PARTS OF SPEECH AND LEXICAL CATEGORIES

Objectives:

• Understand how words are the basic building blocks of syntax.

• Distinguish between semantically based definitions for word class and those based on distribution.

• Identify Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs using distributional criteria.

Parts of speech

Definition Syntactic categories or parts of speech are the groups of words that let us state rules and constraints about the form of sentences. Typical parts of speech are Nouns (abbreviated as N), Verbs (V), Adjectives (Adj) and Adverbs (Adv).

Comment Certain words can appear in certain places. This is one of the central insights of syntactic theory. We want to be able to capture where some words appear and others do not in our rules. Parts of speech allow us to make generalizations about which types of elements appear in which positions.

Discussion Almost every student taking an elementary class in grammar will learn something like the following traditional definitions of parts of speech:

Traditional semantic definitions

1. (i) Noun: word describing a person, place or thing

2. (ii) Verb: word describing an action, occurrence or state of being

3. (iii) Adjective: word that expresses quality, quantity or extent

4. (iv) Adverb: word that expresses manner, quality, place, time, degree, number, cause, opposition, affirmation or denial

These definitions are based in meaning or semantics. To a certain degree, they have some intuitive validity. Nouns do typically refer to things, and verbs typically do refer to actions or states. However, from our linguistic perspective these definitions are inadequate.