Part of speech


In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech is a category of words that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior, 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. Word classes may be classified as open or closed: open classes acquire new members constantly, while closed classes 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. 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.
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.

History

The classification of words into lexical categories is found from the earliest moments in the history of linguistics.

India

In the Nirukta, written in the 6th or 5th century BCE, the Sanskrit grammarian Yāska defined four main categories of words:
  • नाम nāma – noun
  • आख्यात ākhyāta – verb
  • उपसर्ग upasarga – pre-verb or prefix
  • निपात nipāta – particle, invariant word
These four were grouped into two larger classes: inflectable and uninflectable.
The ancient work on the grammar of the Tamil language, Tolkāppiyam, argued to have been written around 2nd century CE, classifies Tamil words as peyar, vinai, idai, and uri.

Western tradition

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 and nouns ". Aristotle added another class, "conjunction" , which included not only the words known today as conjunctions, but also other parts.
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:
  • 'Name' 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.
  • Verb : a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone
  • Participle : a part of speech sharing features of the verb and the noun
  • Article : a declinable part of speech, taken to include the definite article, but also the basic relative pronoun
  • Pronoun : a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for a person
  • Preposition : a part of speech placed before other words in composition and in syntax
  • Adverb : a part of speech without inflection, in modification of or in addition to a verb, adjective, clause, sentence, or other adverb
  • Conjunction : 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 modified the above eightfold system, excluding "article" but adding "interjection".
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, adjectives ' and numerals '. This is reflected in the older English terminology noun substantive, noun adjective and noun numeral. Later the adjective became a separate class, as often did the numerals, and the English word noun came to be applied to substantives only.

Classification

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, adjectives and adverbs. 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 including particles and postpositions although many fewer words are in these categories.
The classification below, or slight expansions of it, is still followed in most dictionaries:
;Noun : a word or lexical item denoting any abstract or concrete entity ; a person, place, thing, idea, or quality. 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 : a substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns make sentences shorter and clearer since they replace nouns.
;Adjective : a modifier of a noun or pronoun. Adjectives make the meaning of another word more precise.
;Verb : a word denoting an action, occurrence, or state of being. Without a verb, a group of words cannot be a clause or sentence.
;Adverb : a modifier of an adjective, verb, or another adverb. Adverbs make language more precise.
;Preposition : a word that relates words to each other in a phrase or sentence and aids in syntactic context. Prepositions show the relationship between a noun or a pronoun with another word in the sentence.
;Conjunction : a syntactic connector; links words, phrases, or clauses. Conjunctions connect words or group of words.
;Interjection : an emotional greeting or exclamation. Interjections express strong feelings and emotions.
;Article :a grammatical marker of definiteness or indefiniteness. 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 or sometimes the term 'determiner' 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 do not have that ending, while many adjectives do have it, as do occasional words in other parts of speech.
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

recognize that the above list of eight or nine word classes is drastically simplified. 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, or not applicable to certain languages. 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 :
  • Categories that will usually be open classes:
  • * Adjectives
  • * Adverbs
  • * Nouns
  • * Verbs
  • * Interjections
  • Categories that will usually be closed classes:
  • * Auxiliary verbs
  • * Coverbs
  • * Conjunctions
  • * Determiners
  • * Measure words or classifiers
  • * Adpositions
  • * Preverbs
  • * Pronouns
  • * Cardinal numerals
  • * Particles
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, verb phrases and so on. Lexical and phrasal categories together are called syntactic categories.