9.The Traditional and Syntactico-Distibutional Classification of Words.

In the original Ancient Greek grammatical teaching which put forward the first outline of the part of speech theo­ry, the division of words into grammatical classes was also based on one determining criterion only, namely, on the formal-morphological featuring. It means that any given word under analysis was turned into a classified lexeme on the principle of its relation to grammatical change. In conditions of the primary acquisition of linguistic knowledge, and in connection with the study of a highly inflexional language this char­acteristic proved quite efficient.

Still, at the present stage of the development of linguistic science, syntactic characterization of words that has been made possible after the exposition of their fundamental morphological properties, is far more important and universal from the point of view of the general classificational requirements.

This characterization is more important, because it shows the dis­tribution of words between different sets in accord with their function-

al specialization. The role of morphology by this presentation is not underrated, rather it is further clarified from the point of view of ex­posing connections between the categorial composition of the word and its sentence-forming relevance.

This characterization is more universal, because it is not specially destined for the inflexional aspect of language and hence is equally ap­plicable to languages of various morphological types.

On the material of Russian, the principles of syntactic approach to the classification of word stock were outlined in the works of A.M. Peshkovsky. The principles of syntactic (syntactico-distributional) classifica­tion of English words were worked out by L. Bloomfield and his follow­ers Z. Harris and especially Ch. Fries.

The syntactico-distributional classification of words is based on the study of their combinability by means of substitution testing. The testing results in developing the standard model of four main "positions" of notional words in the English sentence: those of the noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A), ad­verb (D).

Fries chooses tape-recorded spontaneous conversa­tions comprising about 250,000 word entries (50 hours of talk). The words isolated from this corpus are tested on the three typical sentences (that are isolated from the records, too), and used as substitution test-frames:

Frame A. The concert was good (always).

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

Frame C. The team went there.

As a result of successive substitution tests on the cited "frames" the following lists of positional words ("form-words", or "parts of speech") are established:

Class 1. (A) concert, coffee, taste, container, difference, etc. (B) clerk, husband, supervisor, etc.; tax, food, coffee, etc. (C) team, husband, wom­an, etc.

Class 2. (A) was, seemed, became, etc. (B) remembered, wanted, saw, suggested, etc. (C) went, came, ran,... lived, worked, etc.

Class 3. (A) good, large, necessary, foreign, new, empty, etc.

Class 4. (A) there, here, always, then, sometimes, etc. (B) clearly, suf­ficiently, especially, repeatedly, soon, etc. (C) there, back, out, etc.; rapid­ly, eagerly, confidently, etc.

All these words can fill in the positions of the frames without affecting their general structural meaning:

- the first frame; "actor - action - thing acted upon - characteristic of the action"

- the second frame; "actor - action - direction of the action"

- the third frame.

Comparing the syntactico-distributional classification of words with the traditional part of speech division of words, one cannot but see the similarity of the general schemes of the two: the opposition of notional and functional words, the four absolutely cardinal classes of notional words (since numerals and pronouns have no positional functions of their own and serve as pro-nounal and pro-adjectival elements), the in­terpretation of functional words as syntactic mediators and their formal representation by the fist.

However, under these unquestionable traits of similarity are distinctly revealed essential features of difference, the proper evaluation of which allows us to make some important generalizations about the structure of the lexemic system of language.