word classes presentation

Grammar Frameworks�& Word Classes

Word Classes

• There are eight main word classes in grammar.
• Some may be unfamiliar, but you have more than likely come across most of them before.
• Can you think of any?
• Hint: nouns

Mini-Whiteboards

• Get yourself into pairs or a group of 3.
• At regular points you will need to try and guess the words or give examples using your mini whiteboards.
• This will help you to learn and remember the word classes!
• Adjectives describe nouns
• Adjectives can make comparisons:
• Comparatives
• e.g. bigger
• Superlatives
• e.g. biggest

Watch out for the irregulars!

Irregular Adjectives: Examples

• Verbs refer to physical and mental actions and tell you what the subject is doing.
• There are main verbs and auxiliary verbs.
• A main verb gives the meaning
• An auxiliary verb helps us understand the meaning of the main verb by making the tense clear, suggesting modality, creating emphasis or creating questions.

Modal Auxiliaries

These words can only be used with a main verb

• Adverbs give more information about a verb, for example ‘I ran fast ’.
• Personal pronouns:
• I, me, we, us, you, he, she, it, him, her
• Possessive pronouns:
• mine, ours, yours, his, hers, its, theirs
• Reflexive pronouns:
• myself, yourself, ourselves, himself, herself, itself, themselves
• Demonstrative pronouns:
• pointing – this, that, these, those (to replace a noun)
• Indefinite pronouns:
• someone, no one, anything, everything, everyone
• Relative pronouns:
• that, who, whom, whose

Prepositions

• Used to explain relationships regarding position, direction and time
• For example: to, at, on, opposite, towards, into, past, before, during, after

Conjunctions

• Coordinating: and, but, or (also known as connectives)
• Subordinating: connects a subordinate clause to a main clause
• For example: although, because, unless, until.

Determiners

• These are words that go before a noun :
• The definite article – the
• The indefinite article – a/an
• Possessive determiners – my, our, your, their, its
• Demonstrative determiners – this, that, these, those

• Cambridge Dictionary +Plus

Word classes and phrase classes

Major word classes.

English has four major word classes : nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. They have many thousands of members, and new nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are often created. Nouns are the most common type of word, followed by verbs. Adjectives are less common and adverbs are even less common.

Many words belong to more than one word class. For example, book can be used as a noun or as a verb; fast can be used as an adjective or an adverb:

It’s an interesting book . (noun)

We ought to book a holiday soon. (verb)

He loves fast cars. (adjective)

Don’t drive so fast ! (adverb)

Typical word-class suffixes

A suffix can often, but not always, tell us if a word is a noun, verb , adjective or adverb :

A good learner’s dictionary will tell you what class or classes a word belongs to.

Word formation

Other word classes

The other word classes include prepositions, pronouns, determiners, conjunctions and interjections.

Prepositions

Prepositions describe the relationship between words from the major word classes. They include words such as at, in, on, across, behind, for :

We went to the top of the mountain. ( to describes the relationship between went and top ; of describes the relationship between top and mountain )

Are you ready for lunch yet? ( for describes the relationship between ready and lunch )

Pronouns are words which substitute for noun phrases, so that we do not need to say the whole noun phrase or repeat it unnecessarily. Pronouns include words such as you, it, we, mine, ours, theirs, someone, anyone, one, this, those :

That ’s Gerry in the photo. He lives in Barcelona.

This jacket’s mine . That must be Linda’s.

Determiners

Determiners come before nouns. They show what type of reference the noun is making. They include words such as a/an, the, my, his, some, this, both :

Have you got a ruler I can borrow?

I need some paper for my printer.

This phone isn’t easy to use.

Determiners ( the, my , some , this )

Conjunctions

Conjunctions show a link between one word, phrase or clause and another word, phrase or clause. They include and, but, when, if, because :

Joe and Dan are brothers.

It was okay, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a restaurant.

We’ll ring you when we get to London.

Interjections

Interjections are mostly exclamation words (e.g. gosh! wow! oh! ), which show people’s reactions to events and situations:

A: I’m giving up my job . B: Oh .

Yippee ! I don’t have to go to work tomorrow!

Gosh ! What an awful smell!

Interjections ( ouch, hooray )

Discourse markers ( so, right, okay )

Phrase classes

The different word classes can form the basis of phrases. When they do this, they operate as the head of the phrase. So, a noun operates as the head of a noun phrase, a verb as the head of a verb phrase, and so on. Heads of phrases (H) can have words before them (e.g. determiners (det), adjectives (adj), adverbs (adv)) or after them (e.g. postmodifiers (pm) or complements (c)):

Noun phrase (underlined)

[DET] That [ADJ] [H] old box [PM (clause)] you left in the kitchen has got a hole in it.

Adverb phrase (underlined)

It all happened [ADJ] very [H] suddenly .

Prepositional phrase (underlined)

[H] The President [C] of the United States arrives tomorrow.

Noun phrases

Verb phrases

Adjective phrases

Adverb phrases

Prepositional phrases

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14 Word Classes

Willem B. Hollmann has been a Lecturer in Linguistics at Lancaster University since 2003. His publications include articles in Cognitive Linguistics on summary vs. sequential scanning (2007) and cognitive sociolinguistics and Lancashire dialect (2011). He has published on Lancashire dialect grammar elsewhere as well, e.g. in English Language and Linguistics (2007). He has edited (with Anna Siewierska) a special issue of Functions of Language on ditransitive constructions, to which he contributed a paper as well (2007). One of the things he is working on currently is the role of phonological and distributional cues in lexical categorization. One paper on this topic will appear in a special issue of Studies in Language , which he is editing with Nikolas Gisborne.

• Published: 05 March 2020
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This overview of (theoretical approaches to) English word classes is built around widely accepted criticisms of ‘traditionalist’ definitions of word classes, which have been characterized—mainly by structuralists, going back to Bloomfield (1933)—as purely notional and overly simplistic. Bloomfield and his followers argue that these definitions must be replaced by distributional ones. Following careful analysis of the arguments of both traditional grammarians and structuralist linguists, the chapter presents a more nuanced picture. Traditional grammarians did not rely only on notional criteria, and where they used them, they sometimes did so in a seemingly rather sophisticated manner. Furthermore, structuralists rely less on pure distributionalism than they claim they do. Finally, there are other current theoretical approaches beyond structuralism, including generative, cognitive, functional-typological, and psycholinguistic accounts. The chapter argues that there are strengths and weaknesses in each, and points to some recent work in which insights from different approaches are beginning to come together.

14.1 Introduction

This chapter takes as its starting point a story about word classes agreed upon explicitly or implicitly by many grammarians. 1 It can be summarized as follows: traditional grammarians analysed word classes in notional terms, with nouns referring to things, verbs to actions, and adjectives to properties. But these notional definitions are so simplistic as to be of almost no use in the study of grammar when considering a specific language, such as English. Linguists have since replaced them with the right definitions, which are based on language-particular morphological and syntactic criteria.

Referring to ‘traditionalist’ grammarians, Pullum ( 2010 : 16) tells the story as follows:

Their system of analysis, essentially unaltered for two hundred years, is assumed in all dictionaries and almost all grammar textbooks today, despite its grave defects. The deepest errors stem from a longstanding confusion of category (word class) with function (grammatical or semantic relation). Attempts to define category in terms of function yield a familiar story: nouns name things, verbs name actions, adjectives name qualities, and so on. All of this is puerile confusion.

Elsewhere he says:

To classify words on a rigorous basis, so that within a language we can definitively place words in lexical categories, we have to use parochial criteria – not universal concepts like “thing” or “substance” but facts that are local to one language. The right definition of nouns in English depends on morphological facts like having forms for plain and genitive case and forms expressing singular and plural number , and syntactic facts like occurring as Subject or Object , or as Complement of a preposition. It may well be true that every human language will have a large and open class of words among which, as central and typical members, will be all of its names for natural kinds of thing like trees, leaves, cats, dogs, houses, water, salt, the sun, and the moon, and it will be appropriate to call that class its “noun” class. But that is not a definition of nounhood. It is a rough rule-of-thumb idea of how to track categorisation across languages. It is not (of course) immune to error, and within a language it is not really of any use at all. (Pullum 2009 : 257) 2

The following examples show, in reverse chronological order, some other versions of the same story, presented in many textbooks and dictionaries of linguistics.

Traditionally, the categories mentioned above are identified by semantic criteria, that is, by criteria having to do with what the words mean. A noun is sometimes said to be the name of a person, a thing or a place; a verb is said to be the name of an action; an adjective the name of a quality; etc. (Koopman et al. 2013 : 3)

Traditional discussions of word-classes start with definitions such as ‘A noun is the name of a person, place or thing’. (Hudson 2010a: 127)

noun ( n .) ( n , N ) A term used in the grammatical classification of words, traditionally defined as the ‘name of a person, place or thing’, but the vagueness associated with the notions of ‘name’ and ‘thing’ (e.g. is beauty a thing?) has led linguistic descriptions to analyse this class in terms of the formal and functional criteria of syntax and morphology. (Crystal 2008b : 333)

Word class analysis has long been familiar in Europe under the title parts of speech , and since medieval times grammarians have operated with nine word classes or parts of speech: noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, article, and interjection. Difficulties have arisen with such a scheme because the various classes were not always clearly defined in formal terms; though for the most part they could be justified formally in Latin and Ancient Greek, in which languages they were first worked out, several of them were rather hazily defined in terms of types of meaning or philosophical abstractions (verbs being said to stand for actions or for being acted on, and nouns for things or persons). (Robins 1964 : 227–8)

The lineage of this story extends back to Bloomfield, who wrote:

To describe the grammar of a language, we have to state the form-classes of each lexical form, and to determine what characteristics make the speakers assign it to these form-classes. The traditional answer to this question appears in our school grammars, which try to define the form-classes by the class-meaning ― by the feature of meaning that is common to all the lexical forms in the form-class. The school grammar tells us, for instance, that a noun is “the name of a person, place, or thing.” (1933: 266)

Instead, Bloomfield argued for lexical categorization on structural grounds:

The form-class of a lexical form is determined for the speakers (and consequently for the relevant description of a language) by the structure and constituents of the form, by the inclusion of a special constituent (a marker), or by the identity of the form itself. (1933: 266–8)

The theory of word classes embodied by the quotations from Bloomfield and his followers, including the historiographical notes about traditional grammarians, will be referred to in this chapter as ‘the structuralist story’. Not all linguists listed here would self-identify as structuralists, and they may have adopted very different positions in relation to different aspects of grammar. Nevertheless, these quotations are suggestive of a Bloomfieldian view of word classes.

This chapter deals with a range of issues related to word classes, such as their boundaries and the role of prototypes, the number of word classes and their theoretical and psychological status. The discussion is organized around a critical examination of the structuralist story, selected as the focus because many of the views it consists of are so widespread, both within and beyond structuralist linguistics. I will show that these commonly held views are all problematic. I will address the inaccuracies in the order in which they appear in the story, summarized above:

There is a fourth problematic view, on which I base my conclusion:

Problematic View 4: The structuralist analysis is the right one. (Section 14.5 )

The perspective on word classes that will emerge from the discussion is considerably more complex than the one embodied by the structuralist story. The views of many traditional grammarians will turn out to be relatively sophisticated, rather than ‘puerile’. The structuralist approach itself will be seen as subject to several criticisms. And instead of being ‘the right one’, it will be presented as one of several approaches, each with its own strengths, weaknesses, applications, and target audiences.

14.2 Problematic view 1: the notional terms employed in traditional grammarians’ definitions were ‘things’, ‘actions’, and ‘qualities’

One difficulty when assessing the structuralist story is that the ‘traditional’ English grammarians often remain nameless. Bloomfield mentions the ancient Greek grammarians Dionysius Thrax and Apollonius Dyscolus (1933: 5) and the Latin grammarians Donatus and Priscian ( ibid .: 6). He then jumps via ‘[t]he medieval scholar’ (Bloomfield 1933 : 6) to the Port-Royal grammarians Arnauld and Lancelot ( 1660 ) and Gottfried Hermann’s (1801) grammar of classical Greek, suggesting that their view of grammar ‘is still embodied in our school tradition’ ( ibid .). The other studies mentioned above do not refer to any specific English grammarian either, apart from Pullum ( 2010 ), who points to Lowth (1762).

14.2.1 The traditional treatment of nouns

Bishop Robert Lowth’s grammar is well known for its role in the emergence of prescriptivism (see Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2010 for elaborate discussion). It was widely used and is in that respect a suitable grammar for Pullum to mention. However, Lowth’s discussion of word classes does not conform to the caricature that is often painted of traditional grammarians. Under Substantive one reads: ‘A Substantive, or Noun, is the name of a thing; of whatever we conceive in any way to subsist , or of which we have any notion.’ (Lowth 1762: 14; emphasis original.) The clause ‘or of which we have any notion’ is problematic, as one may argue that every word, certainly every lexical word, corresponds to something of which we have a notion. However, apart from that there is clearly an attempt by Lowth to go beyond the simple suggestion that nouns name concrete objects. Instead, Lowth suggests that what matters is conceptualization: how we think of entities, rather than what they are , ontologically speaking.

Bloomfield’s example of the noun fire (mentioned by Pullum 2009 , 2010 ) is relevant here. Bloomfield observes that ‘[f]or over a century physicists have believed it to be an action or process rather than a thing’ (1933: 266). The status of ontological categories is a much debated topic in philosophy. The absolute view, on which category systems proposed by philosophers correspond directly to categories of things in the world is by no means the only possible position. Westerhoff ( 2005 : 135) argues that we can never establish this relation with certainty, and that we should instead take a relative view. On this view, ontological categories are ways to systematize our knowledge of the world, with different systematizations being suitable in different contexts.

In criticizing traditional grammarians for proposing definitions that are not in line with ontological categories, Bloomfield appears to take the absolute view of categories for granted. But following Westerhoff’s suggestion that a relative view is more appropriate, it is quite irrelevant what physicists believe fire to be. What matters instead is the fact that we can view the world, including the phenomenon of fire, in different ways. Lowth would argue that speakers use the noun fire when they conceive of the process (or whatever) in question as a thing. In this respect, his theory of word classes anticipates the conceptual semantic definitions of word classes offered by Langacker ( 1987 , 2008a ; see section 14.4.2.2 below).

Pullum also discusses ‘nouns that occur only in idiomatic phrases, like sake (as in Doit just for my sake “Do it out of concern for me”) or dint (as in It was achieved by dint of hard work “It was achieved through the means of hard work”)’ (2009: 257). He says that ‘[t]hese words do not have denotations in any ordinary sense. The world cannot really be said to contain any (…) sakes or dints’ (Pullum 2009 : 257). However, one influential analysis of such expressions has been Nunberg et al.’s (1994) suggestion that the problematic elements do have meanings, albeit restricted to the idioms in which they occur. Under this analysis, sake would mean something like ‘benefit’, while the meaning of dint could be ‘means’.

Pullum’s suggestion that these elements ‘do not have denotations in any ordinary sense’ leads one back to distributionalism, but that approach does not necessarily fare well here. Relative to the criteria for nounhood listed by Pullum ( 2009 : 257), sake and dint do not allow a genitive - ’s , dint cannot be pluralized and cannot occur as the subject or object of a clause. Other criteria could be thought of―on what critics such as Croft would suggest is an ad hoc basis; see section 14.4.2.3 , below―, which these words may or may not satisfy, but critics would argue that to do so would compromise Pullum’s suggestion that his approach is ‘rigorous’ (2009: 257).

Based on cases such as fire , sake , and dint Pullum argues that ‘[t]he traditional view has it backwards: it is not that these are things, so we named them with nouns; it is just that we have named them with nouns, and in that sense we have (in a way) classed them with things’ (2009: 257). Pullum is certainly justified in doubting whether fire is a thing, but Lowth suggested that what matters is conceptualization. The challenge for the alternative view offered by Pullum is that it lacks an explanation as to why fire should be a noun. Instead, it presents the lexical category status of this word as an accident. Lowth’s account, by contrast, does offer an explanation.

14.2.2 The traditional treatment of verbs and adjectives

The points made above about Lowth’s description of nouns apply also to the other major word classes typically referred to by structuralists who criticize traditional grammarians: verbs and adjectives.

Regarding verbs, Pullum criticizes the definition of verbs as describing ‘actions or activities’ (2009: 257) as follows:

The old definition is similarly hopeless. Manipulation is an action; but the word manipulation is a noun. Yoga is an activity; agriculture is an activity; osculation is an activity: but all these words belong solely to the category of nouns. (Pullum 2009 )

I have already argued above that in Lowth’s view the ontological status of entities is irrelevant with regard to lexical categorization. Lowth would suggest that manipulation , agriculture , and osculation are used when the speaker conceptually reifies the activities they represent―and he would have argued the same for yoga , had that activity been familiar to him in the second half of the eighteenth century. (The earliest recorded instance in the OED is from 1818; see yoga , n.)

Pullum’s criticism of the traditional definition of verbs focuses on the notion that describing an activity should be a sufficient criterion for verbhood. Other grammarians who are critical of traditional grammarians suggest that it is not a necessary criterion either. Koopman et al. ( 2013 : 3), for example, point out that verbs may denote states, e.g., John fears storms . However, Lowth’s definition does in fact seem to allow verbs to have stative meaning: ‘A Verb is a word which signifies to be, to do, or to suffer’ (1762: 29).

As regards adjectives, Pullum’s (2010: 16) and others’ suggestion that they are traditionally held to describe qualities at first blush appears to correspond well to Lowth’s (1762) suggestion: ‘An Adjective is a word added to a substantive to express its quality’ (26). Koopman et al. (2013) argue that the traditional view is problematic because ‘adjectives can denote states’, giving John is fearful of storms as an example. But the OED shows that quality may refer to a feature of a person’s character ( quality , n., s.v. 2.a), which John’s fear of storms presumably is.

One of Pullum’s objections to the traditional definition is that adjectives do not always add meaning to nouns, as in The good die young (2009: 258). Lowth’s (1762) section on adjectives is only a few pages long, and does not include discussion of such cases. Pullum implies that this is a serious omission, since this leaves Lowth’s definition too broad: good and young do not modify any noun yet are adjectives―at least in Pullum’s view. In section 14.4.2.3 below, I discuss a non-adjectival analysis, based on Croft ( 2001 , 2007b , 2014). Here, let me just say that in a sentence such as Great Danes die young , at least some linguists would analyse young as ‘modifying the noun phrase’ 3   Great Danes (Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt 2005 : 9, Croft 2014: 231).

14.2.3 Other word classes

The quotations representing the structuralist story in section 14.1 , above, demonstrate that the criticisms levelled at traditional grammarians are usually phrased in terms of problems with notional criteria. Critics generally focus their discussion on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. One may wonder why the discussion often ends there. A closer look at Lowth’s grammar suggests an answer to this question, but a brief consideration of grammatical category systems is in order first.

Despite Robins’ suggestion, cited above, that ‘since medieval times grammarians have operated with nine word classes or parts of speech: noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, article, and interjection’ (1964: 227), there was actually considerable variation among traditional grammarians. No fewer than fifty-six systems are identified in Michael’s monumental (1970) survey of 273 grammars from Bullokar (1586) up to 1800. Of these, forty-five consist of the nine class system described by Robins, making it the second most common taxonomy in the period, after the ten class system which recognizes participles as a separate category, and followed by the eight class system in which participles are also a class, but articles and adjectives are subsumed under nouns (Michael 1970: 521–2).

As it happens, Lowth’s (1762) system fits in with the nine class system Robins ascribes to all traditional grammarians. The descriptions of the classes other than nouns, verbs, and adjectives generally display a mixture of semantic and structural (morphological and/or syntactic) properties. As an example, consider Lowth’s definition of interjections. It starts with a description of the syntactic fact that interjections stand on their own among the rest of the sentence, and then moves on to a description of their affective semantics:

Interjection, so called, because they are thrown in between the parts of a sentence without making any alteration to it, are a kind of natural sounds to express the affection of the speaker. (Lowth 1762: 67)

The definition offered by Huddleston and Pullum ( 2002 : 1361) is extremely similar:

The general definition of interjection is that it is a category of words that do not combine with other words in integrated syntactic constructions, and have expressive rather than propositional meaning.

I return to Huddleston and Pullum’s use of semantics in word class definitions in section 14.4.1 below. The point to make here is that the reason why the structuralist story singles out nouns, verbs, and adjectives in its criticism of traditional grammarians is that for these categories there are a greater number of structural properties to highlight (partly the result, of course, of the fact that the members of these categories display morphological distinctions). For other word classes the structuralist ‘alternative’ often overlaps considerably with the traditional view, in being partly semantic. One important proviso, however, is that proponents of the structuralist view may not all take the conceptual view of semantics inherent in Lowth’s grammar―Bloomfield himself certainly did not; see Matthews ( 1993 ) for useful discussion.

14.2.4 Other classical grammarians

Thus far, the discussion of traditional grammarians has focused on Lowth (1762), as he was explicitly referred to by Pullum ( 2010 ). Needless to say, Lowth was part of a larger tradition―a much larger grammatical tradition, in fact, as is clear from discussions such as Michael (1970) and Linn (2006).

In terms of the relatively sophisticated semantic definitions and the parallel use of morphological and/or syntactic criteria, Lowth (1762) is far from unique; Michael (1970) offers a well-informed detailed discussion of these different kinds of criteria. Yet although the structuralist critique of this aspect of the traditional theory of word classes is inaccurate in relation to many grammars, it is valid in relation to some. For example, Michael (1970: 284–5) shows that some grammarians went even beyond the position criticized by Bloomfield and his followers. Specifically, the grammarians in question equated nouns with their referents: ‘A Noun Substantive is the Thing itself’ (Wilson 1759 : 5); ‘All things are nouns: you are surrounded with nouns’ (Anon. 1785). The motivation of these grammarians may have been pedagogical simplicity, but one wonders whether this kind of simplification would have helped students of grammar―often, at the time, children. (The target audience is nonetheless an important consideration in the assessment of different approaches to word classes; see section 14.5 below.)

14.3 Problematic view 2: traditional word class descriptions were purely notional

Full consideration of the discussion of word classes in Lowth (1762) and other traditional grammarians reveals the inaccuracy of Problematic View 2. Focusing on nouns, which will serve to make the point, I note that Lowth’s description includes discussion of different plural formation strategies, as well as of the genitive -’s . Thus, apart from a relatively sophisticated appreciation of semantic properties, Lowth also considered morphology.

In addition to morphology, Lowth draws attention to the co-occurrence of nouns and articles, which are ‘prefixed to substantives, to point them out, and to shew how far their signification extents’ (1762: 10). He is also careful to stress that:

Proper names being the names of individuals, and therefore of things already as determinate as they can be made, admit not of articles, or of plurality of number; unless by a figure, or by accident; as, when great conquerors are called Alexanders , and some great conqueror, an Alexander, or the Alexander of his age; when a common name is understood, as the Thames, that is, the river Thames ; the George, that is the sign of St. George; 4 or when it happens, that there are many persons of the same name, as the two Scipios . (Lowth 1762: 15)

Of course, one could criticize Lowth for not having noticed the distributional similarities between articles and other similar elements, which give rise in many current accounts of English grammar to the class of determiners (Quirk et al. 1985 , Biber et al. 1999 ) or determinatives (Huddleston and Pullum 2002 ). But the more important point from the perspective of giving an accurate assessment of the position and contribution of traditional grammarians is that there was already an awareness of syntactic criteria for category membership.

The use of morphological and/or syntactic properties was rather widespread beyond Lowth (Michael 1970, Vorlat 1975 , Dons 2004 ). Interestingly, Michael also highlights some cases where grammarians relied on structural criteria alone; see for example the definition of verbs by Greaves ( 1594 ), Butler ( 1634 ), and Jonson ( 1640 ), all cited by Michael (1970: 363).

One might perhaps object that traditional grammarians’ description of morphological and syntactic facts do not ‘count’ as part of the definition of the class, as they are not mentioned in the very first sentence of the section on nouns (or whatever word class), which in Lowth and others often provides a brief semantic characterization. But we often find semantic, morphological, and syntactic descriptions in the same section of these grammars, so how does one decide what counts and what does not? And anyway might not students and other grammarians have drawn on these morphological and syntactic properties in descriptions such as Lowth’s in deciding whether to label a given word as a noun? There is some evidence that such distributional facts were indeed drawn upon: Michael (1970: 282) cites an essay by school teacher Lewis ( 1674 ), who appears to suggest that syntactic criteria are easier to teach to children than semantic criteria.

14.4 Problematic view 3: linguists have replaced notional criteria with structural criteria

Problematic View 3 has been formulated so as to cover two misconceptions, which I address in sections 14.4.1 and 14.4.2 .

14.4.1 The use of non-structural criteria by Bloomfield and his followers

The structuralist story can be construed as suggesting that semantic criteria of lexical categories should be replaced completely by structural ones. It is unclear whether Bloomfield ( 1933 ) had that in mind, as he only provides structural criteria for nouns, verbs, and adjectives. But the problem is deeper than that. In some places Bloomfield appears to give a rough indication of the inventory of English word classes: ‘a language like English will show at least half a dozen parts of speech, such as substantive, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, co-ordinating conjunction, and subordinating conjunction, in addition to interjections’ (1933: 198). However, he argues that based on distributionalism it is in fact impossible to devise a ‘fully satisfactory’ system of word classes, as it depends on the ‘functions’ one considers to be the most important (1933: 269)―where function is defined as distribution (see Matthews 1993 : 126–7). Bloomfield’s admission implies that he saw his own distributionally defined classes as being vulnerable to the criticism that a different prioritization of criteria could have led to a different system.

This view converges with Croft’s and Haspelmath’s, which I discuss in section 4.2.3, below.

Even though proponents of the structuralist story propose formal criteria, on closer inspection some of those criteria have significant semantic import. Pullum defines nouns in English partly based on the singular/plural distinction, and English verbs purely on the basis of their morphology (2009: 257). However, Panagiotidis ( 2015 : 7), writing from a generative perspective, has recently offered the following suggestion:

Both number morphology and tense morphology, characteristic of nouns and verbs respectively, have specific and important semantic content: they are unlike declension or conjugation class morphology, which are arbitrary, Morphology-internal and completely irrelevant to meaning.

To the extent that one agrees with this, properties that are usually thought of as purely formal, may be more accurately seen as formal and semantic at the same time.

Regardless of their commitment to Bloomfieldian distributionalism, when grammarians describe word classes beyond nouns, verbs, and adjectives, they sometimes struggle to keep the door closed to meaning. An example is Huddleston and Pullum’s (2002) definition of interjections, given above (section 14.2.2 ).

14.4.2 Alternative approaches, which do not (exclusively) rely on structural criteria

The way in which the structuralist story of word classes is sometimes presented may invite an interpretation on which distributional definitions are universally accepted in the field. Consider Crystal’s definition of nouns in section 14.1 , above, which suggests that ‘linguistic descriptions’ of nouns rely on distributional facts. The absence of a determiner before linguistic descriptions enables a generic reading, such that one might interpret the use of structural criteria as applying to all linguistic descriptions. One may make a similar observation in relation to Pullum’s statement that ‘verbs are defined by their showing (in all the central cases) tense inflections and participial forms, not by their relation to activity or process’ (2009: 257). The question here is: defined in this manner by all linguists or only some?

There is in fact a multitude of approaches to word classes. This is explicitly recognized also by some advocates of Bloomfieldian distributionalism, for example Aarts and Haegeman ( 2006 ) and Aarts ( 2007a ). It is perhaps unsurprising that Aarts highlights the broader picture, as his approach differs from other distributionalist work in at least two important respects. First, grammarians such as Bloomfield and Pullum appear to deem the psychological reality or plausibility of grammatical theory, including lexical categories, irrelevant. However, Aarts expresses an interest in ‘[t]he mental representations of grammatical categories’ (2007a: 88). Second, on a related note, whereas Huddleston and Pullum ( 2002 ) and Pullum ( 2009 , 2010 ) discuss category membership in terms of degrees of centrality and (proto)typicality, they do not offer an explicit theory of gradience in cognition and language. Aarts ( 2007a ) does, distinguishing between subsective and intersective gradience between categories, with the former type referring to cases where a category member may have fewer properties than a prototype but still belongs to the same category (e.g., the adjectives utter versus happy ; Aarts 2007a : 209–10), and the latter to situations where peripheral regions of two categories are similar to one another and where an element displays properties of two different categories (e.g., adjectives and prepositions, as shown by the distribution of like and especially near ; Aarts 2007a : 215–19).

Below, I present some of the main theories of word classes, based on generative grammar (section 14.4.2.1 ), cognitive linguistics ( 14.4.2.2 ), functional typology ( 14.4.2.3 ), psycholinguistics ( 14.4.2.4 ), and finally a recent attempt to synthesize different theories for which there is empirical support ( 14.4.2.5 ). The structuralist approach itself is missing from this overview, as its nature will have become clear throughout the preceding sections. However, where deemed helpful and appropriate I will draw comparisons between it and the theoretical alternatives I focus on below.

14.4.2.1 Generative grammar

Chomksy (1974) defines lexical categories in terms of the abstract syntactic features +/−N and +/−V. Chomsky’s original proposal is restricted to nouns, verbs, and adjectives but in later discussion (1981: 48) he adopts Jackendoff’s (1977: 31) inclusion of prepositions as well. The analyses may be represented by the following word class and feature matrix in Table 14.1 :

Proposals to extend it to other classes have been made by e.g., Jackendoff ( 1977 ), Zimmermann ( 1990 ), Déchaine ( 1993 ), Adger ( 2003 ), and Panagiotidis ( 2015 ).

The system is designed so as to capture generalizations across words―including words belonging to different classes. For instance, the shared feature [+V] accounts for the fact that verbs and adjectives, but not nouns and prepositions, can take the prefix un- (Stowell 1981 : 57, note 17). Whilst the exercise of devising feature-based theories has also found favour with some linguists working in non-Chomskian frameworks (e.g., Bresnan 2001 , Jackendoff 2002 , Sag et al. 2003 , Culicover and Jackendoff 2005 ), Chomsky’s original proposal has attracted criticism from several other generative grammarians.

Baker ( 2003 ) and Panagiotidis ( 2015 ) suggest that Chomsky’s features do a poor job of making correct predictions. For example, adjectives and adpositions do not share a feature, but they can both follow a measure phrase (see examples 1–2, below; taken from Baker 2003 : 2). By contrast, nouns and verbs cannot appear in that environment (3–4, below), which is equally difficult to understand as they do not share a feature either.

The problems are partly caused by the fact that Chomsky’s features lack substance (Baker 2003 : 2–3); or, as Panagiotidis puts it, ‘we do not know what the attributes [N] and [V] stand for’ (2015: 13). Both Baker and Panagiotidis also express concern about the inability of Chomsky’s theory to account for crosslinguistic regularities in the mapping between certain concepts and certain word classes, such that, for example, the concept ROCK is always coded as a noun. Why should the words to describe these objects always end up as [+N, −V]?

Note here an important difference between the views of these generative grammarians and the structuralist position adopted by Pullum ( 2009 , 2010 ): Baker and Panagiotidis set out to define word classes in a way that makes crosslinguistic predictions, whereas Pullum is interested specifically in English. Moreover, Panagiotidis’ conceptual view of the semantics of word classes is at odds with the objectivist position taken by Pullum ( 2009 , 2010 ; see section 14.2.1 above).

The accounts offered by Baker ( 2003 ) and especially Panagiotidis ( 2015 ) are influenced by functional-typological research such as Croft ( 1991 , 2001 ), in which word classes are discussed (partly) in terms of discourse function, and also the cognitive linguistic work of Langacker ( 1987 ), whose semantic definitions of word classes are more sophisticated than the ones offered by traditional grammarians, even if the latter are often less simplistic than they have been made out to be by Bloomfield and his followers.

Based on the insight that nouns, verbs, and adjectives may play different roles in discourse, Baker ( 2003 ) suggests that nouns bear a so called referential index, as a result of which they may occur in argument positions in a sentence, function as antecedents of pronouns, and so on. Verbs license subjects. Adjectives, by contrast, do none of these things, which sees them end up in sentence structure positions that are not occupied by nouns or verbs, such as the attributive position preceding a noun and the predicative position following a copula. Adverbs, finally, are positional variants of adjectives: they are allowed to merge with VPs, APs, and TPs, provided they end in -ly (Baker 2003 : 231), which Baker does not analyse as a suffix but as a noun meaning ‘manner’ (2003: 234–5). For a similar analysis of adverbs and adjectives see Giegerich (2012).

Baker couches his account in syntactic terms, but in his consideration of language acquisition (2003: 296–300) he suggests that semantic criteria play a role. In order to get onto the first rung of the ladder, that is the system of the L1, children may make use of their potentially innate knowledge that there are concrete objects, dynamic physical events, and physical properties. However, once the lexical categories become linked to their syntactic properties, the connection with semantics is said to disappear. Baker expresses this by means of Macnamara’s ladder metaphor: ‘The child climbs to grammar on a semantic ladder and then kicks the ladder away’ (1982: 134, cited by Baker 2003 : 297).

Panagiotidis ( 2015 ) moves away from Baker’s (2003) emphasis on syntax, and proposes that the features [N] and [V] are instructions to the Language Faculty to interpret their bearers as ‘sortal’ or ‘temporal’, respectively. The basis of this distinction in Langacker’s work is explicitly acknowledged, and the discussion of Langacker’s distinction between ‘things’ and ‘processes’ (see section 14.4.2.2 below) is therefore relevant in connection with Panagiotidis as well. Panagiotidis himself accounts for the distinction between sleep as a noun and as a verb as follows:

Both words can be said to encode the same concept. However, the noun sleep forces the viewing of this concept to be a sortal one, which is to say that the perspective over the concept of sleep that the nominal category imposes is of sleep as some type of virtual object or substance. We can therefore lose our sleep (like we lose our keys or lose blood), get more sleep (like we can get more air, food or water); we can also talk about morning sleep being different or sweeter than early evening sleep , and so on. On the other hand, the verb sleep forces us to view the concept of sleep as a subevent, as extending into time, which readily offers itself to temporal modification and so on. Similarly, the perspective over the concept of sleep that the verbal category imposes is of sleep being expressible as a time interval, as something potentially having duration (long, short etc.). (2015: 88)

There are a number of additional differences between Panagiotidis and Baker. One important contrast concerns the cognitive status of the features [N] and [V]. Baker assumes that they are stored as part of the specification of (relevant) words in the lexicon. The assumption that lexical category status of words is stored as part of our linguistic knowledge is shared by different theories, with some exceptions being Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; see e.g., Sag et al. 2003 ) and Distributed Morphology (DM; see e.g., Halle and Marantz 1993 , 1994 , Marantz 1997, Harley and Noyer 1999 , Harley 2009 , Acquaviva and Panagiotidis 2012 ). It is the non-lexicalist framework of DM that Panagiotidis partly aligns himself with, suggesting that nounhood or verbhood, for instance, are bestowed on roots when they are inserted into the syntactic structure of a sentence. Thus, the root sleep ends up as a noun if it is inserted into a DP but as a verb when inserted into a TP.

14.4.2.2 Cognitive linguistics

The most comprehensive and influential cognitive linguistic account of word classes has been offered by Langacker. His theory covers major and minor word classes. Here I will focus on nouns and verbs, but for a useful overview of other classes as well see Taylor (2002: 221–2) and Taylor (this volume).

Langacker argues that nouns and verbs describe THINGS and PROCESSES, respectively. The capitals suggest that these are concepts, thus rendering the theory impervious to the objectivist criticism of notional theories provided by Bloomfield and his followers. Moreover, THINGS and PROCESSES, which emerge in and through language acquisition and use, are defined in a more sophisticated manner than in previous conceptualist semantic descriptions of word classes, with a THING representing ‘a region in some domain’ (Langacker 1987 : 189; where a domain may be defined as ‘any kind of conception or realm of experience’ 2008a: 44, such as space, colour, temperature, emotion) or ‘any product of grouping and reification’ (2008a: 105). A PROCESS, by contrast, is a relation between entities which develops and is mentally followed through time (Langacker 1987 : 248). The latter, but not the former, involves so-called ‘sequential scanning’, whereby the changing configurations of the relation are tracked from one moment to the next. Langacker opposes this to ‘summary scanning’, in which the various configurations of a scene become available as a single Gestalt. Langacker often compares sequential scanning to a film of a ball flying through the air, with a picture that represents its complete trajectory as an arc corresponding to summary scanning.

In early work, the distinction between sequential and summary scanning appeared to be sharp, but in response to criticism from Broccias and Hollmann ( 2007 ), Langacker (2008b) now argues that this is not the case. The degree to which sequential scanning is evoked by a verb depends on whether it heads a finite clause or is somehow subordinated, e.g., when modifying a noun or when functioning as a non-finite complement. In such cases, sequentiality may be partly or wholly suppressed, leaving behind a summarily scanned view of the event (Langacker 2008b: 576).

In relation to Bloomfield’s example of fire , Langacker would argue that this word is the linguistic manifestation of a reified conceptualization of the process of burning. A finite, main clause form of the verb burn , on the other hand, describes the process of an entity being affected, over time, by fire. However, one issue that emerges in this context is that this analysis could be seen as post hoc, in that the analyst may decide that the process is reified because it is described by a noun, or seen as a process because it happens to be coded by a verb.

Langacker suggests that in our mental grammar, conceived of as a huge network, between the general noun and verb schemas and specific instances (e.g., corresponding to the words fire and burn ) there may be prototypes. Words describing concrete objects are seen as prototypical nouns, with verbs describing dynamic, energetic interactions between participants being prototypical of that class (Langacker 2008a : 103–4).

14.4.2.3 Functional typology

Functional typologists aim to describe word classes in such a way that languages can be compared so as to allow for the discovery and formulation of linguistic universals (see e.g., Dryer 1997 , Croft 2001 , 2014, Haspelmath 2010 ). Functional typologists recognize that the complete description of individual languages will involve language-specific categories; in that sense they agree with Bloomfieldian ‘categorial particularism’ (Haspelmath 2010 ). However, they suggest that these language-particular ‘descriptive categories’ must not be confused with universal ‘comparative concepts’ (to use Haspelmath’s terms). They further argue that whereas descriptive categories should be based on distributional analysis―again in line with Bloomfieldian tradition―comparative concepts are mainly conceptual-semantic in nature, as this is where universality is most prominent.

It should be noted that despite the overlap in some important perspectives with the structuralist tradition, functional typologists would disagree with Pullum’s (2009: 257) claim that their definitions of comparative concepts are ‘rough rule-of-thumb ideas’ designed merely ‘to track categorisation across languages’. The ‘rules of thumb’ are seen in this approach as the only crosslinguistically valid option, and the quest for language universals goes beyond ‘tracking categorisation’.

In many cases there is overlap between language-specific categories (e.g., English nouns) and comparative concepts (e.g., nouns in general), but typologists argue that it is important to keep them apart. Much work within the generative framework does not do this, which leads Haspelmath to criticize for example Baker’s (2003) theory of word classes (cf. section 14.4.2.1 above).

There are certain differences among functional typological accounts of categories, including word classes. One of the main ones relates to psychological realism. Haspelmath’s research is not committed to that, but Croft’s work is. Since Croft’s approach has been influential also outside typology (e.g., in generative grammar, see section 14.4.2.1 above), some discussion is in order.

In Croft’s theory, universally valid lexical categorization depends firstly on the communicative/pragmatic function a word (or the phrase it heads) performs. Croft ( 1991 , 2000 , 2001 ) focuses on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Croft distinguishes between three major communicative functions, called ‘propositional acts’, following Searle ( 1969 ): reference, predication, and modification. (The analysis in Croft 1990 , 2014 also incorporates other word classes, which involve additional pragmatic functions.)

Secondly, Croft draws on the ‘commonsense ontology of types of entities’ (Croft 1991 : 38; for criticism see Baker 2003 : 15), consisting of objects, actions, and properties, whose prototypes are defined in more detail in terms of specific semantic properties (Croft 1991 : 62–6).

Croft observes that object words that refer (e.g., door in example (5), below), action words that predicate (e.g., opened ), and property words that modify (e.g., white ) have a privileged, ‘unmarked’ status in the languages of the world.

In particular, object words that are referring expressions, action predicates, and property modifiers are morphologically no more complex than other kinds of words (compare monomorphemic door to whiteness , made up of the property word white plus an extra morpheme to allow it to function as a referring expression), and they display a range of inflectional distinctions that is never surpassed by other kinds of words (compare door-door’s-door to whiteness-*whiteness’s-*whitenesses ). It is these typological prototypes that Croft labels ‘noun’, ‘verb’, and ‘adjective’―a view he traces back to Sapir ( 1921 : 119, cited by Croft 2000 : 88).

The difference between this theory and Pullum’s is demonstrated by consideration of Pullum’s example The good die young . The depictive secondary predicate young (see section 14.2.2 above) is a property word, but on account of its function is not an adjective in Croft’s analysis, but a property predicate. Good is not either, but is an example of property reference.

From Croft ( 2000 ) onwards, typological prototypes are referred to as ‘parts of speech’ (Croft 2000 : 88), with ‘syntactic category’ or ‘grammatical category’ reserved for language-particular groupings. Croft further argues that distributional analysis as used in structuralist syntactic argumentation lacks a principled basis, as there are no agreed upon sets of distributional tests, and there is variation across grammarians with respect to which criteria are considered to be the most important (see Haspelmath 2010 : 667–8 for the same point). I have shown above (section 14.4.1 ) that this was anticipated by Bloomfield himself, who suggested that a system of word classes for English cannot be set up fully satisfactorily. Croft concludes that language-specific word classes (descriptive categories) are therefore ‘myriad’ in number (2000: 81). Moreover, they sometimes have fuzzy boundaries in the sense that not all speakers will always agree as to the distribution of individual words (Croft 2001 : 81).

14.4.2.4 Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguists have approached lexical categorization from corpus-based and experimental perspectives, studying both language acquisition and processing (comprehension) in adult speakers. In Berko’s well-known (1958) wu g study, children were shown images of imaginary creatures or activities with nonsense words attached to them and then encouraged to produce a different morphological form of those words. The fact that a nonsense word such as wug yielded plural wugs when two of the non-existent creatures were shown offered early evidence for the importance of distribution. Brown (1957) showed that subjects associated nonsense words such as sib with either objects or actions depending on the context they appeared in; compare a sib to sibbing . This study therefore suggested that both distribution and semantics play a role in word class assignment.

As an example of a more recent study on the role of distributional cues in lexical categorization, Höhle et al. ( 2004 ) look at whether the acquisition of nouns and verbs in German children aged between twelve and sixteen months was supported by the presence of determiners and subject pronouns. They report that at fourteen to sixteen months the presence of determiners helps children identify nouns, while subject pronouns do not (yet) play a role. They explain this with reference to corpus data that show that in German, with its relatively free word order, subject pronouns have a much lower cue validity for verbs than determiners have for nouns (Höhle et al. 2004 : 349).

In addition to semantic and distributional criteria, since the late 1980s psycholinguistics has yielded a by now substantial body of evidence to suggest that lexical categorization, at least of nouns and verbs, also depends in part on the phonological properties of words (e.g., Kelly and Bock 1988 , Sereno and Jongman 1990, Kelly 1992 , 1996 , Durieux and Gillis 2001, Monaghan et al. 2005 , Farmer et al. 2006 , Don and Erkelens 2008 ). Based on corpus data and various kinds of experiments, often involving nonsense words, researchers have demonstrated that phonological cues are available, and that they can be, and indeed are, used in lexical categorization. For English, the phonological cues for nouns versus verbs include the former typically being longer, having longer syllables, containing fewer voiced final obstruents, having more nasal consonants, and featuring lower and less advanced stressed vowels.

14.4.2.5 A synthetic approach

In a series of studies, Hollmann ( 2012 , 2013 , 2014 ) has presented additional evidence for the role of phonological and distributional properties of word classes. He argues that the almost complete neglect by theoretical linguists of psycholinguistic research on lexical categorization is to their detriment, and shows how phonological and distributional properties may be integrated into a Langackerian word class architecture.

In Hollmann ( 2012 , 2013 ) participants were asked to produce novel English nouns and verbs, and to use each of their nonce creations in a sentence. Phonological analysis of the nonce words provides support for the psychological reality of many of the phonological properties associated with these word classes in the psycholinguistic literature (see section 14.4.2.4 above). This suggests that these properties are part of the mental representation of the categories of nouns and verbs. In cognitive grammar terms, this may mean that below a maximally schematic noun or verb schema there are a number of phonologically partially specified subschemas (see also Taylor 2002: 184, whose proposal Hollmann builds on).

Hollmann ( 2012 ) analyses the distribution of the novel nouns and verbs in the example sentences produced by the subjects. He finds that nouns are often used in referential positions (subject/object), but that even more often than that they co-occur with a determiner. In cognitive grammar terms, this suggests that the noun schema partly emerges from, and may have a particularly strong meronymic link with, the determiner-noun construction. 6 For novel verbs, their frequent occurrence as main verbs in finite clauses suggests that the verb schema emerges from and has a strong meronymic connection with the finite clause construction.

Hollmann ( 2014 ) extends the phonological analysis of word classes to adjectives. Analysis of the most frequent nouns, verbs, and adjectives in the British National Corpus shows that adjectives sound more like nouns than like verbs, but retain some distinctness. Hollmann suggests that the phonological similarity to, but not identity with, nouns may be explained in terms of lexical category processing: adjectives and nouns often belong to the same high level constituent (e.g., the subject noun phrase in The poor dog shivered ), with the verb phrase being a separate constituent. The phonological similarity between adjectives and nouns may thus benefit language processing.

To sum up, Hollmann advocates a view of word classes which integrates insights from psycholinguistics, the structuralist tradition, functional-typological theory, and cognitive linguistics.

14.5 Conclusion

To conclude this chapter I will discuss the fourth commonly held problematic view:

Problematic View 4: the structuralist analysis is the right one.

Section 14.2 has shown that the account of word classes offered by many traditional grammarians does not warrant the dismissive attitude one encounters in the work of Bloomfield and some of his followers. The semantic criteria proposed are sometimes rather sophisticated, so a rejection of those would require more detailed arguments. Moreover, as I demonstrated in section 14.3 , a number of the morphological and syntactic criteria advocated by structuralists were anticipated by traditional grammarians. Also, structuralist grammarians frequently take recourse to meaning as well, especially in relation to minor word classes (section 14.4.1 ). All things considered, the structuralist view of word classes owes a greater debt to traditional grammarians than its proponents tend to acknowledge. And to the extent that using semantic criteria is a weakness, structuralists suffer from it to some extent as well.

In section 14.4.2 I offered an overview of alternative accounts of word classes: generative and/or feature-based, cognitive, functional-typological, psycholinguistic, and finally a combined approach. The sheer breadth of the spectrum, the different types of evidence drawn on by researchers, and the criticisms of the Bloomfieldian approach expressed from within those alternative paradigms suggest that structuralists should avoid the suggestion that their approach is universally accepted and/or necessarily ‘the right one’.

A more accurate picture of word classes is that they may be studied from a variety of angles. The angle, and therefore the potential merit of the theory adopted, may depend on the interests of the researcher and/or the needs of the target audience. However, these interests and needs will also present questions and challenges.

If one is interested in setting up a systematic, fine-grained analysis of word classes in English, one may opt for a distributionalist approach. However, in order to achieve true rigour one must explore the limits of the approach, and describe these explicitly. For instance, what exactly is the list of criteria one uses, on what basis were they selected and potentially differentially weighted, and where does one encounter problems in their application (e.g., minor word classes)? In terms of the target audience, such an approach may be suitable for professional linguists and advanced students, but what about young learners―the main audience of many traditional grammars? Aarts advocates distributionalism in his (2007a) monograph. However, interestingly, in his Englicious project, which offers materials for teachers and schoolchildren in the UK, he enriches the largely distributional definitions of word classes from the National Curriculum Glossary with semantic descriptions, e.g., ‘Nouns [include] words for people, animals, and things ( teacher , rabbit , desk ) and also many words for abstract concepts ( kindness , mystery , technology )’ ( http://www.englicious.org/glossary , s.v. noun [last accessed 4 April 2019]).

If one’s interests extend beyond English, then depending on overall theoretical preference one may gravitate towards feature-based or semantic-pragmatic approaches. Here, the ability to generate language universals that are supported by crosslinguistic data will be a measure of success. In addition, to the extent that one is interested in word classes as cognitively real categories, questions emerge related to the amount of independent evidence for the cognitive constructs one proposes. However, this is less relevant within the generative perspective of Baker and Panagiotidis, couched as it is in the modularity assumption, than in the approaches of Langacker and Croft, who make no such assumption.

If one’s aim is to build an empirically well-supported theory of lexical categorization in acquisition and processing, then the psycholinguistic perspective presents itself. Testing one’s hypotheses will ideally involve triangulation across corpora and different kinds of experimental data sets, and one should raise questions about ecological validity. Although theoretical linguists have ignored psycholinguistic research on lexical category assignment for too long, one might also suggest that psycholinguists should engage more with linguistic theory, in an effort to frame their findings in terms of models constructed on other, not necessarily less important, types of evidence. Hollmann’s synthetic perspective offers a glimpse of what such an approach might look like, yet it is clear that combining different approaches inherently also raises all the kinds of questions associated with those theories.

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I am grateful for discussion of this chapter with Bas Aarts, Bill Croft, Rodney Huddleston, Evelien Keizer, and an external reviewer, with any remaining shortcomings being entirely my own.

Emphasis here and elsewhere in the original, unless stated otherwise.

I use scare quotes because rather than employing the term ‘modification’ the linguists in question would suggest that depictive young ‘predicates’ a property of the subject Great Danes . It is worth noting that Croft ( 2001 , 2007b , 2014) sees modification and predication as propositional act functions (in the sense of Searle 1969 ; see further section 14.4.2.3 below), not as syntactic relations between constituents. The typological evidence in fact suggests that the function of depictives such as young falls somewhere between restrictive and non-restrictive modification and main predication (see e.g., van der Auwera and Malchukov 2005 ).

Lowth refers here to a specialized use of the word George , on which it is ‘[a] representation of St George, typically jewelled or enamelled, and forming part of the insignia of the Order of the Garter’ ( OED , George , n., s.v. 1b.).

I use the term ‘adposition’ rather than ‘preposition’ here as Chomsky’s proposal appears to be intended to be relevant not only to English but universally. Gazdar et al., who state that their decompositional approach of these word classes follows Chomsky’s, indeed refer to ‘Preposition/Postposition’ (1985: 20).

A construction is defined here as in the work of Langacker, Croft, and Goldberg from 2006 onwards, i.e. as a form-meaning pairing that occurs frequently enough for it to be stored as a unit in a speaker’s mental grammar.

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PARTS OF SPEECH - WORD CLASSES: POWERPOINT PRESENTATION

Subject: English

Age range: 7-11

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

22 July 2021

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This PowerPoint Presentation is perfect for teaching Parts of Speech - Word Classes – Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Verbs, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions and Interjections. These no prep activities would be great for ELA lessons or ELA centers. Your students will love these exercises that are carefully planned for student engagement.

After attempting these New Bloom’s Taxonomy-based activities students will be able to:

• Identify the correct definition for a range of word classes.
• Identify the correct word class of words in the context of a sentence.
• Apply existing knowledge of word classes to complete a sentence.
• Construct a sentence using vocabulary from a specific word class.
• Exercise error identification to identify common mistakes made in using parts of speech.
• Use different word classes to create different meanings in different contexts.

Here are some possible uses for these in your classroom:

• To challenge early finishers
• For effective tutoring
• As ESL stations and sub tubs
• As holiday work and homework
• For small group collaborations
• For an end of unit assessments
• For reinforcement and enrichment

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This bundle of 8 (PowerPoint Presentations) is perfect for teaching Word Classes - Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Verbs, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions and Interjections. These no prep activities would be great for ELA lessons or ELA centers. Your students will love these exciting exercises that are excellent for student engagement. This bundle includes PowerPoint Presentations on: * Noun Types: 37 Slides * Pronoun Types: 38 Slides * Adjective Types: 40 Slides * Verb Types; 43 Slides * Adverb Types: 35 Slides * Conjunction Types: 35 Slides * Prepositions Types: 57 Slides * Parts of Speech: 40 Slides More Word Class Bundles by the same Author: * Boom Cards: 8 Decks * Google Slides: 8 Presentations * PowerPoint Presentations: 8 Lessons * Unit Lesson Plans: 8 Units * Worksheets with Answers: 8 Sets * Scaffolding Notes: 8 Sets ◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈ Save 50% on this BUNDLE! Note: These are also sold separately! ◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈

PARTS OF SPEECH - WORD CLASSES: BUNDLE

These bundled resources are perfect for teaching Parts of Speech - Word Classes – Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Verbs, Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions and Interjections. These no prep activities would be great for English lessons or English centers. Your students will love these ELA Boom Cards, Google Slides, PPT, Worksheets with Answers and Scaffolding Notes. After completing this unit students will be able to: * Identify the correct definition for a range of word classes. * Identify the correct word class of words in the context of a sentence. * Apply existing knowledge of word classes to complete a sentence. * Construct a sentence using vocabulary from a specific word class. * Exercise error identification to identify common mistakes made in using parts of speech. * Use different word classes to create different meanings in different contexts. This download includes: * Scaffolding Notes: 4 Handouts * Worksheets with Answers: 26 Exercises * Unit Lesson Plan: 39 Pages * PowerPoint Presentation: 40 Slides * Google Slides: 40 Slides * Boom Cards: 89 Digital Task Cards Here are some possible uses for these in your classroom: * To challenge early finishers * For effective tutoring * As ESL stations and sub tubs * As holiday work and homework * For small group collaborations * For an end of unit assessments * For reinforcement and enrichment ◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈ Save 30% on this BUNDLE! Note: These are also sold separately! ◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈◈

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Word classes.

Topics | Year 4/5 This unit is part of Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar > Word Classes

• Identify the general word class of a noun, verb, adjective and adverbs

Identify nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

Identify the article in a sentence

Use conjunctions to join clauses

SPaG: Stand-alone Presentation

This presentation includes

Look at the main word classes and their relationships with each other, including:

Also look at pronouns, prepositions, articles, and conjunctions.

SPaG Worksheets

Identify the general word class of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs

Each collection of exercises is made up of three sets. Set A is the easiest or most accessible, Set C is the hardest or uses more complex language.

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Word Classes

Nov 27, 2014

230 likes | 501 Views

Word Classes. Noun Verb Adjective Adverb Pronoun Conjunction Preposition. Nouns. A noun is a word used for naming a person, an animal, a place or a thing. flower. saucepan. apple. bird. pencil. You can usually put the word ‘the’ in front of a noun. Nouns.

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Presentation Transcript

Word Classes Noun Verb Adjective Adverb Pronoun Conjunction Preposition

Nouns A noun is a word used for naming a person, an animal, a place or a thing. flower saucepan apple bird pencil You can usually put the word ‘the’ in front of a noun.

Nouns A proper noun is a noun that refers to a particular person or thing. January Michael Elstow England Julia Proper nouns have a capital letter.

Pronoun Sometimes you refer to a person or thing without using its actual name. The word you use instead of the noun is called a pronoun. I he she you it me him her we they us them

Verb A verb is a doing or a being word. Verbs often tell us about actions – what someone does or is doing He went to the shop. Jack can jump very high. hide write sing cut

Adjectives Adjectives are describing words. They tell you more about a noun or pronoun. They give the reader a clearer picture of what is being described. Mr Fox had a long, bushy tail and gleaming eyes. He wore an old, scruffy jacket. She did not have any food left.

Adverbs Adverbs give more detail about a word in a sentence. Usually it tells you more about the verb. An adverb usually answers the questions How? When? Where? or Why? Sarah ran home quickly. Cut the paper carefully. Suddenly the room went dark.

Adverbs Adverbs give more detail about a word in a sentence. Adverbs can be one word or a group of words. If there is no verb in the group of words it is called an adverbial phrase. Sarah ran home across the field. Cut the paper as carefully as possible. If there is a verb in the group of words it is called an adverbial clause. They sang as they walked along.

Conjunction

Preposition

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INTRODUCTION Lesson 1 – Microsoft Word Word Basics

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Elektrostal

Elektrostal’.

(until 1938, Zatish’e), a city under oblast jurisdiction in Moscow Oblast, RSFSR; situated 58 km east of Moscow. Railroad station on a branch line of the Moscow-Orekhovo-Zuevo line. Population, 135,000 (1977; 43,000 in 1939; 97,000 in 1959; 123,000 in 1970). Enterprises in the city include the Elektrostal’ Electrometallurgical Plant, a heavy machinery plant, a book bindery, and a plant for the production of motor vehicles and railroad equipment. The main educational institutes are a branch of the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys, machine-building and construction technicums, and a music school.

(full name, I. F. Tevosian Elektrostal’), an electrometallurgical plant located in the city of Elektrostal’, Moscow Oblast. It manufactures high-quality alloy and special steels.

Formed from a foundry that had opened in 1916, Elektrostal’ began operation in 1918. It was thoroughly retooled between 1926 and 1937, with the addition of two steelmaking shops equipped with open-hearth and electric furnaces, a rolling shop equipped with model 350, model 600, and model 800 mills, a heat-treating shop, a stamping shop, a forging shop, and a drop-hammer shop. In 1940, the plant produced 226,000 tons of steel.

Elektrostal’ was evacuated to the Urals at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45. It was reevacuated in 1942 and began production for the front in July of that year. In the 1950’s, 1960’s, and 1970’s, a number of production sections were modernized and fully mechanized; shops with special equipment of the newest design were built, as were first-class laboratories with modern apparatus.

Elektrostal’ makes use of many advanced production processes, including oxygen steelmaking, subsurface deoxidation, and refining in molten slags and under high vacuums. Electron-beam melting and plasma-arc melting have been introduced.

Research is conducted at Elektrostal’ on the development and commercial production of new types of steel. The plant is now capable of producing more than 2,000 types of steel and alloys. Its steel output increased by a factor of 3.5 between 1945 and 1975.

Elektrostal’ was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1945 and the Order of the October Revolution in 1971.

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