IX Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2017

The words of language are divided into grammatically relevant

sets, or classes. Parts of speech are grammatical (or lexico-grammatical)

classes of words identified on the basis of the three criteria: the

meaning common to all the words of the given class, the form with

the morphological characteristics of a type of word, and the function 20

in the sentence typical of all the words of this class (e. g. the English

noun has the categorical meaning of “thingness”, the changeable

forms of number and case, and the functions of the subject, object and

substantive predicative).

The notion of “parts of speech” goes back to the times of Ancient

Greece. Aristotle (384–322 B. C.) distinguished between nouns,

verbs and connectives. Traditional grammars of English, following

the approach which can be traced back to Latin, agreed that there

were eight parts of speech in English: the noun, pronoun, adjective,

verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection. Some books

additionally mentioned the article. A. I. Smirnitsky and B. A .Ilyish are

Russian scholars of English grammar notable, among other things, for

the development of the three-criteria characterization of the parts of

speech.

Modern classifications, proposed by different scholars, distinguish,

as a rule, between notional parts of speech, having a full nominative

value, and functional parts of speech characterized by a partial

nominative value. The complete lists of notional and functional words,

ever mentioned in those classifications, include the following items.

Notional words: Functional words:

1) nouns; 1) prepositions;

2) adjectives; 2) conjunctions;

3) verbs; 3) articles;

4) adverbs; 4) particles;

5) pronouns; 5) postpositions.

6) numerals;

7) statives;

8) modal words;

9) interjections.

The main problem with the traditional classification is that some

grammatical phenomena given above have intermediary features in

this system. They make up a continuum, a transition zone, between the

polar entities. For example, there is a very specific group of quantifiers

in English (such words as many, much, little, few). They have features

of pronouns, numerals, and adjectives and are referred to as “hybrids.

Statives can be considered as making up a separate part of speech

(according to B. A. Ilyish), or as a specific group within the class of

adjectives (according to M. Y. Blokh).

There are hardly any reasons for the identification of postpositions

as a separate functional class because these are prepositions and adverbs

in a specific lexical modifying function. The separate notional class

of modal words in this system is open to criticism because they are

adverbs by nature. The same refers to the functional class of particles.

The grammatical status of the English article is not clear enough;

in linguistic literature there are variants of its interpretation as a sort of

an auxiliary word or even a detached morpheme.

In general, the items of the traditional part-of-speech system

demonstrate different featuring. Sometimes one or even two of the three

criteria of their identification may fail. Let’s review the system in detail.

Noun is characterized by the categorical meaning of “thingness”,

or substance. It has the changeable forms of number and case. The

substantive functions in the sentence are those of the subject, object

and predicative.

Adjectives are words expressing properties of objects. There

are qualitative and relative adjectives. The forms of the degrees of

comparison are typical of qualitative adjectives. Adjectival functions in

the sentence are those of attribute and predicative.

Verb is characterized by the categorial meaning of process expressed

by both finite and non-finite forms. The verb has the changeable forms

of the 6 categories: person, number, tense, aspect, voice and mood. The

syntactic function of the finite verb is that of predicate. The non-finite

forms of the verb (Infinitive, Gerund, Participle I, Participle II) perform

all the other functions (subject, object, attribute, adverbial modifier,

predicative).

Adverbs have the categorical meaning of the secondary property,

i. e. the property of process or another property. They are characterized

by the forms of the degrees of comparison (for qualitative adverbs) and

the functions of various adverbial modifiers.

Pronouns point to the things and properties without naming them.

The categorial meaning of indication (deixis) is the only common feature 22

that unites the heterogeneous groups of English personal, possessive,

demonstrative, interrogative, relative, conjunctive, indefinite, defining,

negative, reflexive, and reciprocal pronouns.

Numerals have the categorical meaning of number (cardinal and

ordinal). They are invariable in English and used in the attributive and

substantive functions.

Statives are words of the category of state, or qualifying a-words,

which express a passing state a person or thing happens to be in (e. g.

aware, alive, asleep, afraid etc).

Modal words express the attitude of the speaker to the situation

reflected in the sentence and its parts. Here belong the words of

probability (probably, perhaps, etc), of qualitative evaluation

(  fortunately, unfortunately, luckily, etc) and also of affirmation and

negation.

Interjection, occupying a detached position in the sentence, is a signal of emotions. Preposition expresses the dependencies and interdependencies of

substantive referents.

Conjunction expresses connections of phenomena.

Article is a determining unit of specific nature accompanying the

noun in communicative collocations. The article expresses the specific

limitation of the substantive function.

Particle unites the functional words of specifying and limiting

meaning (even, just, only, etc).

Each part of speech is further subdivided into groups and subgroups

in accord with various semantic, formal and functional features of

constituent words. Thus, nouns are subcategorized into proper and

common, animate and inanimate, countable and uncountable, concrete

and abstract, etc. Verbs are subcategorized into fully predicative and

partially predicative, transitive and intransitive, actional and statal,

terminative and durative, etc. Adjectives are subcategorized into

qualitative and relative, etc.

When taking some definitions of the parts of speech, one cannot

but see that they are difficult to work with. When linguists began to

look closely at English grammatical structure in the 1940s and 1950s, 23

they encountered so many problems of identification and definition that

the term “part of speech” soon fell out of favour, “word class” being

introduced instead. Of the various alternative systems of word classes

attempted by different scholars, the one proposed by Ch. C. Fries is of

a particular interest. Ch. C. Fries developed the syntactico-distributional

classification of words based on the study of their position in the sentence

and combinability. It was done by means of substitution tests. Tape recorded spontaneous conversations comprising about 250,000 word entries provided the material. The words isolated from that corpus were

tested on the three typical sentence patterns (substitution test-frames)

with the marked main positions of notional words:

1 2 3 4

Frame A. The concert was good (always).

1 2 1 4

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

1 2 4

Frame C. The team went there.

The notional words could fill in the marked positions of the frames

without affecting their general structural meanings (“thing and its

quality at a given time” for the first frame; “actor — action — thing

acted upon” for the second frame; “actor — action — direction of the

action” for the third frame).

As a result of successive substitution tests on the given frames,

4 positional classes of notional words were identified. They corresponded

to the traditional grammatical classes of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and

adverbs. The other words (154 units) were unable to fill in the marked

notional positions of the frames without destroying their structural

meanings. Ch. C. Fries distributed them into 15 groups of function

words representing the three main sets: 1) the specifiers of notional

words (the determiners of nouns, modal verbs, functional modifiers

and the intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs); 2) the interpositional

elements (prepositions and conjunctions); 3) the words, referring to

the sentence as a whole (question-words; inducement words: let, let’s,

please, etc; attention-getting words; words of affirmation and negation;

sentence introducers it, there; and some others).

Working bibliography

1.Иванова И. П. Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка / И. П. Иванова, В. В. Бурлакова, Г. Г. Почепцов. М., 1981.С. 14–20.

2.Прибыток И. И. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка/И. И. Прибыток. М., 2008. С. 25–30.

3.Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 37–48.

4.Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language / D. Crystal. Cambridge Univ. Press. 1995. P. 206–207.

5.Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 27–35

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