as a special set of pro-forms /Where is M.? — M. is in London. — J. is there too/. The paraphrase for wh-words is broad enough
to explain also their use in subordinate clauses /I wonder what M. thinks/. Through the use of wh-words we can ask for
the identification of subject, object, complement or adverbial of a sentence /They [S] make [V] him [O] the chairman [C] every year
[A]. — Who [S] makes him…?/.

         
Now that we have outlined the various aspects of Parts of Speech, according to
traditional grammars, we will look at some other approaches and other
specifications, without the sake of complexity, only to widen our views a
little more on the subject:

     
Otto Jespersen[5]starts out from the point that all clauses consist of
several words. One word is defined or modified by another word, which in turn
may be defined or modified by a third word. This leads to the establishment of
different ranks of words according to their mutual relations as defined or
defining. In the combination “extremely hot weather” weather may
be called a primary word or principal; hot
is a secondary word or
adjunct; and extremely is a
tertiary word or subjunct. Primary and secondary words are superior in relation to tertiary words; secondary and tertiary
words are inferior in relation to primary words. It is therefore
possible to have two or more (coordinate) adjuncts to the same principal /that
nice [A] young [A] lady [P]/.

The
logical basis of this system of subordination is the greater or lesser degree
of specialization. Primary words are more special (apply to a smaller number of individuals) than secondary
words, and these in their turn are less general than tertiary words. The word
defined by another word, is in itself always more special than the word
defining it, though the latter serves to render the former more special than it
is in itself. Thus in the sentence “very clever student”, student
is the most special idea, whereas clever can be applied to many more
men, and very, which indicates only a high degree, can be applied any
idea. Student is more special than clever, though clever
student is more special than student; clever is more special
than very, though very clever is more special than clever.

It
is a natural consequence of these definitions that proper nouns can only be
used as principals, and while there are thus some words that can only stand as
principals as expressing highly specialized ideas, there are other words that
may be either primary and secondary words in different combinations /conservative Liberals — liberal Conservatives/. Further there are words of such general signification
that they can never be used as primary words, like the articles.

His
further definitions of parts of speech fall under the categories of substantives (=principals), adjectives
(=adjuncts), adverbs (=subjuncts), verbs
(=verbs not subject to conjugation), verbids
(=participles and infinitives), predicatives (=‘mediate adjuncts’; {most commonly}a verb connecting two ideas in
such a way that the second becomes a kind of adjunct to the first (the
object)./Eg.: the rose is red/), objects (=primary words, but more special as well as more
general than the first principal /eg.: an owl sees a  bird/.), and pronouns
(= a separate “parts of speech”, understood differently according to the
situation in which they are used).

       
Lyons[6]
starts out from distinguishing formal
and nominal definitions. Nominal definitions of the parts of
speech may be used to determine the names, though not the membership, of the
major syntactic classes of English. Creating syntactic classes on ‘formal’
distributional grounds, with all the members of each of them listed in the
lexicon, associated with the grammar, will mean that though not all members of
class X will denote persons, places and things; most of the lexical items which
refer to persons, places and things will fall within it; and if this is so we
may call X the class of nouns. In other words we have ‘formal’ class X and
‘notional’ class A; they are not co-extensive, but if A is wholly or mainly
included in X, then X may be given the label suggested by the ‘notional’ definition
of A.

He
also points out the necessity of considering the distinction between deep and
surface structure and define parts of speech not as classes of words in
surface structure, but as deep-structure constituents of sentences. The
distinction between deep and surface structures is not made explicitly in
traditional grammar, but it is implied by the assumption that all clauses and
phrases are derived from simple, modally ‘unmarked’ sentences. It is asserted
that every simple sentence is made up of two parts: a subject and a predicate. The subject is necessarily a noun (or a pronoun standing for a noun).
The predicate falls into one of three types according to the part of speech
which occurs in it: 1. intransitive verb, 2. transitive verb with its object,
3. the ‘verb to be’ with its complement. The object, like the
subject, must be a noun, while the complement must either be an adjective, or a
noun.

Deriving
from these associations with particular parts of speech it is possible to
determine traditional parts of speech or their function solely on the basis of
constituent-structure relations. The class of nouns is the one constituent
class which all sentences have in common at the highest level of constituent
structure. The class of intransitive verbs is the only class which combines
directly with nouns to form sentences. The class of transitive verbs combine
with nouns and with no other class to form predicates. Be is the
copula-class, since it combines with both nouns and the class of adjectives.
This argument rests of course on the specific assumptions incorporated in the
syntactic function of the parts of speech; namely the status of the copula or
‘verb to be’, and the universality of the distinction between verbs and
adjectives.

‘To
be’ is not itself a constituent of deep structure, but a semantically-empty
“dummy verb” generated for the specification of certain distinctions (usually
carried by the verb) when there is no other verbal element to carry these
distinctions. Sentences that are temporally, modally and aspectually unmarked
do not need the dummy carrier /M. is clever/. As for the distinction
between verbs and adjectives it is traditionally referred to as to do with the
surface phenomenon of inflection. The adjective, when it occurs in predicative
position, does not take the verbal suffixes associated with distinctions of
tense, mood and aspect, but instead a dummy verb is generated by the grammar to
carry the necessary inflexional suffixes /M. is clever — *M. is
clever-s/. The verb is less freely transformed
to the position of modifier in the noun-phrase; but when it occurs in this
syntactic position, unlike the adjective, it bears the suffix -ing /the clever man — the singing man — *the clever-ing man/. A distinction between stative verbs and verbs of action is also relevant to English. Stative verbs do not
normally occur in the progressive form, while the majority of English verbs,
which occur freely in the progressive are called verbs of action. This
aspectual difference is matched by a similar difference in English adjectives.
Most adjectives are stative, in the sense that they do not normally take
progressive aspect when they occur in predicative position /M. is clever — *M. is being clever/, but there are a number of adjectives which occur
freely with the progressive in the appropriate circumstances /M. is being silly now/. In other words, to be stative is normal for the
class of adjectives, but abnormal for the verbs; to be non-stative is normal
for verbs, but abnormal for adjectives. It is, however, the aspectual contrast
which correlates with the notional definition of the verb and the adjective in
terms of “action” and “quality”.

          
To follow this argument Huddleston[7]points
out that nothing said about inflection requires that all the forms of a lexeme
should belong to the same part of speech. The main problem area concerns the
traditional non-finite forms of verb lexemes, participles, the gerund and the
infinitive. A participle is said to be a “verbal adjective”, while the gerund
and the infinitive are “verbal nouns”. According to traditional doctrine, a
gerund like writing in She likes writing letters is a noun
because it is the object of the verb like. This would lead traditional
grammarians to classify together as nouns words which are syntactically very
different. /Eg.: Writing the
letters took some time — The writing of the letters took some time/. Instead of saying that both are nouns because they
are subject of took, he suggests that we call writing a verb in the
former case, because it is the head of the extended verb phrase, and call it a
noun in the latter case, because it is a head of the noun phrase. Since the
relation between this later type of noun writing and the stem write
is lexical rather than inflectional, he calls this a “deverbal noun”, for it is
derived by a lexical-morphological process from a verb stem.

The
second problem area concerns possessives. In the traditional treatment of forms
like John’s in John’s book is regarded as an inflectional form of
the noun John but is also said to have the force of an adjective. This
is easily resolved in the light of the analyses of ‘s as a clitic rather
than an inflexional suffix: John’s is not syntactically a single word,
not a form of John, so that the issue of whether a lexeme and a member
of its paradigm belong to the same parts of speech does not arise.

References

Huddleston,
R. —
Introduction to the grammar of English .

                               
[ Cambridge University Press, 1984 ].

Jespersen,
O. —
Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles . (Vol. II.)

                               
[ Allen and Unwin, 1954, London ].

Lyons — Introduction
to Theoretical Linguistics .

                               
[ Cambridge University Press, 1968 ].

Mc
Cawley, J.D.
— The Syntactic Phenomena of English .

                               
[ The University of Chicago Press, 1988 ].

Quirk
& Greenbaum
— A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language .

                               
[Longman, 1983, London ].

Quirk
& Greenbaum
— A University Grammar of English .

                               
[ Longman, 1973 ].

Quirk
& Greenbaum
— A Student’s Grammar of the English Language .

                               
[ Longman, 1991 ].

Microsoft
(R) Encarta. 1994 Microsoft Corporation.

                               
[ Funk & Wagnall’s Corp., 1994 ].

In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class^[1] or grammatical category^[2]) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior (they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences), sometimes similar morphological behavior in that they undergo inflection for similar properties and even similar semantic behavior. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, numeral, article, and determiner.

Other terms than part of speech—particularly in modern linguistic classifications, which often make more precise distinctions than the traditional scheme does—include word class, lexical class, and lexical category. Some authors restrict the term lexical category to refer only to a particular type of syntactic category; for them the term excludes those parts of speech that are considered to be function words, such as pronouns. The term form class is also used, although this has various conflicting definitions.^[3] Word classes may be classified as open or closed: open classes (typically including nouns, verbs and adjectives) acquire new members constantly, while closed classes (such as pronouns and conjunctions) acquire new members infrequently, if at all.

Almost all languages have the word classes noun and verb, but beyond these two there are significant variations among different languages.^[4] For example:

• Japanese has as many as three classes of adjectives, where English has one.
• Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese have a class of nominal classifiers.
• Many languages do not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, or between adjectives and verbs (see stative verb).

Because of such variation in the number of categories and their identifying properties, analysis of parts of speech must be done for each individual language. Nevertheless, the labels for each category are assigned on the basis of universal criteria.^[4]

History[edit]

The classification of words into lexical categories is found from the earliest moments in the history of linguistics.^[5]

India[edit]

In the Nirukta, written in the 6th or 5th century BCE, the Sanskrit grammarian Yāska defined four main categories of words:^[6]

1. नाम nāma – noun (including adjective)
2. आख्यात ākhyāta – verb
3. उपसर्ग upasarga – pre-verb or prefix
4. निपात nipāta – particle, invariant word (perhaps preposition)

These four were grouped into two larger classes: inflectable (nouns and verbs) and uninflectable (pre-verbs and particles).

The ancient work on the grammar of the Tamil language, Tolkāppiyam, argued to have been written around 2nd century CE,^[7] classifies Tamil words as peyar (பெயர்; noun), vinai (வினை; verb), idai (part of speech which modifies the relationships between verbs and nouns), and uri (word that further qualifies a noun or verb).^[8]

Western tradition[edit]

A century or two after the work of Yāska, the Greek scholar Plato wrote in his Cratylus dialogue, «sentences are, I conceive, a combination of verbs [rhêma] and nouns [ónoma]».^[9] Aristotle added another class, «conjunction» [sýndesmos], which included not only the words known today as conjunctions, but also other parts (the interpretations differ; in one interpretation it is pronouns, prepositions, and the article).^[10]

By the end of the 2nd century BCE, grammarians had expanded this classification scheme into eight categories, seen in the Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax:^[11]

1. ‘Name’ (ónoma) translated as «Noun«: a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a concrete or abstract entity. It includes various species like nouns, adjectives, proper nouns, appellatives, collectives, ordinals, numerals and more.^[12]
2. Verb (rhêma): a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone
3. Participle (metokhḗ): a part of speech sharing features of the verb and the noun
4. Article (árthron): a declinable part of speech, taken to include the definite article, but also the basic relative pronoun
5. Pronoun (antōnymíā): a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for a person
6. Preposition (próthesis): a part of speech placed before other words in composition and in syntax
7. Adverb (epírrhēma): a part of speech without inflection, in modification of or in addition to a verb, adjective, clause, sentence, or other adverb
8. Conjunction (sýndesmos): a part of speech binding together the discourse and filling gaps in its interpretation

It can be seen that these parts of speech are defined by morphological, syntactic and semantic criteria.

The Latin grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 CE) modified the above eightfold system, excluding «article» (since the Latin language, unlike Greek, does not have articles) but adding «interjection».^[13][14]

The Latin names for the parts of speech, from which the corresponding modern English terms derive, were nomen, verbum, participium, pronomen, praepositio, adverbium, conjunctio and interjectio. The category nomen included substantives (nomen substantivum, corresponding to what are today called nouns in English), adjectives (nomen adjectivum) and numerals (nomen numerale). This is reflected in the older English terminology noun substantive, noun adjective and noun numeral. Later^[15] the adjective became a separate class, as often did the numerals, and the English word noun came to be applied to substantives only.

Classification[edit]

Works of English grammar generally follow the pattern of the European tradition as described above, except that participles are now usually regarded as forms of verbs rather than as a separate part of speech, and numerals are often conflated with other parts of speech: nouns (cardinal numerals, e.g., «one», and collective numerals, e.g., «dozen»), adjectives (ordinal numerals, e.g., «first», and multiplier numerals, e.g., «single») and adverbs (multiplicative numerals, e.g., «once», and distributive numerals, e.g., «singly»). Eight or nine parts of speech are commonly listed:

1. noun
2. verb
3. adjective
4. adverb
5. pronoun
6. preposition
7. conjunction
8. interjection
9. article* or (more recently) determiner

Additionally, there are other parts of speech including particles (yes, no)^[a] and postpositions (ago, notwithstanding) although many fewer words are in these categories.

Some traditional classifications consider articles to be adjectives, yielding eight parts of speech rather than nine. And some modern classifications define further classes in addition to these. For discussion see the sections below.

The classification below, or slight expansions of it, is still followed in most dictionaries:

Noun (names)

a word or lexical item denoting any abstract (abstract noun: e.g. home) or concrete entity (concrete noun: e.g. house); a person (police officer, Michael), place (coastline, London), thing (necktie, television), idea (happiness), or quality (bravery). Nouns can also be classified as count nouns or non-count nouns; some can belong to either category. The most common part of speech; they are called naming words.

Pronoun (replaces or places again)

a substitute for a noun or noun phrase (them, he). Pronouns make sentences shorter and clearer since they replace nouns.

Adjective (describes, limits)

a modifier of a noun or pronoun (big, brave). Adjectives make the meaning of another word (noun) more precise.

Verb (states action or being)

a word denoting an action (walk), occurrence (happen), or state of being (be). Without a verb, a group of words cannot be a clause or sentence.

Adverb (describes, limits)

a modifier of an adjective, verb, or another adverb (very, quite). Adverbs make language more precise.

Preposition (relates)

a word that relates words to each other in a phrase or sentence and aids in syntactic context (in, of). Prepositions show the relationship between a noun or a pronoun with another word in the sentence.

Conjunction (connects)

a syntactic connector; links words, phrases, or clauses (and, but). Conjunctions connect words or group of words

Interjection (expresses feelings and emotions)

an emotional greeting or exclamation (Huzzah, Alas). Interjections express strong feelings and emotions.

Article (describes, limits)

a grammatical marker of definiteness (the) or indefiniteness (a, an). The article is not always listed among the parts of speech. It is considered by some grammarians to be a type of adjective^[16] or sometimes the term ‘determiner’ (a broader class) is used.

English words are not generally marked as belonging to one part of speech or another; this contrasts with many other European languages, which use inflection more extensively, meaning that a given word form can often be identified as belonging to a particular part of speech and having certain additional grammatical properties. In English, most words are uninflected, while the inflected endings that exist are mostly ambiguous: -ed may mark a verbal past tense, a participle or a fully adjectival form; -s may mark a plural noun, a possessive noun, or a present-tense verb form; -ing may mark a participle, gerund, or pure adjective or noun. Although -ly is a frequent adverb marker, some adverbs (e.g. tomorrow, fast, very) do not have that ending, while many adjectives do have it (e.g. friendly, ugly, lovely), as do occasional words in other parts of speech (e.g. jelly, fly, rely).

Many English words can belong to more than one part of speech. Words like neigh, break, outlaw, laser, microwave, and telephone might all be either verbs or nouns. In certain circumstances, even words with primarily grammatical functions can be used as verbs or nouns, as in, «We must look to the hows and not just the whys.» The process whereby a word comes to be used as a different part of speech is called conversion or zero derivation.

Functional classification[edit]

Linguists recognize that the above list of eight or nine word classes is drastically simplified.^[17] For example, «adverb» is to some extent a catch-all class that includes words with many different functions. Some have even argued that the most basic of category distinctions, that of nouns and verbs, is unfounded,^[18] or not applicable to certain languages.^[19][20] Modern linguists have proposed many different schemes whereby the words of English or other languages are placed into more specific categories and subcategories based on a more precise understanding of their grammatical functions.

Common lexical category set defined by function may include the following (not all of them will necessarily be applicable in a given language):

• Categories that will usually be open classes:
  • adjectives
  • adverbs
  • nouns
  • verbs (except auxiliary verbs)
  • interjections
• Categories that will usually be closed classes:
  • auxiliary verbs
  • clitics
  • coverbs
  • conjunctions
  • determiners (articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
  • particles
  • measure words or classifiers
  • adpositions (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
  • preverbs
  • pronouns
  • contractions
  • cardinal numbers

Within a given category, subgroups of words may be identified based on more precise grammatical properties. For example, verbs may be specified according to the number and type of objects or other complements which they take. This is called subcategorization.

Many modern descriptions of grammar include not only lexical categories or word classes, but also phrasal categories, used to classify phrases, in the sense of groups of words that form units having specific grammatical functions. Phrasal categories may include noun phrases (NP), verb phrases (VP) and so on. Lexical and phrasal categories together are called syntactic categories.

Open and closed classes[edit]

Word classes may be either open or closed. An open class is one that commonly accepts the addition of new words, while a closed class is one to which new items are very rarely added. Open classes normally contain large numbers of words, while closed classes are much smaller. Typical open classes found in English and many other languages are nouns, verbs (excluding auxiliary verbs, if these are regarded as a separate class), adjectives, adverbs and interjections. Ideophones are often an open class, though less familiar to English speakers,^[21][22][b] and are often open to nonce words. Typical closed classes are prepositions (or postpositions), determiners, conjunctions, and pronouns.^[24]

The open–closed distinction is related to the distinction between lexical and functional categories, and to that between content words and function words, and some authors consider these identical, but the connection is not strict. Open classes are generally lexical categories in the stricter sense, containing words with greater semantic content,^[25] while closed classes are normally functional categories, consisting of words that perform essentially grammatical functions. This is not universal: in many languages verbs and adjectives^[26][27][28] are closed classes, usually consisting of few members, and in Japanese the formation of new pronouns from existing nouns is relatively common, though to what extent these form a distinct word class is debated.

Words are added to open classes through such processes as compounding, derivation, coining, and borrowing. When a new word is added through some such process, it can subsequently be used grammatically in sentences in the same ways as other words in its class.^[29] A closed class may obtain new items through these same processes, but such changes are much rarer and take much more time. A closed class is normally seen as part of the core language and is not expected to change. In English, for example, new nouns, verbs, etc. are being added to the language constantly (including by the common process of verbing and other types of conversion, where an existing word comes to be used in a different part of speech). However, it is very unusual for a new pronoun, for example, to become accepted in the language, even in cases where there may be felt to be a need for one, as in the case of gender-neutral pronouns.

The open or closed status of word classes varies between languages, even assuming that corresponding word classes exist. Most conspicuously, in many languages verbs and adjectives form closed classes of content words. An extreme example is found in Jingulu, which has only three verbs, while even the modern Indo-European Persian has no more than a few hundred simple verbs, a great deal of which are archaic. (Some twenty Persian verbs are used as light verbs to form compounds; this lack of lexical verbs is shared with other Iranian languages.) Japanese is similar, having few lexical verbs.^[30] Basque verbs are also a closed class, with the vast majority of verbal senses instead expressed periphrastically.

In Japanese, verbs and adjectives are closed classes,^[31] though these are quite large, with about 700 adjectives,^[32][33] and verbs have opened slightly in recent years. Japanese adjectives are closely related to verbs (they can predicate a sentence, for instance). New verbal meanings are nearly always expressed periphrastically by appending suru (する, to do) to a noun, as in undō suru (運動する, to (do) exercise), and new adjectival meanings are nearly always expressed by adjectival nouns, using the suffix -na (〜な) when an adjectival noun modifies a noun phrase, as in hen-na ojisan (変なおじさん, strange man). The closedness of verbs has weakened in recent years, and in a few cases new verbs are created by appending -ru (〜る) to a noun or using it to replace the end of a word. This is mostly in casual speech for borrowed words, with the most well-established example being sabo-ru (サボる, cut class; play hooky), from sabotāju (サボタージュ, sabotage).^[34] This recent innovation aside, the huge contribution of Sino-Japanese vocabulary was almost entirely borrowed as nouns (often verbal nouns or adjectival nouns). Other languages where adjectives are closed class include Swahili,^[28] Bemba, and Luganda.

By contrast, Japanese pronouns are an open class and nouns become used as pronouns with some frequency; a recent example is jibun (自分, self), now used by some young men as a first-person pronoun. The status of Japanese pronouns as a distinct class is disputed,^{[by whom?]} however, with some considering it only a use of nouns, not a distinct class. The case is similar in languages of Southeast Asia, including Thai and Lao, in which, like Japanese, pronouns and terms of address vary significantly based on relative social standing and respect.^[35]

Some word classes are universally closed, however, including demonstratives and interrogative words.^[35]

See also[edit]

• Part-of-speech tagging
• Sliding window based part-of-speech tagging

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Media related to Parts of speech at Wikimedia Commons
• The parts of speech
• Guide to Grammar and Writing
• Martin Haspelmath. 2001. «Word Classes and Parts of Speech.» In: Baltes, Paul B. & Smelser, Neil J. (eds.) International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Pergamon, 16538–16545. (PDF)