Parts of Speech as Grammatical Categories
A. A. Reformatsky and L.S. Barkhudarov define pans of speech as grammatical categories, i.e. they take into account both their morphological and syntactic characteristics. This conception is, certainly, a step forward in comparison, with the one-sided morphological and syntactic interpretations.
However, there is no gainsaying the fact that some morphologically non-marked words are unmistakably referred to this or that part of speech even when taken in isolation, i.e. in the absence of both morphological and syntactic characteristics. Thus, on hearing just one invariable word r.aKady but knowing that it is the name of a bird, writes L. V. SCerba, all linguists will qualify it as a noun. It follows from it that meaning is a most important factor in classifying words into parts of speech.
Parts of Speech as Lexico-Gratnmatical Categories
The Dutch linguist O. Jespersen was one of the first to postulate the necessity of a three-fold approach to the classification of words into parts of speech. He writes, Tn my opinion, everything should be kept in view: form, function, and meaning/ Nowadays, the majority of linguists, both in Russia and abroad, regard parts of speech as lexico-gramrnatical categories. This conception seems to be the most convincing. The only trouble is that the three mentioned criteria do not always point the same way. Let us take such units as the rich and the poor. Semantically (they have the meaning of 'thingness') and functionally (they can perform the functions of subject and object), they are, certainly, nouns. But they lack the most typical morphological categories of nouns - case and number.
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The Field Structure of Parts of Speech
As the authors of the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English put it, nouns can be more or less 'nouny'. A typical noun has singular, plural, and genitive forms; it can be preceded by the definite or the indefinite article; and it typically refers to a person or thing, or some other entity. Such nouns are boy, dog, etc. Yet in the class of nouns we regularly include words that have only some of the features characteristic of nouns, e.g. information (which is invariable and cannot be preceded by the indefinite article) and Sarah (which does not normally occur in the plural or combine with articles).
In view of it, one should regard parts of speech not as boxes with clear-cut boundaries, but as formations with a compact core and a gradual transition into a diffuse periphery. Those language units that comprise all the characteristic features of a part of speech constitute the centre of the part of speech. The peripheral phenomena are those that lack some characteristics of the given part of speech or have a number of features of another part of speech but still belong to the given part of speech. Thus, the centre of the lexico-grammatical field of nouns is constituted by those nouns that have all the characteristic properties of nouns: 1) semantic - denote 'thingness', 2) morphological - have the categories of case and number, 3) syntactic — can perform the functions of subject and/or object.
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But what about the periphery? The absence of what noun properties shifts a noun into the periphery of the class of nouns and the absence of what noun properties changes the nature of the noun completely and places it in the periphery of some other part of speech? In other words, which of the three criteria: meaning, form, or function is the most important in the process of differentiating parts of speech?
The use of the morphological criterion is limited by the fact that there are a lot of languages in the world that have few or no morphological forms at all. The syntactic criterion is not reliable either because many of the same orthographic words (orthographic words are word forms separated by spaces in written text) can function as different parts of speech. Cf.:
Put a little round of butter on each steak (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) - noun.
Tne little boy's eyes grew round with delight (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) - adjective.
The field has a fence all round (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English) - adverb.
We sat round the table (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English)- preposition.
L.V. Scerba's analysis of the word xamdy has proved quite convincingly that in classifying words into parts of speech meaning is most important. Practically everybody agrees that nouns denote 'thingness', verbs - actions and processes, adjectives - properties of things, adverbs - properties of actions and processes, etc. The thing that raises doubts is the nature of part-of-speech meaning.
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