Word classes

Having arrived at a definition of ‘word’, we briefly introduce the notion of word classes or parts of speech. The idea that words can be straightforwardly grouped into classes is not uncontroversial, and some of these categories have a different status in different theories. In traditional descriptive grammar, where the word classes were inherited from Latin grammar via the traditional grammarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English is usually described as having eight word classes: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection. However, a new set of word classes has gradually emerged within modern descriptive linguistics which aims to present a more objective view of word classes from a cross-linguistic perspective. According to the distributional approach to word classes, words are grouped with certain classes mainly on the basis of their morphological and distributional behaviour: words of the same class will generally take the same sort of derivational and inflectional affixes (morphological behaviour), and will generally occupy the same positions or ‘slots’ in a sentence relative to members of other word classes (distributional behaviour). We illustrate here with English examples.

Nouns Nouns often refer to entities, including people, and abstractions (like war and peace). Nouns typically take the inflectional plural affix -s (cats, dogs, houses) but there are exceptions (*mans,*peaces). Nouns also typically take the possessive affix -’s (man’s best friend), and in terms of distribution, follow determiners like your and adjectives like funny (your funny face). Nouns can be divided into two main subclasses: common nouns and proper nouns. Proper nouns are names of people or places like Lily or London. Common nouns do not pick out particular individuals by name, but refer to classes. These are the ‘ordinary’ nouns like cat, house and water, and this subclass is the one that we are most concerned with in this book because common nouns represent one of the major linguistic categories. Common nouns can be divided into count nouns and mass nouns. Count nouns can be counted (one book, two books) and have to be preceded by a determiner like the when singular (compare The book is on the table with *Book is on the table). In the plural, however, count nouns can occur without a deter miner (Books are expensive). Mass nouns cannot be counted or pluralised (*two sands) and can occur with or without determiners. This classification of nouns is summarised in Figure 14.7.

Verbs

Verbs typically denote actions, processes or events, and take inflectional affixes including the third person singular (he/she/it) present tense -s, the past tense affix -ed and the progressive participle affix -ing. These are illustrated in example (5).

These verb forms reflect a number of properties relating to agreement, tense and aspect to which we return below. Verbs can often take derivational affixes like noun-forming -er (employ–employer) or adjective-forming -able (employ– employable). In terms of distribution, the English verb follows the subject.

 Adjectives

 Adjectives typically denote attributes or states, and some can inflect for grade (tall, taller, tallest). Adjectives can often be identified by the presence of a derivational affix like -ful (careful),-y (funny), or -ish (selfish). In terms of distribution, English adjectives occur in their attributive function preceding the noun or in predicative function following copular verbs like be or become:

The difference between the attributive and the predicative function of adjectives relates to how ‘vital’ the adjective is to the well-formedness of the grammatical unit. In (6a), we can remove the adjective and we still have a well-formed (although less informative) grammatical unit: I love her face. If we remove the adjective in (6b), we are left with an incomplete grammatical unit: Her face was…

Adverbs

 Adverbs are words like suddenly, repeatedly, hopefully and soon. These typically express information relating to time, manner, place and frequency, and have a modifying function within the sentence (providing information, for example, about how, where or when something happened). Some are recognisable by the adverb-forming derivational affix -ly, and a few inflect for grade (soon, sooner, soonest), but on the whole these are difficult to identify by morphology or distribution because they have the widest distribution of all the English word classes. A further complication with this category is that members of other word classes can also perform the same function as adverbs. This is called an adverbial function, which means that something behaves in the same way as an adverb, providing modifying information about place, manner, time and so on, regardless of word class. For example, the expression after supper performs an adverbial function in the sentence George arrived after supper, but is not an adverb; it is a preposition phrase, consisting of a preposition and a noun phrase. The term ‘adverbial’ refers to a type of grammatical function (section 14.3.5).

The word classes introduced so far represent content words or open-class words. As we have seen, open-class words have a readily identifiable meaning and belong to classes that are large and constantly changing as new words are introduced and old words are lost. While open-class words provide the content meaning in utterances, there are several equally important word classes that contain grammatical words or closed-class words. These have a less readily identifiable meaning (often they are described as ‘function words’) and belong to classes that are small and more resistant to change. With the exception of some determiners (see below), none of these word classes has any inflectional or derivational properties in English, but they do show some predictable distributional patterns. The discussion of these categories in English rests upon some new terms like ‘phrase’ and ‘clause’ which will be discussed later in the section.

 Prepositions

Prepositions are words like on, with, under and beyond, which combine with a noun phrase to form a preposition phrase (on the table, with my best friend). These are called prepositions because they precede the noun phrase. In some languages, they follow the noun phrase and are called postpositions. The general term for both prepositions and postpositions is ‘adposition’.

Determiners

Determiners are words like the, my and some, which combine with a noun to form a noun phrase (the garden, my cats, some flowers). Apart from the deter miners this and that which inflect for number (these, those), determiners have no other inflectional or derivational properties in English. It is important to remember that determiners are followed by nouns because some words can be both determiners (I love these flowers) and pronouns (I love these).

Pronouns

 Pronouns are sometimes described as a subclass of nouns because they show the same pattern of distribution. In other words, pronouns substitute for nouns (hence the term ‘pronoun’). However, pronouns can be viewed as a separate category from nouns because they belong to a closed class and because they provide what cognitive linguists call schematic meaning rather than content meaning. For example, you could probably draw a picture of my favourite teacup without having seen it, but you would be unable to draw a picture of it without having seen it. In isolation from context, it means ‘a single inanimate object’. Of course, in reality we are never called upon to interpret it out of context, but this illustrates the difference between content meaning and schematic meaning. There are several different kinds of pronouns. To mention a few examples, per sonal pronouns are words like you, me and her; possessive pronouns are words like mine and hers (not to be confused with possessive determiners my and her), and demonstrative pronouns are words like this/these and that/those.

 Auxiliary verbs

 Finally, we mention the closed-class category of auxiliary verbs. In English, this category includes the modal auxiliaries (for example, can, must and will) which introduce mood into the sentence, and the primary auxiliaries (have and be) which introduce aspect and passive voice. We return to tense, aspect, mood and voice in more detail in Chapter 18, limiting the present discussion to the grammatical properties of the auxiliary verbs. The modal auxiliaries share few characteristics with ‘ordinary’ (lexical) verbs in English. They do not inflect for progressive aspect, for example (*musting) nor do they have a third person singular -s form (*she musts). They are called auxiliary verbs because they belong inside the verb string (this is bracketed in (7a)), because they must be followed by a verb phrase (VP), and because they can function as operators. This means that they can invert with the subject (she) to form a question:

The primary auxiliaries have and be look more like ‘ordinary’ verbs. They inflect for tense, for example. As we saw briefly in Chapter 11, the auxiliary have introduces perfect aspect into the sentence, which means that the event is viewed as completed, and has to be followed by a perfect (traditionally called ‘past’) participle (sung):

The auxiliary be can introduce progressive or continuous aspect into the sentence, which means that the event is viewed as ongoing. In this case, be has to be followed by a progressive (traditionally called ‘present’) participle (singing):

The auxiliary be can also introduce passive voice. As we saw earlier, this means that the person or thing that undergoes the event depicted by the verb appears in subject position (before the verb). Example (10a) shows an active sentence and (10b) its passive counterpart. Observe that the passive auxiliary was is followed by the same participle form as the perfect auxiliary have (e.g. sung). As we observed earlier, this is traditionally referred to as the ‘past’ participle:

Like the modal verbs, the primary auxiliaries can also function as operators (11). As example (11d) shows, the verb do also has an auxiliary function in English. This verb does not introduce its own aspect or voice into the clause. Instead, it occurs when the speaker wants to emphasise the truth of a statement (Lily does like shellfish), or when the sentence requires a verb that can function as an operator but lacks another modal or auxiliary to perform this function. For this reason, the auxiliary do is sometimes called a ‘dummy’ auxiliary.

The verbs have, be and do are not always auxiliaries. They can also be lexical verbs. If have, be or do is the only verb in the sentence, it is a lexical verb. This is illustrated by (12a). In some dialects of English, lexical have can invert with the subject to form a question (12b). If have, be or do is followed by another verb phrase, it is an auxiliary verb; the fact that these verbs can occur both as lexical and auxiliary verbs explains why it is possible to find a sequence of two instances of the ‘same’ verb in a single clause. This is illustrated by examples (12c)–(12e).

When the verb be is a lexical verb, it is called the copula, which means ‘linking verb’. It links the subject of the sentence (Lily) to the phrase that provides some information about the subject:

As this discussion illustrates, the behaviour of the primary auxiliaries and their lexical counterparts is not entirely distinct. Another way of saying this is that lexical have and be are not prototypical lexical verbs.

There are several other closed-class categories that we will not discuss here, mainly including ‘linking’ categories that join sentences, like coordinating con junctions (and, but), subordinating conjunctions (although, because), discourse connectives (however, therefore) and complementisers (for example, that in she hoped that they would be married in the snow). We will also have little to say about interjections, words like yuk! or wow! that form independent utterances and do not participate in grammatical structure.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

المجمع العلمي يقيم مهرجانًا بذكرى الولادات الشعبانية في بغداد

معهد القرآن الكريم النسوي يباشر استعداداته لإقامة مهرجان السقاء القرآني السنوي الخامس

بالتعاون مع جامعة ستانفورد.. جامعة الكفيل تعتمد منهجًا متطورًا لطب الطوارئ

سماحة السيد الصافي يستقبل وفد شركة (سيتي فارما) الباكستانية المختصة في الأدوية

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

اللحظات الأخيرة قبل الموت.. هذا هو تسلسل "فقدان الحواس"

وخز الأطراف وضعف الذاكرة.. علامات على نقص فيتامين هام

عادة صباحية بسيطة.. تأثيرها قد يحسن ضغط الدم

عادات يومية تدمر قلبك بصمت.. خبراء يطلقون التحذير

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

الذكاء الاصطناعي يفك لغز آثار أقدام الديناصورات

القمر أولا.."سبيس إكس" تؤجل خططها الخاصة بالرحلات إلى المريخ

الذكور أم الإناث؟ دراسة "تنسف الشائع" بشأن التوحد

خبير يكشف عن اقتراب العلماء من فك شفرات "لغات الحيوانات" !

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Characteristics of the cognitive approach to grammar

Agreement and case

Grammatical functions

Units of grammar

Grammar

Grammatical terminology

Cognitive approaches to grammaticalization

Constructional approaches to grammar

Cognitive Grammar

The Conceptual Structuring System Model

Distinct cognitive approaches to grammar

The architecture of the model