Other terms thanpart of speech—particularly in modernlinguistic classifications, which often make more precise distinctions than the traditional scheme does—includeword class,lexical class, andlexical category. Some authors restrict the termlexical category to refer only to a particular type ofsyntactic category; for them the term excludes those parts of speech that are considered to befunction words, such as pronouns. The termform class is also used, although this has various conflicting definitions.[4] Word classes may be classified asopen or closed:open classes (typically including nouns, verbs and adjectives) acquire new members constantly, whileclosed 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.[5] For example:
Many languages do not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, or between adjectives and verbs (seestative 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.[5]
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 theTamil language,Tolkāppiyam, argued to have been written around 2nd century CE,[8] classifies Tamil words aspeyar (பெயர்; noun),vinai (வினை; verb),idai (part of speech which modifies the relationships between verbs and nouns), anduri (word that further qualifies a noun or verb).[9]
A century or two after the work of Yāska, theGreek scholarPlato wrote in hisCratylus dialogue, "sentences are, I conceive, a combination of verbs [rhêma] and nouns [ónoma]".[10]Aristotle added another class, "conjunction" [sýndesmos], which included not only the words known today asconjunctions, but also other parts (the interpretations differ; in one interpretation it ispronouns,prepositions, and thearticle).[11]
By the end of the 2nd century BCE, grammarians had expanded this classification scheme into eight categories, seen in theArt of Grammar, attributed toDionysius Thrax:[12]
'Name' (ónoma) translated as 'noun': a part of speech inflected forcase, signifying a concrete or abstract entity. It includes variousspecies likenouns,adjectives, proper nouns, appellatives, collectives, ordinals, numerals and more.[13]
Verb (rhêma): a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected fortense,person andnumber, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone
Participle (metokhḗ): a part of speech sharing features of the verb and the noun
Article (árthron): a declinable part of speech, taken to include the definite article, but also the basicrelative pronoun
Pronoun (antōnymíā): a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for a person
Preposition (próthesis): a part of speech placed before other words in composition and in syntax
Adverb (epírrhēma): a part of speech without inflection, in modification of or in addition to a verb, adjective, clause, sentence, or other adverb
Conjunction (sýndesmos): a part of speech binding together the discourse and filling gaps in its interpretation
The Latin names for the parts of speech, from which the corresponding modern English terms derive, werenomen,verbum,participium,pronomen,praepositio,adverbium,conjunctio andinterjectio. The categorynomen includedsubstantives (nomen substantivum, corresponding to what are today called nouns in English),adjectives(nomen adjectivum) andnumerals(nomen numerale). This is reflected in the older English terminologynoun substantive,noun adjective andnoun numeral. Later[16] the adjective became a separate class, as often did the numerals, and the English wordnoun came to be applied to substantives only.
Works ofEnglish 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", andcollective numerals, e.g., "dozen"), adjectives (ordinal numerals, e.g., "first", andmultiplier numerals, e.g., "single") and adverbs (multiplicative numerals, e.g., "once", anddistributive numerals, e.g., "singly"). Eight or nine parts of speech are commonly listed:
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.
Additionally, there are other parts of speech includingparticles (yes,no)[a] andpostpositions (ago,notwithstanding) although many fewer words are in these categories.
The classification below, or slight expansions of it, is still followed in mostdictionaries:
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 ascount nouns ornon-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 separately as its own part of speech. It is considered by some grammarians to be a type of adjective[17] or sometimes the term 'determiner' (a broader class) is used.
English words are not generallymarked as belonging to one part of speech or another; this contrasts with many other European languages, which useinflection more extensively, meaning that a given word form can often be identified as belonging to a particular part of speech and having certain additionalgrammatical 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 likeneigh,break,outlaw,laser,microwave, andtelephone 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 thehows and not just thewhys." The process whereby a word comes to be used as a different part of speech is calledconversion or zero derivation.
Linguists recognize that the above list of eight or nine word classes is drastically simplified.[18] 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,[19] or not applicable to certain languages.[20][21] 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):
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 ofobjects or othercomplements which they take. This is calledsubcategorization.
Many modern descriptions of grammar include not only lexical categories or word classes, but alsophrasal categories, used to classifyphrases, in the sense of groups of words that form units having specific grammatical functions. Phrasal categories may includenoun phrases (NP),verb phrases (VP) and so on. Lexical and phrasal categories together are calledsyntactic categories.
Word classes may be either open or closed. Anopen class is one that commonly accepts the addition of new words, while aclosed 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 arenouns,verbs (excludingauxiliary verbs, if these are regarded as a separate class),adjectives,adverbs andinterjections.Ideophones are often an open class, though less familiar to English speakers,[22][23][b] and are often open tononce words. Typical closed classes areprepositions (or postpositions),determiners,conjunctions, andpronouns.[25]
The open–closed distinction is related to the distinction betweenlexical and functional categories, and to that betweencontent words andfunction 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,[26] 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[27][28][29] 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 ascompounding,derivation,coining, andborrowing. 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.[30] 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 ofverbing and other types ofconversion, 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 ofgender-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 inJingulu, which has only three verbs, while even the modern Indo-EuropeanPersian has no more than a few hundred simple verbs, a great deal of which are archaic. (Some twenty Persian verbs are used aslight verbs to form compounds; this lack of lexical verbs is shared with other Iranian languages.) Japanese is similar, having few lexical verbs.[31]Basque verbs are also a closed class, with the vast majority of verbal senses instead expressed periphrastically.
InJapanese, verbs and adjectives are closed classes,[32] though these are quite large, with about 700 adjectives,[33][34] 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 appendingsuru (する, to do) to a noun, as inundō suru (運動する, to (do) exercise), and new adjectival meanings are nearly always expressed byadjectival nouns, using the suffix-na (〜な) when an adjectival noun modifies a noun phrase, as inhen-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 beingsabo-ru (サボる, cut class; play hooky), fromsabotāju (サボタージュ, sabotage).[35] This recent innovation aside, the huge contribution ofSino-Japanese vocabulary was almost entirely borrowed as nouns (often verbal nouns or adjectival nouns). Other languages where adjectives are closed class include Swahili,[29]Bemba, andLuganda.
By contrast,Japanese pronouns are an open class and nouns become used as pronouns with some frequency; a recent example isjibun (自分, self), now used by some as a first-person pronoun. The status of Japanese pronouns as a distinct class is disputed, 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.[36]
Some word classes are universally closed, however, including demonstratives and interrogative words.[36]
^Yes and no are sometimes classified as interjections.
^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",[22] 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."[24]
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.
also calledSpecies: 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.
^[penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/1B*.html This translation of Quintilian'sInstitutio 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."]
^The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar by Bas Aarts, Sylvia Chalker & Edmund Weine. OUP Oxford 2014. Page 35.
^Zwicky, Arnold (30 March 2006)."What part of speech is "the"".Language Log.Archived from the original on 27 December 2009. Retrieved26 December 2009....the school tradition about parts of speech is so desperately impoverished
^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.
^Launey, Michel (1994).Une grammaire omniprédicative: essai sur la morphosyntaxe du nahuatl classique. Paris: CNRS Editions.
^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.S2CID121039930.
^abThe Art of Grammar: A Practical Guide, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald,p. 99
^Adjective classes: a cross-linguistic typology,Robert M. W. Dixon, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, OUP Oxford, 2006
^abThe Art of Grammar: A Practical Guide, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald,p. 97
^Hoff, Erika (2014).Language Development. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning. p. 171.ISBN978-1-133-93909-2.
^Categorial Features: A Generative Theory of Word Class Categories,Panagiotidis, Phoevos (4 December 2014).p. 54. Cambridge University Press.ISBN9781316194638.
