To lecture 3 Home task

PARTS OF SPEECH IN ENGLISH

Outline
1. The definition of the parts of speech and criteria for singling them out
2. The inventory of the parts of speech in English
3. Limitations to the traditional classification of the parts of speech
4. Alternative approaches to the traditional classification of the parts of speech

Fig. 3.1. Criteria for singling out parts of speech

Fig. 3.2. Parts of speech in English

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 Traditional definitions for the parts of speech
The following definitions are taken from the work of a respected American
scholar G. O. Curme “Parts of Speech and Accidence”, Boston: Heath, 1935. Read
them and answer the questions which follow.
(a) A noun, or substantive, is a word used as a name of a living being or lifeless
thing: Mary, John, horse, cow; hat, house, tree, London, Chicago; virtue;
(b) A pronoun is a word used instead of a noun;
(c) The verb is that part of speech that predicates, assists in predications, asks a
question, or expresses a command: The wind blows; He is blind; Did he do it?
Hurry!. By ‘predication’ Curme evidently means ‘assertion’, the term that appears in
the shorter version of his grammar: ‘The verb is that part of speech by which we
make an assertion or ask a question: The wind blows; Is the wind blowing?);
(d) An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or a pronoun, i.e. a word that is
used with a noun or pronoun to describe or point out the living being or lifeless thing
designated by the noun or pronoun: a little boy, that boy, this boy;
(e) An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb;
(f) A preposition is a word that indicates a relation between the noun or
pronoun it governs and another word, which may be a verb, an adjective or another
noun or pronoun: I live in this house;
(g) A conjunction is a word that joins together sentences or parts of a sentence:
Sweep the floor and dust that furniture; He waited until I came;
(h) An interjection is an outcry to express pain, surprise, anger, pleasure, or
some other emotion, as Ouch!, Oh!, Alas!, Why!

Question. Are these definitions adequate as language-particular definitions, i.e.

do they provide clear criteria that would enable one to assign words to the ‘correct’
class?
If you find difficulty in answering this question, go through the following ones
carefully:
• Instead of what nouns are the pronouns used in the following sentences:

The boy said he was ill; I am ill; Nobody came; Everything was destroyed;
What is the new teacher like? It was John who broke the window.
• Do assertions, questions and the like involve verbs or whole sentences? Is
Curme’s definition helpful in defining verbs in the following sentences:

- Are you ill? (Is it the verb are that asks a question?);
- If John knows her, we’re in trouble (Does the speaker assert in the sentence
that John knows her?);
- They destroyed the residue unnecessarily. – Their destruction of residue was
unnecessary. (Is there anything in the definition of the verb as a word denoting an
action or state that will enable us to include the destroyed into the class of verbs and
to exclude destruction?);
- How is the ‘state of being’ to be interpreted in such a way as to include verbs
like know or love while excluding adjectives like knowledgeable or fond?

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 - If an adjective is a word that ‘describes’ what is designated by a noun or
pronoun, why is it that in They are fools the word fools is a noun, not an adjective
(like foolish in They are foolish?).
If the point that part-of-speech definitions provided by traditional grammars are
not quite adequate as language-particular definitions is obvious to you now, find its
further demonstrations.

ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO THE TRADITIONAL

CLASSIFICATION OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH
(self-study material)
H. Sweet is a prominent English grammarian. His “New English Grammar,
Logical and Historical” (1891) is an attempt of a descriptive grammar intended to
break away from the canons of classical Latin grammar and to give scientific
explanation to grammatical phenomena. His classification of parts of speech makes
distinction between:
1) declinables:
- noun-words: nouns, noun-pronouns, noun-numerals, infinitives, gerunds;
- adjective-words: adjectives, adjective-pronouns, adjective-numerals, participles;
- verbs: finite verbs, verbals (infinitive, participle, gerund);
2) indeclinables (particles): adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections.
H. Sweet could not fully disentangle himself from the rules of classical
grammar (Greek, Latin). That is why we can see that adjectives, numerals and
pronouns, which in English have but a few formal markers, get into the group of
“declinables”.
Sweet’s classification is an attempt to reflect the two-fold functions, or rather
positions in word combinations of such classes as numerals and pronouns, and the
double nature of verbals. The result of such a distribution is a mixture of
morphological and syntactic criteria, and the distorted picture of actual word-classes
existing in English.
Thus, a rational in essence attempt to reflect the facts of English and to depart
from the laws of Latin grammar has in fact brought about a classification in which no
distinction is made between the formal and meaningful features. On this basis it is
impossible to create a theory of independent word-classes, each with its own
properties.
O. Jespersen analyses word classes on different bases. In “The Philosophy of
Grammar” (1924) he presents his Theory of Three Ranks describing the hierarchy of
syntactic relations underlying linear representation of elements in language
structures. The theory is based on the concept of determination. The “rank” of a
word (primary, secondary, or tertiary) depends upon its relation (that of defined or
defining) to other words in a sentence. e.g. extremely hot weather: weather (the
independent word) has the status of primary; hot (defines weather, i.e. determines, or
is subordinated to, the primary ) is secondary; extremely (defines hot, i.e. modifies
the secondary) is tertiary. Though a tertiary word may be further defined by a
(quarternary) word, and this again by a (quinary) word, and so forth, there are no
formal or other traits that distinguish words of these lower orders from tertiary words.

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 If now we compare the word combination a furiously barking dog (a dog
barking furiously) with the sentence The dog barks furiously, we can see that the
same subordination obtains in the latter as well as in the former (dog - primary;
barking - secondary; furiously - tertiary). Yet there is a fundamental difference
between them, which calls for separate terms for the two kinds of structure: the
former kind is called junction, and the latter nexus.
It should be noted that the dog is primary not only when it is the subject, as in
the dog barks, but also when it is the direct object, as in I see the dog, or a
prepositional object, as in he runs after the dog.
The words primary, secondary, and tertiary are applicable to nexus as well as
to junction, but O. Jespersen also uses some special names: adjunct for a secondary
word in a junction, and adnex for a secondary word in a nexus. For tertiary words the
term subjunct is used, and quarternary words, in the rare cases in which a special
name is needed, are termed sub-subjuncts.
There is certainly some degree of correspondence between the three main parts
of speech and the three ranks outlined above. O. Jespersen does not deny the validity
of the traditional classification of parts of speech, but he reserves the latter "for the
dictionary" as he puts it. But the two things, word-classes and ranks, really move in
two different spheres. The two classifications represent different angles at which the
same word or word-form may be viewed, first as it is in itself and then as it is in
combination with other words.
No one would dispute the value of O. Jespersen’s analysis and his deep inquiry
into the structure of language. In the theory of three ranks he offered much that was
new in content and had most notable merits. With all this, O. Jespersen’s analysis
contains some disputable points and inconsistency. The very definition of the notion
of rank is not accurate which in some cases leads to inadequacy of analysis. Applying
his principle of linguistic analysis to sentence structures, such as the dog barks
furiously he ignores the difference between junction and nexus and does not
distinguish attributive and predicative relations and thus seems to leave out the most
important word-class – the verb.
Nothing cardinally different from the traditional approach in the part-of-speech
classification was produced by various English grammars within the period between
the works of O. Jespersen and the appearance of Ch. Fries’s book “The Structure of
English” (1952). Ch. Fries belongs to the American school of descriptive linguistics
for which the starting point and basis of any linguistic analysis is the distribution of
elements. In contrast to other representatives of that school, who excluded meaning
from linguistic description, Fries recognized its importance. He introduced the notion
of structural meaning as different from the lexical meaning of words. In his opinion,
the grammar of the language consists of the devices that signal structural meanings.
This principle is illustrated by means of linearly arranged nonce-words, the
structural meaning of each evident from the form. As an example, Ch. Fries gives a
verse from “Alice in Wonderland” (the signals are underlined)::
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe...

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 Any speaker of English, says Fries, will recognize the frames in which these
words appear (Gf.: the famous глокая куздра... of L. V. Sčerba). So a part of speech,
according to Ch. Fries, is a functional pattern. All the words which can occupy the
same ‘set of positions’ in the pattern of English utterances must belong to same part
of speech. Fries recorded 50 hours of conversation by 300 different speakers and
analyzed 250.000 word entries. As a result of this analysis he singles out four word-
classes (1, 2, 3, and 4) and 15 subclasses of function words (designated by the letters
of Latin alphabet), in which the properties of different word-classes, which are
singled out by traditional grammar, are dissolved in the distributional patterns. Ch.
Fries’s book presents a major linguistic interest as an experiment rather than for its
achievements.