vse_otvety / 36_Problemy_chastey_rechi_v_yazyke

Problems of parts of speech.

The words of language, depending on various formal and semantic features, are divided into grammatically relevant sets or classes. The traditional grammatical classes of words are called "parts of speech".

In the traditional classification we deal with parts of speech as lexico-grammatical classes of words (as a word possesses not only some grammatical but also some semantic properties). And parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of the three criteria: "semantic", "formal", and "functional".

1) the semantic criterion presupposes the evaluation of the generalised meaning: noun – substance, verb – process (actions and states), adjective – property of substance, etc.

2) the formal = morphological criterion: under it we mean categories: of mood, tense, aspect, etc.

3) the functional = syntactical criterion concerns the function, the syntactic role of words in the sentence + the combinability of words.

Henry Sweet: In accord with the described criteria, words on the upper level of classification are divided into notional (the noun, the adjective, the numeral, the pronoun, the verb, the adverb) and functional (the article, the preposition, the conjunction, the particle, the modal word, the interjection), which reflects their division in the earlier grammatical tradition into changeable and unchangeable.

Notional: those denoting things, objects, notions, qualities, etc. – words with the corresponding references in the objective reality.

Functional: those having no references of their own in the objective reality; most of them are used only as grammatical means to form up and frame utterances.

Descriptivist / distributional approach (Charles Fries) is based on the distribution of an element, that is, the ability of words to combine with other words of different types. Charles Fries described the procedure by frames.

Charles Fries distinguished also 15 groups of words.

Advantage: only 1 criterion.

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). Pronouns are included into the corresponding positional classes as their substitutes. Words standing outside the "positions" in the sentence are treated as function words of various syntactic values.

All these words can fill in the positions of the frames without affecting their general structural meaning (such as "thing and its quality at a given time" — the first frame; "actor — action — thing acted upon — characteristic of the action" — the second frame; "actor — action — direction of the action" — the third frame).

Functional words (function words) are exposed in the cited process of testing as being unable to fill in the positions of the frames without destroying their structural meaning. These words form limited groups totalling 15units.

The identified groups of functional words can be distributed among the three main sets. The words of the first set are used as specifiers of notional words. Here belong determiners of nouns, modal verbs serving as specifiers of notional verbs, functional modifiers and intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs. The words of the second set play the role of inter-positional elements, determining the relations of notional words to one another. Here belong prepositions and conjunctions. The words of the third set refer to the sentence as a whole. Such are question-words {what, how, etc.), inducement-words (lets, please, etc.), attention-getting words, words of affirmation and negation, sentence introducers (it, there) and some others.

Problems of parts of speech:

1) notion of conversion – it can be: historical (lufian, lufu)

traditional (paper – to paper (by analogy))

individual (don’t darling me!)

2) existence of small parts of speech – statives

3) postlogues / post-positional elements

4) stone wall problem (either separate words or a word combination)

Exercises: define the part of speech of underline words; multiple choice