Lecture 2. Lexico-Grammatical Classes of Words. Outline

1. The Problem of Classifying Words.

2. 2) The Traditional Classification of Words.

3. Notional and Functional Parts of Speech.

4. The Field Structure of Parts of Speech.

The Problem of Classifying Words.

It’s well-recognized in linguistics that all words are classified into lexico-grammatical classes which are called parts of speech in traditional grammar. The problem of classifying words has always been in the centre of attention of linguistics because it presents a number of difficulties. Linguists have always tried to work out such a classification which should be based on one principle as logics requires.

It is necessary to say that none of these classifications has happened to be satisfactory so far. Most linguists had to resort to some other principles to make the classification more or less clear.

First of all, we should speak about the classification of words worked out by Henry Sweet. He took as the basic principle the morphological properties of words and on this principle he classified all the words into declinable and indeclinable. However this classification failed to be better than the traditional one, because the group of the declinable words included nouns, adjectives and verbs. All the other words were referred to indeclinable words. Having realized that his classification happened to be rather vague, Henry Sweet resorted to some other principles.

1) the principle of syntactic functioning. This principle made it possible for him to distinguish the following groups of words:

(a) noun-words which can function like nouns (nouns, pronouns, infinitive, gerund);

(b) adjective-words (adjectives, pronouns, participle, infinitive, gerund);

(c) verb-words (verbs and verbals).

We can see that the words of the same traditional parts of speech happen to be included into different groups of words at once.

Sweet’s classification is not accepted but it proves that the traditional classification is more rigid and adequate.

Another theory was put forward in American linguistics by Charles Fries. He rejects the traditional classification of words into parts of speech and works out his own. His classification is based on the positional principle. He classifies all the words according to the position they can take in the sentence.

Thus, he takes such sentences as “the clerk remembered the tax”, “the concert was good”, “a good concert was there yesterday”. Fries states that words which can be found in the position of “clerk”, “tax”, “concert” should be included into Class I. Their peculiarity is that in the sentence such words can take the position before words of CLASS II, which correspond to “remembered”, “was”. Words taking the position of “good” belong to CLASS III, and finally words in the position of “there” and “yesterday” make up CLASS IV.

It is not difficult to see that these 4 classes of words in general correspond to the traditional parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

However, not only nouns are included into CLASS I because Fries refers to this class any words in the position before the words of CLASS II, and we can find there such words as “man”, “he”, “the others”, “to live”, “writing” and that does not correspond to the traditional classification of words.

Besides these four classes Fries distinguishes 15 more groups of words. They are also differentiated by the positional principle.

Mostly these groups of words which he marks with letters are much wider than the traditional formal or functional parts of speech.

For ex., group A includes words which can be found in the position of the definite article. It means words which can be used as determiners or attributive elements. So in this group we can find such words as “the”, “my”, “both”, “much”, “Tom’s”, “no”.

But we can see that many of such words can be included into CLASS I or III. Charles Fries says that it mustn’t embarrass us as the main thing that they can take the position of the definite article. Ch. Fries ignores morphological features of words and their syntactic functioning.

His classification failed to achieve the goal, because we can never be sure what class or group we should refer this or that word to without a context and hence this classification is not rigid. However, Ch. Fries’s classification of words is interesting because it illustrates the combining power or syntactic valency of words.