Word class and function

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Words don’t only mean something; they also do something. In the English language, words are grouped into word classes based on their function, i.e. what they do in a phrase or sentence. In total, there are nine word classes in English.

Word class meaning and example

All words can be categorised into classes within a language based on their function and purpose.

An example of various word classes is ‘The cat ate a cupcake quickly.’

  • The = a determiner

  • cat = a noun

  • ate = a verb

  • a = determiner

  • cupcake = noun

  • quickly = an adverb

Word class function

The function of a word class, also known as a part of speech, is to classify words according to their grammatical properties and the roles they play in sentences. By assigning words to different word classes, we can understand how they should be used in context and how they relate to other words in a sentence.

Each word class has its own unique set of characteristics and rules for usage, and understanding the function of word classes is essential for effective communication in English. Knowing our word classes allows us to create clear and grammatically correct sentences that convey our intended meaning.

Word classes in English

In English, there are four main word classes; nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. These are considered lexical words, and they provide the main meaning of a phrase or sentence.

The other five word classes are; prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and interjections. These are considered functional words, and they provide structural and relational information in a sentence or phrase.

Don’t worry if it sounds a bit confusing right now. Read ahead and you’ll be a master of the different types of word classes in no time!

All word classes Definition Examples of word classification
Noun A word that represents a person, place, thing, or idea. cat, house, plant
Pronoun A word that is used in place of a noun to avoid repetition. he, she, they, it
Verb A word that expresses action, occurrence, or state of being. run, sing, grow
Adjective A word that describes or modifies a noun or pronoun. blue, tall, happy
Adverb A word that describes or modifies a verb, adjective, or other adverb. quickly, very
Preposition A word that shows the relationship between a noun or pronoun and other words in a sentence. in, on, at
Conjunction A word that connects words, phrases, or clauses. and, or, but
Interjection A word that expresses strong emotions or feelings. wow, oh, ouch
Determiners A word that clarifies information about the quantity, location, or ownership of the noun Articles like ‘the’ and ‘an’, and quantifiers like ‘some’ and ‘all’.

The four main word classes

In the English language, there are four main word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Let’s look at all the word classes in detail.

Nouns

Nouns are the words we use to describe people, places, objects, feelings, concepts, etc. Usually, nouns are tangible (touchable) things, such as a table, a person, or a building.

However, we also have abstract nouns, which are things we can feel and describe but can’t necessarily see or touch, such as love, honour, or excitement. Proper nouns are the names we give to specific and official people, places, or things, such as England, Claire, or Hoover.

Cat

House

School

Britain

Harry

Book

Hatred

‘My sister went to school.

Verbs

Verbs are words that show action, event, feeling, or state of being. This can be a physical action or event, or it can be a feeling that is experienced.

Lexical verbs are considered one of the four main word classes, and auxiliary verbs are not. Lexical verbs are the main verb in a sentence that shows action, event, feeling, or state of being, such as walk, ran, felt, and want, whereas an auxiliary verb helps the main verb and expresses grammatical meaning, such as has, is, and do.

Run

Walk

Swim

Curse

Wish

Help

Leave

‘She wished for a sunny day.’

Adjectives

Adjectives are words used to modify nouns, usually by describing them. Adjectives describe an attribute, quality, or state of being of the noun.

Long

Short

Friendly

Broken

Loud

Embarrassed

Dull

Boring

‘The friendly woman wore a beautiful dress.’

Word class, Image of woman in dress, StudySmarterFig 1. Adjectives can describe the woman and the dress

Adverbs

Adverbs are words that work alongside verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. They provide further descriptions of how, where, when, and how often something is done.

Quickly

Softly

Very

More

Too

Loudly

The music was too loud.’

All of the above examples are lexical word classes and carry most of the meaning in a sentence. They make up the majority of the words in the English language.

The other five word classes

The other five remaining word classes are; prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and interjections. These words are considered functional words and are used to explain grammatical and structural relationships between words.

For example, prepositions can be used to explain where one object is in relation to another.

Prepositions

Prepositions are used to show the relationship between words in terms of place, time, direction, and agency.

In

At

On

Towards

To

Through

Into

By

With

They went through the tunnel.’

Pronouns

Pronouns take the place of a noun or a noun phrase in a sentence. They often refer to a noun that has already been mentioned and are commonly used to avoid repetition.

Chloe (noun) → she (pronoun)

Chloe’s dog → her dog (possessive pronoun)

There are several different types of pronouns; let’s look at some examples of each.

  • He, she, it, they — personal pronouns
  • His, hers, its, theirs, mine, ours — possessive pronouns
  • Himself, herself, myself, ourselves, themselves — reflexive pronouns
  • This, that, those, these — demonstrative pronouns
  • Anyone, somebody, everyone, anything, something — Indefinite pronouns
  • Which, what, that, who, who — Relative pronouns

She sat on the chair which was broken.’

Determiners

Determiners work alongside nouns to clarify information about the quantity, location, or ownership of the noun. It ‘determines’ exactly what is being referred to. Much like pronouns, there are also several different types of determiners.

  • The, a, an — articles
  • This, that, those — you might recognise these for demonstrative pronouns are also determiners
  • One, two, three etc. — cardinal numbers
  • First, second, third etc. — ordinal numbers
  • Some, most, all — quantifiers
  • Other, another — difference words

The first restaurant is better than the other.’

Conjunctions

Conjunctions are words that connect other words, phrases, and clauses together within a sentence. There are three main types of conjunctions;

  • Coordinating conjunctions — these link independent clauses together.

  • Subordinating conjunctions — these link dependent clauses to independent clauses.

  • Correlative conjunctions — words that work in pairs to join two parts of a sentence of equal importance.

For, and, nor, but, or, yet, so — coordinating conjunctions

After, as, because, when, while, before, if, even though — subordinating conjunctions

Either/or, neither/nor, both/and — correlative conjunctions

If it rains, I’m not going out.’

Interjections

Interjections are exclamatory words used to express an emotion or a reaction. They often stand alone from the rest of the sentence and are accompanied by an exclamation mark.

Oh

Oops!

Phew!

Ahh!

Oh, what a surprise!’

Word class: lexical classes and function classes

A helpful way to understand lexical word classes is to see them as the building blocks of sentences. If the lexical word classes are the blocks themselves, then the function word classes are the cement holding the words together and giving structure to the sentence.

Word class, lexical class, functional class, StudySmarterFig 2. Lexical and functional word classes

In this diagram, the lexical classes are in blue and the function classes are in yellow. We can see that the words in blue provide the key information, and the words in yellow bring this information together in a structured way.

Word class examples

Sometimes it can be tricky to know exactly which word class a word belongs to. Some words can function as more than one word class depending on how they are used in a sentence. For this reason, we must look at words in context, i.e. how a word works within the sentence. Take a look at the following examples of word classes to see the importance of word class categorisation.

The dog will bark if you open the door.

The tree bark was dark and rugged.

Here we can see that the same word (bark) has a different meaning and different word class in each sentence. In the first example, ‘bark’ is used as a verb, and in the second as a noun (an object in this case).

I left my sunglasses on the beach.

The horse stood on Sarah’s left foot.

In the first sentence, the word ‘left’ is used as a verb (an action), and in the second, it is used to modify the noun (foot). In this case, it is an adjective.

I run every day

I went for a run

In this example, ‘run’ can be a verb or a noun.

Word Class — Key takeaways

  • We group words into word classes based on the function they perform in a sentence.

  • The four main word classes are nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. These are lexical classes that give meaning to a sentence.

  • The other five word classes are prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and interjections. These are function classes that are used to explain grammatical and structural relationships between words.

  • It is important to look at the context of a sentence in order to work out which word class a word belongs to.

Frequently Asked Questions about Word Class

A word class is a group of words that have similar properties and play a similar role in a sentence.

Some examples of how some words can function as more than one word class include the way ‘run’ can be a verb (‘I run every day’) or a noun (‘I went for a run’). Similarly, ‘well’ can be an adverb (‘He plays the guitar well’) or an adjective (‘She’s feeling well today’). 

The nine word classes are; Nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, interjections.

Categorising words into word classes helps us to understand the function the word is playing within a sentence.

Parts of speech is another term for word classes.

The different groups of word classes include lexical classes that act as the building blocks of a sentence e.g. nouns. The other word classes are function classes that act as the ‘glue’ and give grammatical information in a sentence e.g. prepositions.

The word classes for all, that, and the is:
‘All’ = determiner (quantifier)
‘That’ = pronoun and/or determiner (demonstrative pronoun)
‘The’ = determiner (article)

Final Word Class Quiz

Word Class Quiz — Teste dein Wissen

Question

A word can only belong to one type of noun. True or false?

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Answer

This is false. A word can belong to multiple categories of nouns and this may change according to the context of the word.

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Question

Name the two principal categories of nouns.

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Answer

The two principal types of nouns are ‘common nouns’ and ‘proper nouns’.

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Question

Which of the following is an example of a proper noun?

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Question

Name the 6 types of common nouns discussed in the text.

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Answer

Concrete nouns, abstract nouns, countable nouns, uncountable nouns, collective nouns, and compound nouns.

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Question

What is the difference between a concrete noun and an abstract noun?

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Answer

A concrete noun is a thing that physically exists. We can usually touch this thing and measure its proportions. An abstract noun, however, does not physically exist. It is a concept, idea, or feeling that only exists within the mind.

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Question

Pick out the concrete noun from the following:

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Question

Pick out the abstract noun from the following:

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Question

What is the difference between a countable and an uncountable noun? Can you think of an example for each?

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Answer

A countable noun is a thing that can be ‘counted’, i.e. it can exist in the plural. Some examples include ‘bottle’, ‘dog’ and ‘boy’. These are often concrete nouns. 

An uncountable noun is something that can not be counted, so you often cannot place a number in front of it. Examples include ‘love’, ‘joy’, and ‘milk’.

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Question

Pick out the collective noun from the following:

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Question

What is the collective noun for a group of sheep?

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Answer

The collective noun is a ‘flock’, as in ‘flock of sheep’.

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Question

The word ‘greenhouse’ is a compound noun. True or false?

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Answer

This is true. The word ‘greenhouse’ is a compound noun as it is made up of two separate words ‘green’ and ‘house’. These come together to form a new word.

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Question

What are the adjectives in this sentence?: ‘The little boy climbed up the big, green tree’

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Answer

The adjectives are ‘little’ and ‘big’, and ‘green’ as they describe features about the nouns.

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Question

Place the adjectives in this sentence into the correct order: the wooden blue big ship sailed across the Indian vast scary ocean.

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Answer

The big, blue, wooden ship sailed across the vast, scary, Indian ocean.

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Question

What are the 3 different positions in which an adjective can be placed?

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Answer

An adjective can be placed before a noun (pre-modification), after a noun (post-modification), or following a verb as a complement.

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Question

In this sentence, does the adjective pre-modify or post-modify the noun? ‘The unicorn is angry’.

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Answer

The adjective ‘angry’ post-modifies the noun ‘unicorn’.

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Question

In this sentence, does the adjective pre-modify or post-modify the noun? ‘It is a scary unicorn’.

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Answer

The adjective ‘scary’ pre-modifies the noun ‘unicorn’.

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Question

What kind of adjectives are ‘purple’ and ‘shiny’?

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Answer

‘Purple’ and ‘Shiny’ are qualitative adjectives as they describe a quality or feature of a noun

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Question

What kind of adjectives are ‘ugly’ and ‘easy’?

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Answer

The words ‘ugly’ and ‘easy’ are evaluative adjectives as they give a subjective opinion on the noun.

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Question

Which of the following adjectives is an absolute adjective?

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Question

Which of these adjectives is a classifying adjective?

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Question

Convert the noun ‘quick’ to its comparative form.

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Answer

The comparative form of ‘quick’ is ‘quicker’.

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Question

Convert the noun ‘slow’ to its superlative form.

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Answer

The comparative form of ‘slow’ is ‘slowest’.

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Question

What is an adjective phrase?

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Answer

An adjective phrase is a group of words that is ‘built’ around the adjective (it takes centre stage in the sentence). For example, in the phrase ‘the dog is big’ the word ‘big’ is the most important information.

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Question

Give 2 examples of suffixes that are typical of adjectives.

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Answer

Suffixes typical of adjectives include -able, -ible, -ful, -y, -less, -ous, -some, -ive, -ish, -al.

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Question

What is the difference between a main verb and an auxiliary verb?

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Answer

A main verb is a verb that can stand on its own and carries most of the meaning in a verb phrase. For example, ‘run’, ‘find’. Auxiliary verbs cannot stand alone, instead, they work alongside a main verb and ‘help’ the verb to express more grammatical information e.g. tense, mood, possibility.

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Question

What is the difference between a primary auxiliary verb and a modal auxiliary verb?

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Answer

Primary auxiliary verbs consist of the various forms of ‘to have’, ‘to be’, and ‘to do’ e.g. ‘had’, ‘was’, ‘done’. They help to express a verb’s tense, voice, or mood. Modal auxiliary verbs show possibility, ability, permission, or obligation. There are 9 auxiliary verbs including ‘could’, ‘will’, might’.

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Question

Which of the following are primary auxiliary verbs?

  • Is

  • Play

  • Have

  • Run

  • Does

  • Could

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Answer

The primary auxiliary verbs in this list are ‘is’, ‘have’, and ‘does’. They are all forms of the main primary auxiliary verbs ‘to have’, ‘to be’, and ‘to do’. ‘Play’ and ‘run’ are main verbs and ‘could’ is a modal auxiliary verb.

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Question

Name 6 out of the 9 modal auxiliary verbs.

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Answer

Answers include: Could, would, should, may, might, can, will, must, shall

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Question

‘The fairies were asleep’. In this sentence, is the verb ‘were’ a linking verb or an auxiliary verb?

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Answer

The word ‘were’ is used as a linking verb as it stands alone in the sentence. It is used to link the subject (fairies) and the adjective (asleep).

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Question

What is the difference between dynamic verbs and stative verbs?

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Answer

A dynamic verb describes an action or process done by a noun or subject. They are thought of as ‘action verbs’ e.g. ‘kick’, ‘run’, ‘eat’. Stative verbs describe the state of being of a person or thing. These are states that are not necessarily physical action e.g. ‘know’, ‘love’, ‘suppose’.

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Question

Which of the following are dynamic verbs and which are stative verbs?

  • Drink

  • Prefer

  • Talk

  • Seem

  • Understand

  • Write

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Answer

The dynamic verbs are ‘drink’, ‘talk’, and ‘write’ as they all describe an action. The stative verbs are ‘prefer’, ‘seem’, and ‘understand’ as they all describe a state of being.

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Question

What is an imperative verb?

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Answer

Imperative verbs are verbs used to give orders, give instructions, make a request or give warning. They tell someone to do something. For example, ‘clean your room!’.

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Question

Inflections give information about tense, person, number, mood, or voice. True or false?

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Question

What information does the inflection ‘-ing’ give for a verb?

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Answer

The inflection ‘-ing’ is often used to show that an action or state is continuous and ongoing.

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Question

How do you know if a verb is irregular?

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Answer

An irregular verb does not take the regular inflections, instead the whole word is spelt a different way. For example, begin becomes ‘began’ or ‘begun’. We can’t add the regular past tense inflection -ed as this would become ‘beginned’ which doesn’t make sense.

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Question

Suffixes can never signal what word class a word belongs to. True or false?

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Answer

False. Suffixes can signal what word class a word belongs to. For example, ‘-ify’ is a common suffix for verbs (‘identity’, ‘simplify’)

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Question

A verb phrase is built around a noun. True or false?

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Answer

False. A verb phrase is a group of words that has a main verb along with any other auxiliary verbs that ‘help’ the main verb. For example, ‘could eat’ is a verb phrase as it contains a main verb (‘could’) and an auxiliary verb (‘could’).

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Question

Which of the following are multi-word verbs? 

  • Shake

  • Rely on

  • Dancing

  • Look up to

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Answer

The verbs ‘rely on’ and ‘look up to’ are multi-word verbs as they consist of a verb that has one or more prepositions or particles linked to it.

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Question

What is the difference between a transition verb and an intransitive verb?

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Answer

Transitive verbs are verbs that require an object in order to make sense. For example, the word ‘bring’ requires an object that is brought (‘I bring news’). Intransitive verbs do not require an object to complete the meaning of the sentence e.g. ‘exist’ (‘I exist’).

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Answer

An adverb is a word that gives more information about a verb, adjective, another adverb, or a full clause.

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Question

What are the 3 ways we can use adverbs?

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Answer

We can use adverbs to modify a word (modifying adverbs), to intensify a word (intensifying adverbs), or to connect two clauses (connecting adverbs).

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Question

What are modifying adverbs?

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Answer

Modifying adverbs are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They add further information about the word.

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Question

‘Additionally’, ‘likewise’, and ‘consequently’ are examples of connecting adverbs. True or false?

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Answer

True! Connecting adverbs are words used to connect two independent clauses.

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Question

What are intensifying adverbs?

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Answer

Intensifying adverbs are words used to strengthen the meaning of an adjective, another adverb, or a verb. In other words, they ‘intensify’ another word.

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Question

Which of the following are intensifying adverbs?

  • Calmly

  • Incredibly

  • Enough

  • Greatly

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Answer

The intensifying adverbs are ‘incredibly’ and ‘greatly’. These strengthen the meaning of a word.

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Question

Name the main types of adverbs

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Answer

The main adverbs are; adverbs of place, adverbs of time, adverbs of manner, adverbs of frequency, adverbs of degree, adverbs of probability, and adverbs of purpose.

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Question

What are adverbs of time?

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Answer

Adverbs of time are the ‘when?’ adverbs. They answer the question ‘when is the action done?’ e.g. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow

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Question

Which of the following are adverbs of frequency?

  • Usually

  • Patiently

  • Occasionally

  • Nowhere

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Answer

The adverbs of frequency are ‘usually’ and ‘occasionally’. They are the ‘how often?’ adverbs. They answer the question ‘how often is the action done?’. 

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Question

What are adverbs of place?

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Answer

Adverbs of place are the ‘where?’ adverbs. They answer the question ‘where is the action done?’. For example, ‘outside’ or ‘elsewhere’.

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Question

Which of the following are adverbs of manner?

  • Never

  • Carelessly

  • Kindly

  • Inside

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Answer

The words ‘carelessly’ and ‘kindly’ are adverbs of manner. They are the ‘how?’ adverbs that answer the question ‘how is the action done?’. 

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In grammar, we first need to identify the types of grammatical units, such as words and phrases, before describing the internal structure of these units, and how they combine to form larger units. Grammatical units are meaningful elements which combine with each other in a structural pattern. Essentially, grammar is the system which organizes and controls these form-meaning relationships.

In the simplest cases, a unit consists of one or more elements on the level below:

. A clause consists of one or more phrases.
. A phrase consists of one or more words.
. A word consists of one or more morphemes.
Morphemes are parts of words, i.e. stems, prefixes, and suffixes. For example, un + friend + ly contains three morphemes: a prefix un-, a stem friend and a suffix -1y. The part of grammar dealing with morphemes is morphology.
The part of grammar dealing with the other types of grammatical units shown above (i.e. words, phrases, clauses, and sentences) is known as syntax.

In general, grammatical units are described in terms of four factors: their structure, their syntactic role, their meaning, and the way they are used in discourse.

1- Structure:

Units can be described in terms of their internal structure: e.g words in terms of bases and affixes, phrases in terms of heads and modifiers, and clauses in terms of clause elements.

2- Role:

Units can be described in terms of their syntactic role. For example, a phrase can have the syntactic role of object in a clause:
In November, Susie won those tickets. (CONV)
In this example, there are also other roles: Susie is the subject, In November is an adverbial.

3- Meaning:

Units can be described in terms of meaning. For example, adverbs (a class of words) can express information about time, place, and manner.

4- Use ( or discourse function):

Units can be further described in terms of how they behave in discourse. This can include their use in different registers, their frequency in those registers, and the factors which influence their use in speech or in written texts. For example, pronouns like it and they are often used to refer back to things mentioned earlier
in the same discourse:
Isn’t Cindy coming? Did she call you? (CONV)
Such pronouns are more common in speech than in written texts.

WHAT ARE WORDS?

Words are generally considered to be the basic elements of language. They clearly show up in writing, and they are the items defined in dictionaries. Yet the definition of ‘word’ is not simple.
Words are relatively fixed in their internal form, but they are independent in their role in larger units

DIFFERENT SENSES OF THE WORD ‘WORD’:

The notion of ‘word’ is complex, and so it is useful to identify a number of slightly different senses of ‘word’:

Orthographic words:

These are the words that we are familiar with in written language, where they are separated by spaces. For example, They wrote us a letter contains five distinct orthographic words.

Grammatical words:

A word falls into one grammatical word class (or ‘part of speech’) or another. Thus the orthographic word leaves can be either of two
grammatical words: a verb (the present tense -s form of leave) or a noun (the plural of leaf). This is the basic sense of ‘word’ for grammatical purposes.

Lexemes:

This is a set of grammatical words which share the same basic meaning, similar forms, and the same word class. For example, leave, leaves, left, and leaving are all members of the verb lexeme leave. This is the meaning of ‘word’ that is employed in dictionaries.

Each occurrence of a word in a written or spoken text is a separate token. In contrast to word tokens, word types are the different vocabulary items that occur in a text (such as you would look up in a wordlist). Notice the token/type distinction applies equally to orthographic words, grammatical words, and lexemes. However, our main concern will be with grammatical words, whether as types or as tokens. In practice, it is not often necessary to distinguish between these senses, as the word ‘word’ is rarely ambiguous in any given context. But if there is any potential ambiguity the sense intended will be specified.

THREE MAJOR FAMILIES OF WORDS

Words can be grouped into three families, according to their main function and their grammatical behaviour: lexical words, function words, and inserts.

Lexical words:

  • Lexical words are the main carriers of information in a text or speech act.
  • They can be subdivided into the following word classes (or parts of speech): nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
  • Of all the word families, lexical words are the most numerous, and their number is growing all the time. In other words, they are members of open classes.
  • They often have a complex internal structure and can be composed of several parts: e.g. unfriendliness = un +friend + li + ness.
  • Lexical words can be heads of phrases: e.g. the noun completion is the head (or main word) of the noun phrase [the completion of the task].
  • They are generally the words that are stressed most in speech.
  • They are generally the words that remain if a sentence is compressed in a newspaper headline: e.g. Elderly care crisis warning.

Function words:

  • Function words can be categorized in terms of word classes such as prepositions, coordinators, auxiliary verbs, and pronouns.
  • They usually indicate meaning relationships and help us to interpret units containing lexical words, by showing how the units are related to each other.
  • Function words belong to closed classes, which have a very limited and fixed membership. For example, English has only four coordinators: and, or, but, and (rarely) nor.
  • Individual function words tend to occur frequently, and in almost any type of text.

Inserts:

  • Inserts are found mainly in spoken language.
  • Inserts do not form an integral part of a syntactic structure, but tend to be inserted freely in a text.
  • They are often marked off by a break in intonation in speech, or by a punctuation mark in writing: e.g. Well, we made it.
  • They generally carry emotional and discoursal meanings, such as oh, ah, wow used to express a speaker’s emotional response to a situation, or yeah, no, okay used to signal a response to what has just been said.
  • Inserts are generally simple in form, though they often have an atypical pronunciation (e.g. hm, uh-huh, ugh, yeah). Examples are: Hm hm, very good (conv), Yeah, I will. Bye (convt), Cheers man (conv).

CLOSED CLASSES AND OPEN CLASSES

  • A closed class contains a limited number of members, and new members cannot be easily added. For example, it is not easy to create a new coordinator or a new pronoun: those word classes have a fairly fixed set of members.
  • The membership of open classes is indefinitely large, and can be readily extended by users of the language. Lexical classes such as nouns and adjectives are open classes. For example, we can easily form new nouns with the suffix -ee, adjectives with -ish, verbs with -ize, and adverbs with -wise.

In practice, the difference between open classes and closed classes is not always clear-cut. For example, new prepositions develop out of other word classes (e.g. regarding), and sequences of orthographic words can gradually
become fixed as a single preposition (e.g. on account of). As a result, ‘closed classes’ are not completely closed, but they are extended only slowly, perhaps over centuries. In contrast, new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs-the open
classes-are always being created.

REFERENCES:

Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, Geoffrey Leech – Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English -Pearson ESL (2002).

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)

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]

  1. ^ Yes and no are sometimes classified as interjections.
  2. ^ Ideophones do not always form a single grammatical word class, and their classification varies between languages, sometimes being split across other word classes. Rather, they are a phonosemantic word class, based on derivation, but may be considered part of the category of «expressives»,[21] which thus often form an open class due to the productivity of ideophones. Further, «[i]n the vast majority of cases, however, ideophones perform an adverbial function and are closely linked with verbs.»[23]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Rijkhoff, Jan (2007). «Word Classes». Language and Linguistics Compass. Wiley. 1 (6): 709–726. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00030.x. ISSN 1749-818X. S2CID 5404720.
  2. ^ Payne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: a guide for field linguists. Cambridge. ISBN 9780511805066.
  3. ^ John Lyons, Semantics, CUP 1977, p. 424.
  4. ^ a b Kroeger, Paul (2005). Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 35. ISBN 978-0-521-01653-7.
  5. ^ Robins RH (1989). General Linguistics (4th ed.). London: Longman.
  6. ^
    Bimal Krishna Matilal (1990). The word and the world: India’s contribution to the study of language (Chapter 3).
  7. ^ Mahadevan, I. (2014). Early Tamil Epigraphy — From the Earliest Times to the Sixth century C.E., 2nd Edition. p. 271.
  8. ^
    Ilakkuvanar S (1994). Tholkappiyam in English with critical studies (2nd ed.). Educational Publisher.
  9. ^ Cratylus 431b
  10. ^ The Rhetoric, Poetic and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, translated by Thomas Taylor, London 1811, p. 179.
  11. ^ Dionysius Thrax. τέχνη γραμματική (Art of Grammar), ια´ περὶ λέξεως (11. On the word):
    λέξις ἐστὶ μέρος ἐλάχιστον τοῦ κατὰ σύνταξιν λόγου.
    λόγος δέ ἐστι πεζῆς λέξεως σύνθεσις διάνοιαν αὐτοτελῆ δηλοῦσα.
    τοῦ δὲ λόγου μέρη ἐστὶν ὀκτώ· ὄνομα, ῥῆμα,
    μετοχή, ἄρθρον, ἀντωνυμία, πρόθεσις, ἐπίρρημα, σύνδεσμος. ἡ γὰρ προσηγορία ὡς εἶδος τῶι ὀνόματι ὑποβέβληται.
    A word is the smallest part of organized speech.
    Speech is the putting together of an ordinary word to express a complete thought.
    The class of word consists of eight categories: noun, verb,
    participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb, conjunction. A common noun in form is classified as a noun.

  12. ^ The term ‘onoma’ at Dionysius Thrax, Τέχνη γραμματική (Art of Grammar), 14. Περὶ ὀνόματος translated by Thomas Davidson, On the noun
    καὶ αὐτὰ εἴδη προσαγορεύεται· κύριον, προσηγορικόν, ἐπίθετον, πρός τι ἔχον, ὡς πρός τι ἔχον, ὁμώνυμον, συνώνυμον, διώνυμον, ἐπώνυμον, ἐθνικόν, ἐρωτηματικόν, ἀόριστον, ἀναφορικὸν ὃ καὶ ὁμοιωματικὸν καὶ δεικτικὸν καὶ ἀνταποδοτικὸν καλεῖται, περιληπτικόν, ἐπιμεριζόμενον, περιεκτικόν, πεποιημένον, γενικόν, ἰδικόν, τακτικόν, ἀριθμητικόν, ἀπολελυμένον, μετουσιαστικόν.
    also called Species: proper, appellative, adjective, relative, quasi-relative, homonym, synonym, pheronym, dionym, eponym, national, interrogative, indefinite, anaphoric (also called assimilative, demonstrative, and retributive), collective, distributive, inclusive, onomatopoetic, general, special, ordinal, numeral, participative, independent.

  13. ^ [penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/1B*.html This translation of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria reads: «Our own language (Note: i.e. Latin) dispenses with the articles (Note: Latin doesn’t have articles), which are therefore distributed among the other parts of speech. But interjections must be added to those already mentioned.»]
  14. ^ «Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria I».
  15. ^ See for example Beauzée, Nicolas, Grammaire générale, ou exposition raisonnée des éléments nécessaires du langage (Paris, 1767), and earlier Jakob Redinger, Comeniana Grammatica Primae Classi Franckenthalensis Latinae Scholae destinata … (1659, in German and Latin).
  16. ^ The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar by Bas Aarts, Sylvia Chalker & Edmund Weine. OUP Oxford 2014. Page 35.
  17. ^ Zwicky, Arnold (30 March 2006). «What part of speech is «the»«. Language Log. Retrieved 26 December 2009. …the school tradition about parts of speech is so desperately impoverished
  18. ^ Hopper, P; Thompson, S (1985). «The Iconicity of the Universal Categories ‘Noun’ and ‘Verbs’«. In John Haiman (ed.). Typological Studies in Language: Iconicity and Syntax. Vol. 6. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 151–183.
  19. ^ Launey, Michel (1994). Une grammaire omniprédicative: essai sur la morphosyntaxe du nahuatl classique. Paris: CNRS Editions.
  20. ^ Broschart, Jürgen (1997). «Why Tongan does it differently: Categorial Distinctions in a Language without Nouns and Verbs». Linguistic Typology. 1 (2): 123–165. doi:10.1515/lity.1997.1.2.123. S2CID 121039930.
  21. ^ a b The Art of Grammar: A Practical Guide, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, p. 99
  22. ^ G. Tucker Childs, «African ideophones», in Sound Symbolism, p. 179
  23. ^ G. Tucker Childs, «African ideophones», in Sound Symbolism, p. 181
  24. ^ «Sample Entry: Function Words / Encyclopedia of Linguistics».
  25. ^ Carnie, Andrew (2012). Syntax: A Generative Introduction. New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 51–52. ISBN 978-0-470-65531-3.
  26. ^ Dixon, Robert M. W. (1977). «Where Have all the Adjectives Gone?». Studies in Language. 1: 19–80. doi:10.1075/sl.1.1.04dix.
  27. ^ Adjective classes: a cross-linguistic typology, Robert M. W. Dixon, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, OUP Oxford, 2006
  28. ^ a b The Art of Grammar: A Practical Guide, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, p. 97
  29. ^ Hoff, Erika (2014). Language Development. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning. p. 171. ISBN 978-1-133-93909-2.
  30. ^ Categorial Features: A Generative Theory of Word Class Categories, «p. 54».
  31. ^ Dixon 1977, p. 48.
  32. ^ The Typology of Adjectival Predication, Harrie Wetzer, p. 311
  33. ^ The Art of Grammar: A Practical Guide, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, p. 96
  34. ^ Adam (2011-07-18). «Homage to る(ru), The Magical Verbifier».
  35. ^ a b The Art of Grammar: A Practical Guide, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, p. 98

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)

Both
the traditional and the syntactico — distributional classifications
divide parts of speech into notional
and
functional.

Criteria
for differentiating
:

  1. the
    prominence of their lexical meaning

  2. peculiarities
    of their combinability

  3. ability
    to be substituted by a word of a more general meaning

  4. ability
    to create/add new items

Notional
words

  1. Complete
    nominative force

  2. Self-dependent
    functions in a sentence

  3. Can
    be used in isolation

  4. Can
    be substituted by a word of a more general meaning

  5. Open
    classes (new items can be added to them, they are indefinitely
    extendable)

Functional
words

  1. Incomplete
    nominative force

  2. Non-self-dependent
    mediatory functions:
    linking
    or specifying

  3. Obligatory
    combinability

  4. Cannot
    be substituted

  5. Closed
    classes (closed
    systems, including a limited number of members. As a rule, they
    cannot be extended by creating new items)

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

strengthen;-
strong

strongly.

Functional
parts of speech are

prepositions, conjunctions, articles, particles.

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

Groups
of functional words (function words — Ch. Fries)

  • With
    a
    unilateral combinability

    – articles, auxiliaries, modals, particles

  • With
    a
    bilateral combinability

    – prepositions and conjunctions which connect 2 or more notional
    words or word- groups

  • Heterogeneous
    subclass

    uniting introductory it/there, interrogative words, interjections
    etc

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

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

7.The noun. The category of number

Noun
as a part of speech:

  1. Semantic
    – a part of speech which categorial meaning is thingness

  2. Formal
    – a) form-building – the category of number, the category of
    case, the category of gender, the category of article determination

b)
derivational – typical word-building patterns: suffixation,
compounding, convertion (to walk – a walk)

3)
Functional – a) combinability: left-hand prepositional
combinability with another N/V/Adj./Adv. [+ prep.Noun],casal
combinability [N’s+N](
.:
the
speech of the President —
the
President’s speech),
contact comb-ty [N+N]- stone-wall constructions, take
an intermediary position between compound nouns and noun phrases
(stone wall, car roof, speech sound)
,
comb-ty with articles and other determiners [art./det. + N]

b)
Syntactic functions – subject, object, other functions are less
typical

Nouns
fall into several subclasses which differ as to their semantic and
grammatical properties: common — proper, concrete — abstract,
countable — uncountable (count — non-count, count — mass),
animate — inanimate, personal — non-personal (human —
non-human).

Lexico-
semantic variants of nouns may belong to different subclasses: paper
— a paper,
etc.

The
class of nouns can be described as a lexico-grammatical field.

Nouns denoting things constitute the centre (nucleus) of the field.
Nouns denoting processes, qualities, abstract notions (predicate
nouns) are marginal, peripheral elements of the field.

  • Nucleus
    and periphery are distinguished on the basis of lexico-semantic
    properties and morph. characteristics – subclasses of Nouns

  • The
    nucleus -> common- concrete-countable- animate Nouns

  • The
    periphery -> abstract – material- uncountable Nouns

The
category of number

The
only category of nouns, which is generally accepted, is the category
of number. Many scholars think that the notion of case applies to
English pronouns, but not to nouns. Gender distinctions are not
marked morphologically.

The
category of number

— is a semantically rooted morphological category ,

  • depends
    on how the referent is perceived: as a discrete, hence countable
    entity, one or more than one, OR as an indiscrete indivisible, hence
    uncountable entity

  • this
    semantic contrast is revealed through lexical and morphological
    means which are accompanied by syntactic marking

Lexical
( lexico-syntactic) means:

  • The
    process of lexicalizing
    semantic contrast consists in denoting a discrete countable entity
    by one word – a meal and an indiscrete uncountable entity – by
    another – food.

We
made a journey – we made a travel

Lexico-
grammatical means:

-s
– news – singularia tantum, goods – pluralia tantum, marked
through syntactic
patterning –
the
form of the predicate verb, use of articles and corresponding
pronouns

Lexicalization
of the plural form
(the
process when a word requires a new name, a word already having a
meaning gets a new one)

Colours
— > flag, pains -.> efforts

Grammatical
means:

The
morph. Category of Number is realized through inflectional
marking
(categorial
forms) and/or syntactic patterning

Form:
the category of Number is constituted by the inflectional opposition
of 2 categorial forms of Noun:

Non-pl.(sg.)
— Pl

binary,
privative opposition

Dog
dog
s

a
strong marked member, marked through the inflexion, ⁻-
zero morpheme.

Sg.
– no positive mark, zero inflexion, a weak unmarked member, many
a river

Pl.
– morpheme of plurality – (e)s, represented by:

  • the
    allomorphs ( variants of 1 morpheme) books
    (s), boys(z), boxes(iz)

  • by
    some other allomorphs ex. oxen

  • internal
    inflexion – sound interchange mouse-mice

  • zero
    inflexion (NB! – only in grammar) – sheep,
    means

Meaning
of their category of Number and its members the
foundation

is laid by the opposition

Discreteness
– non- discreteness
which
embraces countable and uncountable nouns

Discrete
counts
form the inflexional opposition

Non-pl.-
pl.
dog-dogs

Non-pl.
– a single object having distinct outer boundaries

Pl.
– a set of homogeneous objects having distinct inner and outer
boundaries

Indiscrete
uncounts
constitute the lexico-gram.
opposition of subclasses of nouns:

Sg.
Only – pl. only

Sg.
only

indiscrete entities having no boundaries ->mainly abstract and
material uncounts

Pl.only
(see
pract. Grammar)

THE
CATEGORY OF NUMBER

Discreteness
Non-discreteness

morphological
c. lexico-gram.
subclass

Non-pl.(oneness)
Sg. only


a single discrete entity — indiscrete
entities, no boundaries

Pl.(more
–than- oneness) Pl. only


multiplicity of discrete entities <…>

Bloh
Pl only

The
characteristic of the uncountable nouns which denote objects
consisting of two halves

(trousers,
scissors, tongs, spectacles,
etc.),
the
nouns expressing some sort of collective meaning
,
i.e. rendering the idea of indefinite plurality, both concrete and
abstract (supplies,
outskirts, clothes, parings; tidings, earnings, contents, politics;
police, cattle, poultry,
etc.),
the
nouns denoting some diseases as well as some abnormal states of the
body and mind

(measles,
rickets, mumps, creeps, hysterics,
etc.).
As is seen from the examples, from the point of view of number as
such, the absolute plural forms can be divided into set absolute
plural (objects of two halves) and non-set absolute plural (the
rest).

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