Parts of Speech

Paper Summary:

This essay evaluates the definitions and problems of the major word classes; nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs and also touches on the minor classes; pronouns, determiners, auxiliaries and conjunctions. It discusses the reasonings and logic behind these parts of speech.

From the Paper:

"English does have parts of speech for a start. The need for differentiating a similar word in different context for a clearer understanding led to classifying words into word classes, otherwise known as parts of speech. Crystal (1999) defines word class as groups of words that behave in a similar manner syntactically and morphologically. The word order of a sentence in modern English is quite fixed and therefore it is important to know the classification of words before they can be arranged in a sentence. For example, I girl am a would be grammatically anomalous. Changes in the word tenses or aspect can be predicted morphologically if word classification were to be done. In order to be grammatical, he was ill is definitely preferred over he illed or any other variations. In addition, the presence of word class tells us that in a context like he made a killing from killing birds, where killing is used in two different ways differentiated by categorizing the first killing as a noun and the second one as a verb. Clearly, there are more word classes than the two mentioned above in order to facilitate the differentiating words in a sentence. Traditionally, there are eight parts of speech: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections (Burridge & Mulder, 1998:148) although the list gets longer periodically. This essay would discuss some problems in defining major word classes like nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs which are of an open class where new lexemes are constantly added, and the minor classes such as pronouns, prepositions, determiners, auxiliaries and conjunctions that are known to be closed classes; new lexemes are rare. However, concepts that are discussed are by no means exhaustive."

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