Implicación

Any approach to language which hopes to go beyond the fact that

speech involves sequences of linguistic units (whether these be words, morphemes, phonemes, or whatever) must articulate classes of units at a certain level, so that their occurrence with respect to each other may be

specified. One such classification is the traditional one into ‘parts of speech’, first articulated by the grammarians of Classical Antiquity – most authoritatively by Dionysius Thrax, in the third century A.D.

Substantially similar systems of parts of speech have gradually been developed for a large proportion of the languages of the world.

The vocabulary of the English language is customarily divided into eight major divisions called ‘parts of speech’: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. Some books set up a special category for the words, a, an and the, which are called articles. These words, however, do not differ in any essential way from certain adjectives, and it is more usual to consider them with the adjective group.

Grammarians have frequently proposed a reduction of these categories.

Some writers would put prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions together and call them all particles – i.e. indeclinable relation words. Others wish

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to treat adverbs and prepositions together as one group, or nouns and adjectives, or nouns and pronouns. Good arguments can be advanced for some of these arrangements, and some simplification may eventually be

made; meanwhile we can make do with the familiar eight-term classification.

We should understand, however, that four of the parts of speech – nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs – differ essentially from the others.

These categories are (i) partly identifiable by form, and (ii) practically

unlimited in number. Consider the series beauty, beautify, beautiful, beautifully. No one of these can ordinarily be substituted for any of the

others. Thus we say ‘That’s a beauty’, but not ‘That’s a beautify’; ‘I’ll

beautify it’, but not ‘I’ll beautiful it’, ‘a beautiful woman’, but not ‘a beautifully woman’. Similarly arrive and arrival, amusing and

amusingly, soft and soften are not interchangeable. This correlation between four sets of forms and four sets of functions is the ultimate justification for setting up these four word categories.

All the other word groups in the language are closed classes (whether

they are treated as four groups or more). That is, they are limited in number, and the class membership changes only very slowly. We may

coin new nouns and verbs at will, but we cannot easily coin new

conjunctions or prepositions. Furthermore, these other classes are not identifiable by form. Verbs, for example, are identifiable often by signs

like be (be-friend, behead), or –fy (beautiful, identify), but no similar forms mark conjunctions.

Some difficulties are involved in treating the words left over from the

major classes as a small number of parts of speech. This inevitably involves lumping together words that behave quite differently: because

and and, for example, are both called conjunctions, though they actually have little in common. The conventional treatment also tends to festoon the major classes with little groups of words essentially dissimilar. Thus, where is put in the same class with beautifully, some in the same class

with beautiful. This procedure is awkward, but we can find our way along if we pay close attention to subdivisions.

A few words do not fit in any of the conventional groups. Such a word is the to that precedes the infinitive: “It’s time to stop”, or the it in “Is it true that he died?” There are not many such highly specialized words, however, and they create no serious problem.

Most grammars follow the same pattern in defining the parts of speech.

Nouns and verbs are defined notionally (i.e. according to meaning): a

noun is a word that names a person, place or thing (e.g. man, box, beauty, John); a verb is a word that makes an assertion or indicates

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action or being (e.g. want, hit, come, be, sleep). All the other parts of speech are defined syntactically, on the basis of the definition of noun

and verb: an adjective is a word that modifies a noun (e.g. big, red,

horrible, foolish); an adverb is a word that modifies a verb (e.g.

horribly, yesterday, beautifully); a pronoun is a word that replaces or

stands in the place of a noun (e.g. he, she, it, you, who, that); a

preposition is a word relating other parts of speech (e.g. in, under, without, on); a conjunction is a word joining other parts of speech (e.g.

and, that, because, if) and an interjection is an exclamatory word (such as hey, ouch, whoa).

This system seems neat and simple, and indeed it serves fairly well in

practice, but close scrutiny (as we shall see later) tempers one’s

admiration somewhat.

Most of us begin our study of grammar with the notion that the parts of speech are watertight compartments. We believe not only that all words in context can be distributed among the eight categories but also that a given word in a given context must belong to one category and not to any of the others.

The actuality is not so simple; all of the compartments leak.

As

commonly defined, each part of speech bears certain resemblances to others, and the categories run together at border lines. Can we say that

his in “That is his cat” is a pronoun and not an adjective, or that it is an adjective and not a pronoun? We can, of course, frame the definition of pronoun or of adjective so as to include or exclude the word, but it is

probably more enlightening to call it a pronominal adjective (or an

adjective pronoun), thus indicating that it has characteristics of both groups.

Similarly, at some points nouns can scarcely be distinguished from

adjectives or from pronouns. Adverbs approach prepositions in one

direction and conjunctions in another. Some words are both verb-like and noun-like. We can reduce the confusion somewhat by paying close

attention to definition, but no definition of the traditional parts of speech can eliminate overlapping entirely.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2

1. Name any four categories of parts of speech and provide three examples of each.

2. What part of speech are the following words? Ada, die, Nigeria, or, hei, unfortunately.

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