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October -20- 2011

Word Classes

Definition:

Word classes a set of words that display the same formal properties, especially their

inflections and distribution, it similar to the more traditional term part of speech.

The two major families of word classes are (1) lexical (or open) classes (nouns, verbs,

adjectives, adverbs) and (2) function (or closed) classes (determiners, particles, prepositions,

and others).

There is a long tradition of classifying words, for the purpose of grammatical

description, into the ten word classes (or parts of speech) noun, verb, adjective, adverb,

pronoun, preposition, conjunction, numeral, article, interjection. While each of these terms is

useful, and they are indispensable for practical purposes, their status in a fully explicit

description of a language or in general grammatical theory remains disputed. Although most

of the traditional word class distinctions can be made in most languages, the cross-linguistic

applicability of these notions is often problematic. Here I focus primarily on the major word

classes noun, verb, and adjective, and on ways of dealing with the cross-linguistic variability

in their patterning.

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Words can be classified by various criteria, such as phonological properties (e.g.,

monosyllabic vs. polysyllabic words), social factors (e.g., general vs. technical vocabulary),

and language history (e.g. loan words vs. native words). All of these are classes of words, but

as a technical term, word class refers to the ten traditional categories below (plus perhaps a

few others), most of which go back to the Greek and Roman grammarians.

One way to begin studying basic sentence structures is to consider the traditional parts

of speech (also called word classes): nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs,

prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and interjections. Except for interjections ("ouch!"),

which have a habit of standing alone, and articles (a, an, the), which appear in front of nouns,

the parts of speech come in many varieties and may show up just about anywhere in a

sentence. To know for sure what part of speech a word is, we have to look not only at the

word itself but also at its meaning, position, and use in a sentence.

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Open Classes

Definition:

The category of content words that is, parts of speech (or word classes) that readily accept

new members. Contrast with closed class.

The open classes in English are nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

Examples and Observations:

"All the words in a language can be broadly divided into two categories, open and

closed. The closed category is so called because it does not easily accept new words.

Its members are fixed and do not usually change. The open category contains nouns,

verbs, adverbs, and descriptive adjectives, exactly those parts of speech that remain

open to new additions.”

"One familiar variety of language in which the distinction between open-class words

and closed-class words is important is known as telegraphic speech. The term

telegraphic derives from the kind of language used in telegrams, where considerations

of space (and money) force one to be as terse as possible. HAVING WONDERFUL

TIME; HOTEL GREAT; RETURNING FLIGHT 256; SEND MONEY; STOP.

Generally speaking, in telegraphic forms of language the open-class words are

retained, whereas the closed-class words are omitted wherever possible."

Defining Nouns, Verbs, and Adjecti v es

In the following, the emphasis will be on the content word classes: nouns, verbs, and

adjectives. The properties of the function words are more appropriately discussed in other

contexts (e.g., auxiliaries in the context of tense and aspect, conjunctions in the context of

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subordinate clauses, and so on). Before asking how nouns, verbs, and adjectives are defined,

it must be made clear whether a definition of these word classes in a particular language (e.g.,

English or Japanese) is intended, or whether we want a definition of these classes for

language in general.

The widely known and much-maligned definitions of nouns as denoting: thing,

persons, and places of verbs as denoting `actions and processes,' and adjectives as denoting

`properties' is, of course, hopelessly simplistic from the point of view of a particular

language. In most languages, it is easy to find nouns that do not denote persons, things, or

places (e.g., word, power, war), and verbs that do not denote actions or processes (e.g., know,

lack, exist), and many languages also have adjectives that do not denote properties (e.g.,

urban, celestial, vehicular).

However, if the goal is to define nouns, verbs, and adjectives in general terms that are

not restricted to a particular language, these simplistic notional definitions do not fare so

badly. In the first part of the twentieth century, the structuralize movement emphasized the

need for rigorous language-particular definitions of grammatical notions, and notionally

based definitions of word classes were rejected because they patently did not work for

individual languages or were hard to apply rigorously.

Instead, preference was given to morphological and syntactic criteria, e.g., `if an

English word has a plural in ±s, it is a noun,' or `if a word occurs in the context the¼book, it

is an adjective.' But of course this practice was not new, because words like power and war

have always been treated as nouns on morphological and syntactic grounds. Some older

grammarians, neglecting syntax, defined nouns, verbs, and adjectives exclusively in

morphological terms and as a result nouns and adjectives were often lumped together in a

single class in languages. But the predominant practice in Western grammar has been to give

priority to the syntactic criterion. For instance, adjectives in German have a characteristic

pattern of inflection that makes them quite unlike nouns, and this morphological pattern could

be used to define the class (e.g., roter/rote/rotes `red (masculine/feminine/neuter/).

However, a few property words are indeclinable and are always invariant (e.g., rosa,

as in die rosa Tapete `the pink wallpaper'). These words would not be adjectives according to

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a strictly morphological definition, but in fact everybody regards words like rosa as

adjectives, because they can occur in the same syntactic environments as other adjectives.

Thus, there is universal agreement among linguists that language-particular word classes need

to be defined on morphosyntactic grounds for each individual language.

However, two problems remain.

(a) The generality problem: how should word classes be defined for language in general?

Morphological patterns and syntactic constructions vary widely across languages, so

they cannot be used for cross-linguistically applicable definitions.

(b) The subclass problem: which of the classes identified by language particular criteria

count as word classes, and which only count as subclasses? For instance, English has

some property words that can occur in the context is more ¼ than, e.g., beautiful,

difficult, interesting. Another group of semantically similar words (e.g., pretty, tough,

nice) does not occur in this context. Nobody takes this as evidence that English has

two different word classes where other languages have just a single class (adjectives),

but it is not clear why it does not count as sufficient evidence.

The solution to the generality problem that is usually adopted (often implicitly, but cf.

Schachter 1985 and Wierzbicka 2000) is that one defines word classes on a language-

particular basis, and then the word class that includes most words for things and persons is

called `noun,' the word class that includes most words for actions and processes is called

`verb,' and the word class that includes most words for properties is called `adjective.'

However, the subclass problem has not been solved or even addressed satisfactorily, and the

use of word-class notions in a general or cross-linguistic sense remains problematic.

Characterizing Nouns, Verbs, and Adjecti v es

Despite the theoretical problems in defining word classes in general, in practice it is

often not difficult to agree on the use of these terms in a particular language. This is because

nouns, verbs, and adjectives show great similarities in their behavior across languages. Their

most common characteristics are briefly summarized in this section.

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A. Nouns

In many languages, nouns have affixes indicating number (singular, plural, dual, see

grammatical Number), case (e.g., nominative, accusative, ergative, dative), possessor

person/number (`my,' `your,' `his,' etc.), and definiteness.

Nouns can be found anywhere in a sentence, and most sentences contain several

nouns. One way to find nouns is to look for the little words a, an, the. The naming word that

comes after them is probably a noun. Sometimes nouns appear without these little words, but

you can usually insert them without changing the meaning of the sentence.

Paul and his children visited the continent of Africa and saw some lions.

Paul is a noun that names a person.

Children name people nouns in this

Continent names a thing picture?

Africa names a place

Lions names a thing.

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Some examples follow.

(a) Number. Khanty (Western Siberia) xot `house,' xot-yyn `two houses' (dual),

xot-yt `houses' (plural).

(b) Case. Classical Arabic al-kitaab-u

`the book' (nominative), al-kitaab-i

`the book's' (genitive), al-kitaab-a

`the book (accusative).'

(c) Possessor person/number. Somali xoolah-ayga

`my herd,' xoolah-aaga `your herd,' xoleh-eeda

`her herd,' xooli-hiisa `his herd,' etc.

Syntactically, nouns can always be combined with demonstratives (e.g., that house)

and often with definiteness markers (the house), and they can occur in the syntactic function

of argument (subject, object, etc.) without additional coding. Thus, in a simple two argument

clause we can have the child caused the accident but not *smoke causes ill. (Here and in the

following, the subscripts N, V and A indicate nouns, verbs and adjectives.) Verbs like smoke

and adjectives like ill need additional function-indicating coding to occur in argument

function (smok-ing causes ill-ness). Because reference is primarily achieved with nouns, it

is nouns that can serve as antecedents for pronouns (compare Albania's destruction of itself

vs. *the Albanian destruction of itself (impossible)). Finally, nouns are often divided into a

number of gender classes which are manifested in grammatical agreement.

Types of Nouns:

Abstract Noun and Concrete Noun

Animate Noun and Inanimate Noun

Attributive Noun

Collective Noun

Common Noun and Proper Noun

Compound Noun

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Count Noun and Mass Noun

Verbal Noun

Observations:

"In parsing nouns, traditional grammar insisted on noting gender as well as number and

case. Modern grammars disregard this criterion, recognizing that gender has no

grammatical role in English. They do however find good grammatical reasons for

respecting the importance of several other traditional contrasts, especially proper vs.

common, and abstract vs. concrete, and have developed the contrast between mass and

count nouns into a major dimension of sub classification."

(David Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge Univ.

Press, 2003)

Nouns are not restricted to a particular category; that is, a single noun can occupy several

of these categories. For example,

three dogs can be [common, concrete & countable]

American government can be [proper, concrete & collective]

Christian faith can be [proper, abstract & countable]

(Bernard O'Dwyer, Modern English Structures: Form, Function, and Position. Broadview,

2000)

As for meaning, nouns are traditionally known to be names of persons, places, things, and

ideas. But this meaning aspect of nouns remains rather vague--verbs, for example, may

also be considered names of ideas--and the formal characteristics are often more reliable.

Among the formal characteristics of English nouns are that they typically:

a. may be definite in meaning by use of preceding the (the definite article), as in the book, the

guy, the answer;

b. may be made possessive by suffixing -'s, as in people's, Jane's, a politician’s;

c. may be made negative by prefixing non-, as in nonbeliever, nonsense, nonunion.

(Grover Hudson, Essential Introductory Linguistics. Blackwell, 2000)

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B. Adjectives

In a fair number of languages, adjectives have affixes indicating comparison (comparative

degree, superlative degree, equative degree), and in a few languages, adjectives are inflected

or agreement with the noun they modify.

Some examples follow.

(a) Comparison. Latin audax `brave,' audac-ior

`braver' (comparative), audac-issimus

`bravest' (superlative).

(b) Comparison. Tagalog (Philippines) mahal

“expensive' sing-mahal `as expensive as.'

(c) Agreement. Hindi acchaa `good' (masculine singular),

acchee (masculine plural),

acchii (feminine singular/plural).

In many languages, adjectives show no inflectional properties of their own.

Syntactically, a peculiarity of adjectives is that they can typically occur in

comparative constructions (whether they show affixes marking comparison or not), and they

can be combined with degree modifiers of various kinds that do not co-occur with verbs and

nouns (e.g., very hot, too difficult,)

Adjectives generally occur as nominal modifiers without additional coding, whereas

nouns and verbs mostly need additional function-indicating coding when they occur as

modifiers.

To talk or write about a person place or thing, you use nouns like girl, house, or tree.

To add descriptions to those nouns that give the reader a clearer picture of what you mean,

you add “detail” words in front of the noun like little, blue, rich, old. Words that tell more

about nouns or pronouns are called adjectives.

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An adjective is a word which describes or modifies a noun or pronoun. A modifier is

a word that limits, changes, or alters the meaning of another word. Therefore, an adjective

limits, changes, or alters the meaning of a noun or pronoun. Adjectives are usually placed

before the noun.

the white, puffy clouds

a happy, carefree child

some tall, stately trees

a rich dark chocolate layer cake

five huge leafy bushes

Adjectives are sometimes hard to find. A good “trick” to remember is that adjectives are

almost always placed next to the nouns that they modify.

Observations:

"Most common adjectives form pairs which contrast in terms of meaning: good - bad,

wide - narrow, useful - useless, and so on. Many adjectives are derived from from

other words (especially nouns), and are easy to recognize by their suffixes. Some of

the most common adjective suffixes are: -al (as in equal), -ous (as in famous), -ic (as

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in basic), -y (as in sleepy), -ful (as in beautiful and -less (as in hopeless)."

(Geoffrey Leech, A Glossary of English Grammar. Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2006)

"In his 2002 memorial eulogy to former cabinet minister Barbara Castle, Foreign

Secretary Jack Straw recalled her remark, "Bugger the adjectives. It's the nouns and

verbs people want."

(Ned Halley, Dictionary of Modern English Grammar. Wordsworth, 2005)

C. Verbs

In many languages, verbs have affixes indicating tense (present, past, future), aspect

(imperfective, perfective, progressive), mood (indicative, imperative, optative, subjunctive,

etc.), polarity (affirmative, negative), valence-changing operations (passive causative, see

Valency and Argument Structure in Syntax), and the person/number of subject and object(s)

Semantic notions that are more rarely expressed morphologically are spatial orientation and

instrument.

Syntactically, verbs generally take between one and three nominal arguments, e.g.,

fall (1: patient), dance (1: agent), kill (2: agent, patient), see (2: experiencer, stimulus), give

(3: agent, patient, recipient). Nouns and adjectives may also take arguments, but they are not

nearly as rich as verbs, and nouns that correspond to verbs often cannot take arguments in the

most direct way (compare Plato defined beauty vs. *Plato definition beauty (impossible);

additional coding is required: Plato's definition of beauty. Verbs always occur as predicates

without additional coding, whereas nouns and adjectives often need additional function

indicating coding when they occur as predicates, namely a copular verb (cf. Halim worksV

vs. *Halim a workerN (impossible), *Halim hard-workingA (impossible); here the copula is

is required).

Some special verbs are a little more difficult to find because they do not show any

action. When you find the words am, are, is, was, and were used in a sentence between two

nouns, you have found one of these special kinds of verbs. Sometimes these special verbs are

used to show how a person is feeling or to describe a quality.

Verb Types

Dynamic Verbs

Finite Verbs11

Transitive Verbs

Examples and Observations:

I made an appointment with my doctor that afternoon, and he referred me to a psychiatrist. I

got pills, I had about a dozen sessions with her. All of that helped. It was useful to me, yes.

But secondary, I felt. Secondary to my yanking the steering wheel, my pulling sharply left as I

braked, to my wanting so desperately and reflectively to be in life, to be still moving and

doing, those wonderful verbs."

(Sue Miller, The World Below. Random House, 2005)

"The LGSWE [Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English] compares a variety of

lexical features across spoken and written registers and reports that almost one-third of all

content words in spoken interaction are lexical verbs (also known as full verbs, e.g., eat,

dance). Lexical verbs are extremely common in both conversation and fiction but quite rare in

written registers such as news and academic prose. The single-word lexical verbs say, get, go,

know, and think are the five most common verbs occurring in British and American

conversation. The 12 most common lexical verbs identified in LGSWE (say, get, go, know,

think, see, make, come, take, want, give, and mean--occurring over 1,000 times per million

words), account for 'nearly 45% of all lexical verbs in conversation.'"

(Eric Friginal, The Language of Outsourced Call Centers. John Benjamins, 2009)

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D. Adverbs

Another type of describing word or modifier is the adverb. Adverbs limit, change, or

alter the words they modify.

1. ADVERBS MODIFY VERBS

He is driving.

This sentence tells you only that a person is doing an action. If an adverb is added,

you will find out how he is driving, where he is driving, or when he is driving.

How is he driving? He is driving quickly.

Where is he driving? He is driving away.

When is he driving? He is driving now.

2. ADVERBS MODIFY ADJECTIVES

In the following sentence, the noun sunset is described as beautiful. What part of

speech is he word beautiful.

The campers saw a beautiful sunset.

Beautiful is an adjective modifying the noun sunset. If you want to tell how beautiful

it was, you can add something in front of the adjective.

The campers saw a very beautiful sunset.

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The campers saw a truly beautiful sunset.

When a word is added that expresses how beautiful the sunset was, or to what extent it was

beautiful, that word is called an adverb. Thus very and truly are adverbs modifying the

adjective beautiful.

3. ADVERBS MODIFY OTHER ADVERBS

Adverbs may also be used to modify other adverbs.

The dog ate quickly.

The adverb quickly modifies the verb ate and shows how the dog ate. By adding another

adverb, we can find out how quickly the dog ate, as follows:

How quickly did the dog eat? The dog ate very quickly.

Distinguishing between adjectives and adverbs

Sometimes the same word can be both an adjective and and an adverb. In order to

distinguish between them, it is important to look at the context of the word and its function in

a sentence:

The fast train from London to Cardiff leaves at three o'clock.

The sprinter took the bend fast.

The bed was hard and gave me a bad night's sleep.

After faltering, the horses hit the fence hard.

In the first and third sentences, the words fast and hard modify nouns. The first is an

attributive adjective, coming before the noun it modifies; the second is a predicative

adjective, coming after the verb to be. In the second and fourth sentences, the words fast and

hard modify verbs. These are both circumstance adverbs which are in the end position."

(Sara Thorne, Mastering Advanced Language, 2nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)

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REFERENCES

http://wwwstaff.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/2001wcl.pdf

http://www.nald.ca/library/learning/academic/english/grammar/speech/module5.pdf

http://www.methodist.edu/english/terms.pdf

http://luluvikar.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/an-introduction-to-english-syntax.pdf

http://www.punksinscience.org/kleanthes/courses/UCY04F/PLA/syntax.intro.pdf

http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/a/POS.htm

http://dc381.4shared.com/download/EfG9Vtc5/

ENGLISH_SYNTAX_Andrew_Radford.pdf?tsid=20111017-041934-feaac944

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/tta/wc/wcall.htm

http://www.real.gold.ac.uk/essayguide/words/classes.html

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