Theoretical grammar 3

1.

Parts of speech
Presented by Zhanna M. Sagitova

2.

Problems to be discussed:
- brief history of grouping words to parts of speech
- contemporary criteria for classifying words to parts of speech
- structural approach to the classification of words (the doctrine of
American descriptive School)
- notional and functional parts of speech
- A comprehensive approach to the discrimination of parts of speech

3.

In every language we find groups of words that share grammatical
characteristics that are called “parts of speech”.

4.

Parts of speech are grammatical (or lexico-grammatical) classes of
words identified on the basis of the three criteria:
- the meaning common to all the words of the given class;
- the form with the morphological characteristics of a type of word;
- the function in the sentence typical of all the words of this class
(e. g. the English noun has the categorical meaning of “thingness”, the
changeable forms of number and case, and the functions of the
subject, object and substantive predicative).

5.

The notion of “parts of speech” goes back to the times of Ancient
Greece. Aristotle (384–322 B. C.) distinguished between nouns, verbs
and connectives. Traditional grammars of English, following the
approach which can be traced back to Latin, agreed that there were
eight parts of speech in English: the noun, pronoun, adjective, verb,
adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection.

6.

The main problem with the traditional classification is that some
grammatical phenomena given above have intermediary features in
this system.
They make up a continuum, a transition zone, between the polar
entities.
For example, there is a very specific group of quantifiers in English
(such words as many, much, little, few). They have features of
pronouns, numerals, and adjectives and are referred to as “hybrids”.

7.

Many language experts mention "the eight parts of speech" when
discussing language (such as Weaver in 1996). However, the number of
parts of speech we must acknowledge in a language is determined by
the level of detail in our analysis. The more detailed the analysis, the
more parts of speech we will distinguish.

8.

We distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (the major parts
of speech), and pronouns, wh-words, articles, auxiliary verbs,
prepositions, intensifiers, conjunctions, and particles (the minor parts
of speech).

9.

Every literate person needs at least a minimal understanding of parts of
speech in order to be able to use such commonplace items as
dictionaries and thesauruses, which classify words according to their
parts (and sub-parts) of speech.

10.

For example, the American Heritage Dictionary (4th edition, p. xxxi)
distinguishes adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, definite articles,
indefinite articles, interjections, nouns, prepositions, pronouns, and
verbs. It also distinguishes transitive, intransitive, and auxiliary verbs.

11.

Writers and writing teachers need to know about parts of speech in
order to be able to use and teach about style manuals and school
grammars. Regardless of their discipline, teachers need this
information to be able to help students expand the contexts in which
they can effectively communicate.

12.

The parts of speech that contribute the most to a message are called
content words, while other parts of speech are known as function or
structure words.
The content words are the ones that we see in newspaper headlines
where space is at a premium and they are the words we tend to keep in
text messaging where costs per word can be high. However, in most
types of discourse, function words significantly outnumber content
words.

13.

Noun
Verb
Adjective
Adverb
A noun is a naming word. It names a person, place, thing, idea, living creature, quality, or
action.
Examples: cowboy, theatre, box, thought, tree, kindness, arrival
A verb is a word which describes an action (doing something) or a state (being
something).
Examples: walk, talk, think, believe, live, like, want
An adjective is a word that describes a noun. It tells you something about the noun.
Examples: big, yellow, thin, amazing, beautiful, quick, important
An adverb is a word which usually describes a verb. It tells you how something is done. It may
also tell you when or where something happened.
Examples: slowly, intelligently, well, yesterday, tomorrow, here, everywhere
Pronoun
A pronoun is used instead of a noun, to avoid repeating the noun.
Examples: I, you, he, she, it, we, they
Conjunction
A conjunction joins two words, phrases or sentences together.
Examples: but, so, and, because, or
Preposition
A preposition usually comes before a noun, pronoun or noun phrase. It joins the noun to some
other part of the sentence.
Examples: on, in, by, with, under, through, at
Interjection
An interjection is an unusual kind of word, because it often stands alone. Interjections are
words which express emotion or surprise, and they are usually followed by exclamation marks.
Examples: Ouch!, Hello!, Hurray!, Oh no!, Ha!
Article
An article is used to introduce a noun.
Examples: the, a, an

14.

Most parts of speech can be divided into sub-classes in accordance with
various particular semantico-functional and formal features of the
constituent words. This subdivision is sometimes called "subcategorisation"
of parts of speech.
nouns are subcategorised into proper and common, countable and
uncountable, concrete and abstract, etc. e.g.: Mary, Robinson, London, the
Mississippi, Lake Erie - girl, person, city, river, lake; man, scholar, leopard,
butterfly - earth, field, rose, machine; coin/coins, floor/floors, kind/kinds news, growth, water, furniture; stone, grain, mist, leaf - honesty, love,
slavery, darkness.
Prepositions can be divided into prepositions of time, prepositions of place
etc. Nouns can be divided into proper nouns, common nouns, concrete
nouns etc.

15.

Some scholars consider words as falling into two broad categories:
closed class words and open class words.
The former consists of words that are relatively stable and unchanging
in the language.
Closed classes of words are:
pronoun /she, they/,
determiner /the, a/,
primary verb /be/,
modal verb /can, might/,
preposition /in, of/,
conjunction /and, or/
and auxiliaries /do, does/.

16.

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’. They have a grammatical function as structural markers: a
determiner defines the beginning of a noun phrase, a preposition – the
beginning of a prepositional phrase, a conjunction – the beginning of a
clause.

17.

Contemporary criteria for classifying words into parts of
speech
The problem of word classification into parts of speech still remains
one of the most controversial problems in modern linguistics. The
attitude of grammarians with regard to parts of speech and the basis of
their classification varied a good deal at different times. Only in English
grammarians have been vacillating between 3 and 13 parts of speech.
There are four approaches to the problem:
• Classical (logical-inflectional)
• Functional
• Distributional
• Complex

18.

The classical parts of speech theory goes back to ancient times. It is
based on Latin grammar. According to the Latin classification of the
parts of speech all words were divided dichotomically into declinable
and indeclinable parts of speech.
This system was reproduced in the earliest English grammars. The first
of these groups, declinable words, included nouns, pronouns, verbs
and participles,
the second – indeclinable words – adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions
and interjections.
The logicalinflectional classification is quite successful for Latin or other
languages with developed morphology and synthetic paradigms but it
cannot be applied to the English language because the principle of
declinability/indeclinability is not relevant for analytical languages.

19.

A new approach to the problem was introduced in the XIX century by
Henry Sweet.
This approach may be defined as functional. He resorted to the
functional features of words and singled out nominative units and
particles.
To nominative parts of speech belonged noun-words (noun,
nounpronoun, noun-numeral, infinitive, gerund), adjective-words
(adjective, adjective-pronoun, adjective-numeral, participles), verb
(finite verb, verbals – gerund, infinitive, participles),
while adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection belonged to the
group of particles. However, though the criterion for classification was
functional, Henry Sweet failed to break the tradition and classified
words into those having morphological forms and lacking
morphological forms, in other words, declinable and indeclinable.

20.

A distributional approach to the parts of speech classification can be
illustrated by the classification introduced by Charles Fries. He wanted
to avoid the traditional terminology and establish a classification of
words based on distributive analysis, that is, the ability of words to
combine with other words of different types. Within this approach, the
part of speech is a functioning pattern and a word belonging to the
same class should be the same only in one aspect – occupy the same
position and perform the same syntactic function in speech utterances.
Charles Fries introduced this classification. He used the method of
frames (подстановки).

21.

e.g.:
Frame A: The concert was good.
Frame B: The clerk remembered the tax.
Frame C: The team went there.
Words that can substitute the word “concert”, “clerk”, “team”, “the tax”
are Class 1 words.
Class 2 words are “was”, “remembered” and “went”.
Words that can take the position of “good” are Class 3 words.
Words that can fill the position of “there” are called Class 4 words.

22.

It turned out that his four classes of words were practically the same as
traditional nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
What is really valuable in Charles Fries‘ classification is his investigation
of 15 groups of function words (form-classes) because he was the first
linguist to pay attention to some of their peculiarities.

23.

The drawback of this classification is that morphological and semantic
properties are completely neglected, because words of different nature
are treated as items of the same class and vice a versa.

24.

R. Khaimovich and Rogovskaya identify five criteria
1. Lexico - grammatical meaning of words
2. Lexico - grammatical morphemes (stem - building elements)
3. Grammatical categories of words.
4. Their combinability (unilateral, bilateral)
5. Their function in a sentence.

25.

Their Classification
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Nouns
Adjectives
Pronouns
Numerals
Verbs
Adverbs
Adlinks (the cat. of state)
Modal words
Prepositions
Conjunctions
Particles (just, yet, else, alone)
Interjections
Articles
Response words (yes, no) asleep, alive

26.

As authors state the parts of speech lack some of those five criteria.
The most general properties of parts of speech are features 1, 4 and 5.

27.

B. A. Ilyish distinguishes three criteria:
1. meaning;
2. Form;
3. function.
The third criteria is subdivided into two:
a) the method of combining the word with other ones (deal with
phrases)
b) the function in the sentence (deals with sentence structure).

28.

B. A. Ilyish considers the theory of parts of speech as essentially a part of
morphology, involving, however, some syntactical points.
1. Nouns
2. Adjective
3. Pronoun
4. Numerals
5. Statives (asleep, afraid)
6. Verbs
7. Adverbs
8. Prepositions .
9. Conjunctions
10. Particles
11. Modal words
12. Interjections

29.

L. Barkhudarov & D. Steling’s classification of words are
based on four principles.
The important and characteristic feature of their classification is that they do not make use of syntactic
function of words in sentences: meaning, grammatical forms, combinability with other words and the types of
word - building (which are studied not by grammar, but by lexicology).
1.
Nouns
2.
Articles
3.
Pronouns
4.
Adjectives
5.
Adverbs
6.
Numerals
7.
Verbs
8.
Prepositions
9.
Conjunctions
10.
Particles
11.
Modal words
12.
Interjections

30.

In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of
the three criteria: “semantic”, “formal”, and “functional”.

31.

The semantic criterion presupposes the evaluation of the generalized
meaning, which is characteristic of all the subset of words constituting
a given part of speech. This meaning is understood as the “categorial
meaning of the part of speech”.

32.

The formal criterion provides for the exposition of the specific
inflexional and derivational (word-building) features of all the lexemic
subsets of a part of speech.

33.

The functional criterion concerns the syntactic role of words in the
sentence typical of a part of speech. The said three factors of categorial
characterization of words are conventionally referred to as,
respectively, “meaning”, “form”, and “function”.

34.

A comprehensive approach to the
discrimination of parts of speech
The complex approach to the problem of parts of speech classification
was introduced by academician L. V. Shcherba, who proposed to
discriminate parts of speech on the basis of three criteria: semantic,
formal and functional.

35.

By the semantic criterion he understood the generalized meaning or
general grammatical meaning, which is characteristic of all the words,
constituting a given part of speech, i.e. categorial meaning of parts of
speech (e.g. the general grammatical meaning of nouns is substance;
verbs – verbiality, i.e. the ability to express actions, processes or states;
adverbs – adverbiality, i.e. the ability to express qualities or properties
of actions, processes or states; adjectives – qualitiativeness, i.e. the
ability to express qualities or properties of substances).

36.

Taken separately, the semantic criterion cannot be sufficient for word
class discrimination, as there are lexemes of a part of speech, which
acquire the general meaning of the other part of speech (e.g. action – a
noun, which expresses verbiality, sleep – a noun, which expresses
process, blackness – a noun, which expresses quality). Thus, the
general grammatical categorial meaning is important for part of speech
classification, it is the intrinsic quality of a part of speech, it
predetermines some outward properties of its lexemes but it cannot
play the role of an absolute criterion of word classification.

37.

The formal criterion provides for the exposition of the specific
inflexional and derivational (word-building) features of words of a part
of speech and deals with the morphological properties of words, which
include:
1) the system of inflexional morphemes of words, typical of a certain
part of speech;
2) the system of derivational lexico-grammatical morphemes,
characteristic of a part of speech.

38.

Closed-System Items
(a) noun - John, room, answer, play adjective - happy, steady, new,
large, round adverb -steadily, completely, really, very, then verb search, grow, play, be, have, do
(b) article ~the,a(n) demonstrative - that, this pronoun - he, they,
anybody, one, which preposition - of, at, in, without, in spite of
conjunction - and, that, when, although interjection - oh, ahugh, phew

39.

The parts of speech are listed in two groups, (a) and (b), and this
introduces a distinction of very great significance.
Set (b) comprises what are called "closed-system" items. That is, the
sets of items are closed in the sense that they cannot normally be
extended by the creation of additional members: a moment's reflection
is enough for us to realize how rarely in a language we invent or adopt
a new or additional pronoun.
It requires no great effort to list all the members in a closed system,
and to be reasonably sure that one has in fact made an exhaustive
inventory (especially, of course, where the membership is so extremely
small as in the case of the article).

40.

The items are said to constitute a system in being (1) reciprocally
exclusive: the decision to use one item in a given structure excludes the
possibility of using any other (thus one can have "the book" or "a book"
but not "*a the book");
and (2) reciprocally defining: it is less easy to state the meaning of any
individual item than to define it in relation to the rest of the system.
This may be clearer with a non-linguistic analogy. If we are told that a
student came third in an examination, the "meaning" that we attach to
"third" will depend on knowing how many candidates took the
examination: "third" in a set of four has a very different meaning from
"third" in a set of thirty.

41.

Open-Class Items
By contrast, set (a) comprises "open classes". 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 respectively), but the class is "open" in the sense that it is
indefinitely extendable. New items are constantly being created and no one
could make an inventory of all the nouns in English (for example) and be
confident that it was complete. This inevitably affects the way in which we
attempt to define any item in an open class: while it would obviously be
valuable to relate the meaning of "room" to other nouns with which it has
semantic affinity (chamber, hall, house,...) one could not define it as "not
house, not box, not plate, not indignation,..." as one might define a closedsystem item like "this" as "not that".

42.

The distinction between "open" and "closed" parts of speech must be
treated cautiously however. On the one hand, we must not exaggerate
the ease with which we create new words: we certainly do not make up
new nouns as a necessary part of speaking in the way that making up
new sentences is necessary. On the other hand, we must not
exaggerate the extent to which parts of speech in set (b) are "closed":
new prepositions (usually of the form "prep + noun + prep" like by way
of) are by no means impossible.

43.

Although they have deceptively specific labels, the parts of speech tend
in fact to be rather heterogeneous. The adverb and the verb are
perhaps especially mixed classes, each having small and fairly welldefined 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 by the well-established term "auxiliary". With the
adverb, one may draw the distinction broadly between those in -ly that
correspond to adjectives (complete + -ly) and those that do 0ot (now,
there, forward, very, for example).

44.

Discussion on the article "Parts of speech: empirical and theoretical
advances" by Umberto Ansaldo, Jan Don and Roland Pfau

45.

1. What are the main arguments or hypotheses proposed in the article
regarding parts of speech?
2. How do the authors define and categorize different parts of speech
in the context of their research?
3. What empirical data or examples do the authors use to support
their claims about parts of speech?
4. What are the key theoretical advances discussed in the article? How
do these advances contribute to our understanding of parts of
speech?

46.

5. What research methods or approaches do the authors use to
analyze parts of speech? Are these methods predominantly qualitative,
quantitative, or a mix of both?
6. How do the authors define and categorize different parts of speech in
the context of their research?
7. Are there any limitations or biases in the methodology that the
authors acknowledge? How might these affect the findings?

47.

8. How do the findings of this article impact the current understanding
of parts of speech in linguistic theory?
9. What future research directions do the authors suggest? Are there
any specific areas they identify as needing further investigation?
10. How might the theoretical and empirical advances discussed in the
article influence practical applications, such as language teaching or
computational linguistics?

48.

11. Do you agree with the authors' conclusions and theoretical
advancements? Why or why not?
12. How does the article compare with other recent work in the field?
Are there any significant differences or similarities in approach or
conclusions?
13. What are some potential real-world examples that could further
illustrate or challenge the points made in the article?

49.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!