Lecture 3. The Parts of Speech

The traditional grammatical classes of words are called parts of speech. This name was introduced in the grammatical teaching in Ancient Greece, where the concept of the sentence was not yet explicitly identified in distinction to the general idea of speech, where no strict differentiation was drawn between the word as a vocabulary unit and the word as a functional element of the sentence.

A part of speech is a class of words which is characterized by certain typical features which are typical of all the elements which constitute this class (or words or lexical units).

The problem of parts of speech has been a problem for centuries. The number of parts of speech which specialists distinguish varies from 4 to 13-14 or even 15. And if we consider Fries’s classification, we find that he has 4 main classes + 15 functional elements = 19 classes of words.

It’s not an easy thing to describe, to give a full adequate definition of a part of speech. A word as belonging to a part of speech should be characterized from at least two different points/aspects. First of all every word even a function word is a unit in itself as such it has a certain phonetic structure, a certain lexical meaning or a certain word building structure. At the same time we don’t speak in words we speak in utterances, in sentences, therefore a word should be regarded as a member of larger unit. If we consider a word as a unit in itself we consider some properties which characterize the word as such: its lexical and morphological properties; and if we consider the word as a member of a larger unit we should consider its syntactic characteristics.

There are different approaches in describing and classifying the parts of speech.

In English grammar the theory of parts of speech begins in the period of prenormative and normative grammars.

Lowth: in his classification we have 8 parts of speech. The names were all the same but the grouping was already different from what we understand, thus the noun and the adjective were grouped together as two kinds of nouns (they both were names).

Bullocar divided parts of speech into declinable and indeclinable (he already began to investigate the peculiarities of classes of words).

Ben Johnson distinguished changeable and unchangeable parts of speech but he called them “words with number” and “words without number”.

Charles Butler distinguished between declinable and indeclinable parts of speech but he calls them “words with case and number” and “words without case and number”.

Brightlandfeatured a new approach. He completely abandoned the old classes and names and distinguished between four parts of speech: names (noun), qualities (adjective), affirmations (verb), particles (all the predicative parts of speech).

Sweed and Jesperson studied the parts of speech very deeply considering all the various approaches. It was Jesperson who showed that it is impossible to approach a class of words from only one angle. He refers words to a certain class (hence to a certain meaning) through their distribution.

So the traditional approach to the problem of parts of speech takes into account three main criteria which describe a certain word both as a lexical unit and as a unit of a higher level that is meaning, form, function (in the sentence).

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 categorical meaning of the part of speech.

The formal considers the specific inflexional and derivational features of all the lexemic subsets of a part of speech.

The functional criterion concerns the syntactic role of words in the sentence typical of a part of speech.

In accord with the three criteria words on the upper level of classification are divided into notional and functional, or changeable and unchangeable.

The features of the noun: the categorical meaning of substance, the changeable forms of number and case, the specific suffixal forms of derivation, the substantive functions in the sentence, prepositional connections, modification by an adjective.

The features of the adjective: the categorical meaning of property, the forms of degrees of comparison, the specific suffixal forms of derivation, adjectival functions in the sentence.

The features of the numeral: the categorical meaning of number (cardinal and ordinal), the narrow set of simple numerals, the specific forms of composition for compound numerals, the specific suffixal forms of derivation for ordinal numerals, the functions of numerical substantive.

The features of the pronoun: the categorial meaning of indication, the narrow sets of various status with the corresponding formal properties of categorial changeability and word-building, the substantival and adjectival functions for different sets.

The features of the verb: the categorial meaning of process – finite and non-finite, the forms of verbal categories of person, number, tense, aspect, voice, mood, the opposition of the finite and non-finite forms, the function of the finite predicate for the finite verb, the mixed verbal- other than verbal functions for the non-finite verb.

The features of the adverb: the categorial meaning of the secondary property, the forms of the degree of comparison for qualitative adverbs, the specific suffixal forms of derivation, the functions of various adverbial modifiers.

To the functional parts of speech in English belong the article, the preposition, the conjunction, the particle, the modal word, the interjection. The article expresses the specific limitation of the substantive functions. The preposition expresses the dependences and interdependences of substantive referent. The conjunction expresses connections of phenomena. The particle unites the functional words of specifying and limiting meaning. The modal word expresses the attitude of the speaker to the reflected situation and its parts. The interjection occupying a detached position in the sentence is a signal of emotions.

The syntactico-distributional classification of wordsis based on the study of their combinability by means of substitution testing. The testing results in developing the standard model of four main positions of notional words in the English sentence: those of the noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. According to Fries the groups of functional words can be distributed among the 3 main sets. The words of the first set are used as specifiers of notional words. Here belong determiners of nouns, modal verbs serving as specifiers of notional verbs, functional modifiers and intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs. The words of the second set play the role of interpositional elements, determining the relations of notional words to one another. Here belong prepositions and conjunctions. The words of the third set refer to the sentence as a whole. Such are question-words, inducement words, attention-getting words, words of affirmation and negation, sentence introducers.

Exercises:

1. Identify the part of speech the following words belong to. Explain your point of view.

acceptable, forgetful, on, hundred, myself, but, book, influential, soften, you, girl, who, itemize, it, color-blind, gold, whether, hyphenate, rely on, third, or, if, information, as far as, four, write, ice-cold, that, eagerly, mine, may, in.

2. Divide the derivational suffixes in to those specific for the nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs. Give your examples of the words formed with the help of the given affixes.

er, ly, ness, ful, ship, ate, ial, ize, en, able

3. Match the suffixes with their meanings.

4. Illustrate the classification of functional words given by Fries.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 2059