Размещено на http://www.allbest.ru/

Vladimir State University after Alexander G. and Nicholas G. Stoletovs.

Parts of speech (morphology)

Barinkov A.V.

The words of language are divided into grammatically relevant sets, or classes. Parts of speech are grammatical (or lexico-grammatical) classes of words identified on the basis of the three criteria: the meaning common to all the words of the given class, the form with the morphological characteristics of a type of word, and the function 20 in the sentence typical of all the words of this class (e. g. the English noun has the categorical meaning of “thingness”, the changeable forms of number and case, and the functions of the subject, object and substantive predicative). language word grammatical english

The notion of “parts of speech” goes back to the times of Ancient Greece. Aristotle (384-322 B. C.) distinguished between nouns, verbs and connectives. Traditional grammars of English, following the approach which can be traced back to Latin, agreed that there were eight parts of speech in English: the noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection. Some books additionally mentioned the article. A. I. Smirnitsky and B. A .Ilyish are Russian scholars of English grammar notable, among other things, for the development of the three-criteria characterization of the parts of speech.

Modern classifications, proposed by different scholars, distinguish, as a rule, between notional parts of speech, having a full nominative value, and functional parts of speech characterized by a partial nominative value. The complete lists of notional and functional words, ever mentioned in those classifications, include the following items.

Notional words: Functional words:

1) nouns; 1) prepositions;

2) adjectives; 2) conjunctions;

3) verbs; 3) articles;

4) adverbs; 4) particles;

5) pronouns; 5) postpositions.

6) numerals;

7) statives;

8) modal words;

9) interjections.

The main problem with the traditional classification is that some grammatical phenomena given above have intermediary features in this system. They make up a continuum, a transition zone, between the polar entities. For example, there is a very specific group of quantifiers in English (such words as many, much, little, few). They have features of pronouns, numerals, and adjectives and are referred to as “hybrids.

Statives can be considered as making up a separate part of speech (according to B. A. Ilyish), or as a specific group within the class of adjectives (according to M. Y. Blokh).

There are hardly any reasons for the identification of postpositions as a separate functional class because these are prepositions and adverbs in a specific lexical modifying function. The separate notional class of modal words in this system is open to criticism because they are adverbs by nature. The same refers to the functional class of particles. The grammatical status of the English article is not clear enough; in linguistic literature there are variants of its interpretation as a sort of an auxiliary word or even a detached morpheme.

In general, the items of the traditional part-of-speech system demonstrate different featuring. Sometimes one or even two of the three criteria of their identification may fail. Let's review the system in detail. Noun is characterized by the categorical meaning of “thingness”, or substance. It has the changeable forms of number and case. The substantive functions in the sentence are those of the subject, object and predicative.

Adjectives are words expressing properties of objects. There are qualitative and relative adjectives. The forms of the degrees of comparison are typical of qualitative adjectives. Adjectival functions in the sentence are those of attribute and predicative.

Verb is characterized by the categorial meaning of process expressed by both finite and non-finite forms. The verb has the changeable forms of the 6 categories: person, number, tense, aspect, voice and mood. The syntactic function of the finite verb is that of predicate. The non-finite forms of the verb (Infinitive, Gerund, Participle I, Participle II) perform all the other functions (subject, object, attribute, adverbial modifier, predicative).

Adverbs have the categorical meaning of the secondary property, i. e. the property of process or another property. They are characterized by the forms of the degrees of comparison (for qualitative adverbs) and the functions of various adverbial modifiers.

Pronouns point to the things and properties without naming them. The categorial meaning of indication (deixis) is the only common feature 22 that unites the heterogeneous groups of English personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, relative, conjunctive, indefinite, defining, negative, reflexive, and reciprocal pronouns.

Numerals have the categorical meaning of number (cardinal and ordinal). They are invariable in English and used in the attributive and substantive functions.

Statives are words of the category of state, or qualifying a-words, which express a passing state a person or thing happens to be in (e. g. aware, alive, asleep, afraid etc).

Modal words express the attitude of the speaker to the situation reflected in the sentence and its parts. Here belong the words of probability (probably, perhaps, etc), of qualitative evaluation (??fortunately, unfortunately, luckily, etc) and also of affirmation and negation.

Interjection, occupying a detached position in the sentence, is a signal of emotions. Preposition expresses the dependencies and interdependencies of substantive referents.

Conjunction expresses connections of phenomena.

Article is a determining unit of specific nature accompanying the noun in communicative collocations. The article expresses the specific limitation of the substantive function.

Particle unites the functional words of specifying and limiting meaning (even, just, only, etc).

Each part of speech is further subdivided into groups and subgroups in accord with various semantic, formal and functional features of constituent words. Thus, nouns are subcategorized into proper and common, animate and inanimate, countable and uncountable, concrete and abstract, etc. Verbs are subcategorized into fully predicative and partially predicative, transitive and intransitive, actional and statal, terminative and durative, etc. Adjectives are subcategorized into qualitative and relative, etc.

When taking some definitions of the parts of speech, one cannot but see that they are difficult to work with. When linguists began to look closely at English grammatical structure in the 1940s and 1950s, 23 they encountered so many problems of identification and definition that the term “part of speech” soon fell out of favour, “word class” being introduced instead. Of the various alternative systems of word classes attempted by different scholars, the one proposed by Ch. C. Fries is of a particular interest. Ch. C. Fries developed the syntactico-distributional classification of words based on the study of their position in the sentence and combinability. It was done by means of substitution tests. Tape recorded spontaneous conversations comprising about 250,000 word entries provided the material. The words isolated from that corpus were tested on the three typical sentence patterns (substitution test-frames) with the marked main positions of notional words:

1 2 3 4

Frame A. The concert was good (always).

1 2 1 4

Frame B. The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).

1 2 4

Frame C. The team went there.

The notional words could fill in the marked positions of the frames without affecting their general structural meanings (“thing and its quality at a given time” for the first frame; “actor -- action -- thing acted upon” for the second frame; “actor -- action -- direction of the action” for the third frame).

As a result of successive substitution tests on the given frames, 4 positional classes of notional words were identified. They corresponded to the traditional grammatical classes of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The other words (154 units) were unable to fill in the marked notional positions of the frames without destroying their structural meanings. Ch. C. Fries distributed them into 15 groups of function words representing the three main sets: 1) the specifiers of notional words (the determiners of nouns, modal verbs, functional modifiers and the intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs); 2) the interpositional elements (prepositions and conjunctions); 3) the words, referring to the sentence as a whole (question-words; inducement words: let, let's, please, etc; attention-getting words; words of affirmation and negation; sentence introducers it, there; and some others).

Working bibliography

1. Иванова?И.?П. Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка / И.?П.?Иванова, В.?В.?Бурлакова, Г.?Г.?Почепцов. М., 1981.С. 14-20.

2. Прибыток?И.?И. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка/И.?И.?Прибыток. М., 2008. С. 25-30.

3. Blokh?M.?Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 37-48.

4. Crystal?D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language / D. Crystal. Cambridge Univ. Press. 1995. P. 206-207.

5. Ilyish?B.?A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 27-35

Размещено на Allbest.ru