2.3 Word Classes

When the structural linguists tried to identify the word categories of English, “they looked at the words themselves, their forms, their meanings, and their functions in the sentence, and then established two main categories: the form classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) and the structure classes” (Kolln & Funk, 2012, p.16). The structure classes consist of the following classes: determiners, auxiliaries, conjunctions, qualifiers, interrogatives, expletives, and prepositions. One of the differences between the classes is their form. “As their label suggests, the form classes are those that can undergo changes in form— that are, in fact, distinguishable by their form— whereas the structure classes are not” (p. 226). Determiners are words that mark nouns, among which the following groups are identified: articles (a, an, and the), possessive nouns and pronouns (Dan’s, my, mine, his, her, its, our, ours, your, yours, their, and theirs), demonstrative pronouns (this, that, these, and those), and indefinite pronouns (some, both, each, another, anybody, anyone, anything, something, many, much, few, etc.), numerals (one, two, etc). Like determiners, auxiliaries are closed words. The auxiliary class contains the following: do (does and did), have (has and had), be (am, is, are, was, and were), can (could), must, may (might), should, and others.

Among conjunctions, we can identify coordinating conjunctions (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so), subordinating conjunctions (time: when, whenever, after, as, before, once, since, till, until, now that, while, as long as, and as soon as; concession: though, although, even though, if, and while; contingency: if and once; condition: if, in case, as long as, unless, and provided that; reason: because, since, and as long as; result: so that; comparison: as, just as, and as if; contrast: while and whereas), and correlative conjunctions (both– and , either– or , neither– nor, and not only– but also).

Qualifiers mark adjectives and adverbs. They qualify or intensify adjectives and adverbs: very beautiful, rather impressive, damn sure, and rather slowly. Interrogatives, as their name implies, introduce questions: who, whose, whom, which, what, how, why, when, and where. Expletive words, sometimes called empty words, act simply as operators that allow us to manipulate sentences in a variety of ways. The following are expletives: there (There is a book on the table); that (I think that he is a good doctor); or (the structure of the English lexicon, or vocabulary); as (We elected him as the chair) (Kolln & Funk, 2012, pp.282-284).

A preposition links nouns, pronouns, and phrases to other words in a sentence. The word or phrase that the preposition introduces is called the object of the preposition. Prepositions are divided into simple prepositions (about, beneath, into, through, above, beside, throughout, across, between, after, beyond, of, to, against, off, toward, along, by, on, under, amid, underneath, among, around, down, outside, within, before, from, without, etc.) and phrasal prepositions, which consist of a simple preposition preceded by a word from another category, such as an adverb, adjective, or conjunction (according to, because of, next to, ahead of, out of, along with, contrary to, prior to, by means of, in charge of, in spite of, in accordance with, in front of, on account of, in back of, in lieu of, on behalf of, in case of, in search of, etc.) (Kolln & Funk, 2012, pp. 274-276).

Form classes comprise the largest group of words. They are called “open classes because new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs regularly enter the language as new technology and new ideas require them” (p. 225). Structure classes stay stable; that is why, they are called closed classes, because they “remain constant from one generation to the next” (p.265).