The Theoretical View on English Parts of Speech Classification
In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of the three criteria: "semantic", "formal", and "functional". (meaning, form, function)
1) The semantic criterion presupposes the evaluation of the generalized meaning, which is characteristic of all the subsets of words constituting a given part of speech. This meaning is understood as the "categorial meaning of the part of speech".
2) The formal criterion provides for the exposition of the specific in-flexional and derivational (word-building) features of all the lexemic subsets of a part of speech.
3) The functional criterion concerns the syntactic role of words in the sentence typical of a part of speech.
In accord with the described criteria, words are divided into notional and functional.
The notional parts of speech: the noun, the adjective, the numeral, the pronoun, the verb, the adverb.
The functional one: the article, the preposition, the conjunction, the particle, the modal word, the interjection.
Other views
The first classification of parts of speech was homogeneous: in ancient Greek grammar the words were subdivided mainly on the basis of their formal properties into changeable and unchangeable; nouns, adjectives and numerals were treated jointly as a big class of “names” because they shared the same morphological forms. This classical linguistic tradition was followed by the first English grammars: Henry Sweet divided all the words in English into “declinables” and “indeclinables”. But the approach which worked well for the description of highly inflectional languages turned out to be less efficient for the description of other languages.
Alongside of the three-criteria principle of dividing the words into grammatical (lexico-grammatical) classes modern linguistics has developed another principle of word-class identification based on syntactic featuring of words only.
The syntactic approach is more universal and applicable to languages of different morphological types. The principles of a monodifferential syntactico-distributional classification of words in English were developed by the representatives of American Descriptive Linguistics, L. Bloomfield, Z. Harris and Ch. Fries.
Ch. Fries selected the most widely used grammatical constructions and used them as substitution frames: the frames were parsed into parts, or positions, each of them got a separate number, and then Ch. Fries conducted a series of substitution tests to find out what words can be used in each of the positions. Some of the frames were as follows:
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· The concert was good (always).
· The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).
· The team went there.
All the words that can be used in place of the article made one group, the ones that could be used instead of the word “clerk” another, etc.
The results of his experiments were surprisingly similar to the traditional classification of parts of speech: he distinguished four major classes of what he called “positional words” (or “form-words”) – the words which can be used in four major syntactic positions without affecting the meaning of the structures; generally speaking, these classes coincide with the four major notional parts of speech in the traditional classification: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Besides, Ch. Fries distinguished 15 limited groups of words, which cannot fill in the positions in the frames. These “function words” are practically the same as the functional words in the traditional classification.
Another advanced approach is connected with the implementation of the linguistic field theory to the parts of speech classification. It was formulated by the Russian linguists G. S. Schur and V. G. Admoni. According to this approach, the borderlines between the classes of words are not rigid; instead of borderlines there is a continuum of numerous intermediary phenomena, combining the features of two or more major classes of words.
Field theory states that in each class of words there is a core, the bulk of its members that possess all the characteristic features of the class, and a periphery (marginal part), which includes the words of mixed, dubious character, intermediary between this class and other classes of words.
For example, the non-finite forms of the verb (the infinitive, the gerund, participles I and II) make up the periphery of the verbal class: they lack some of the features of a verb, but possess certain features characteristic to either nouns, or adjectives, or adverbs.
These are the major advanced linguistic approaches, which supplement and significantly improve the traditional classification of word classes.
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