There is
a long tradition of classifying words, for the purpose of grammatical
description, into the ten word classes (or parts of speech) noun, verb,
adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, numeral, article,
interjection. While each of these terms is useful, and they are indispensable
for practical purposes, their status in a fully explicit description of a
language or in general grammatical theory remains disputed. Although most of
the traditional word class distinctions can be made in most languages, the
cross-linguistic applicability of these notions is often problematic. Here I
focus primarily on the major word classes noun, verb, and adjective, and on
ways of dealing with the cross-linguistic variability in their patterning.
Words
can be classified by various criteria, such as phonological properties (e.g.,
monosyllabic vs. Polysyllabic words), social factors (e.g., general vs.
technical vocabulary), and language history (e.g., loanwords vs. native words).
All of these are classes of words, but as a technical term, word class refers
to the ten traditional categories below (plus perhaps a few others), most of
which go back to the Greek and Roman grammarians. In addition to the terms, a
few examples are given of each word class.
Noun
: book, storm,
arrival
Verb
: push, sit,
know
Adjective
: good, blue,
Polish
Adverb
: quickly, very,
fortunately
Pronoun
: you, this,
nobody
Preposition/adposition
: on, for,
because of
Conjunction
: and, if,
while
Numeral
: one, twice,
third
Article
: the, a
Interjection
: ouch, tsk
(In
this article, the more general term `adposition' will be used rather than preposition,
because many languages have postpositions rather than prepositions, and word
order is irrelevant in this context).
The
special status of the classification above derives from the fact that these are
the most important classes of words for the purpose of grammatical description,
equally relevant for morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics. This makes the
classification more interesting, but also more complex and more problematic
than other classifications of words. Besides the term word class, the older
term part of speech (Latin pars orationis) is still often used,
although it is now quite opaque (originally it referred to sentence
constituents). The term word class was introduced in the first half of the
twentieth century by structuralist linguistics. Another roughly equivalent
term, common especially in Chomskyan linguistics is `syntactic category'
(although technically this refers not only to lexical categories such as nouns
and verbs, but also to phrasal categories such as noun phrases and verb
phrases).
The
main two problems with the maximal wordclass above are (a) that some of the
classes intersect (e.g., the English word `there' is both a pronoun and an
adverb), and (b) that the different classes do not have equal weight; while
most languages have hundreds of verbs and thousands of nouns, there are far
fewer pronouns and conjunctions, and often only a handful of adpositions and
articles. The solution that is often adopted explicitly for the second problem
is to make a further subdivision into major word classes (nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs) and minor word classes (all others). (Alternative terms
for major and minor classes are content words / function words and, especially
in Chomskyan linguistics, lexical categories / functional categories.) This
distinction is discussed further in Sect. 2. The solution to the first problem
that is implicit in much contemporary work is that pronouns and numerals are
not regarded as word classes on a par with nouns, verbs, prepositions, and so
on. Instead, they are regarded as semantically highly specific subclasses of
the other classes, for instance, there are nominal pronouns (e.g., he, who),
adjectival pronouns (e.g., this, which, such) and adverbial pronouns
(e.g., here, thus). Similarly, there are adjectival numerals ( five,
fifth), adverbial numerals (twice), and nominal numerals (a
fifth, a five). Some languages also have verbal pronouns and verbal
numerals. Accordingly, this article will not deal with pronouns (see Pronouns)
and numerals (see Numeral Systems).
2. Content Words and Function Words
Content
word classes are generally open (i.e., they accept new members in principle)
and large (comprising hundreds or thousands of words), and content words tend
to have a specific, concrete meaning. They tend to be fairly long (often
disyllabic or longer), and their text frequency is fairly low. By contrast,
function word classes are generally closed and small, and function words tend
to have abstract, general meaning (or no meaning at all, but only a grammatical
function in specific constructions). They tend to be quite short (rarely longer
than a syllable), and their text frequency is high.
3. Kinds of word classes
In this
section we will discuss the major word classes of English. These are nouns,
verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
a. Nouns
In many
languages, nouns have affixes indicating number (singular, plural, dual, see Grammatical
Number), case (e.g., nominative, accusative, ergative, dative), possessor
person}number (`my,' `your,' `his,'etc’), and definiteness. Some examples
follow.
Example
: book, pen, chair, table, etc.
b. Verbs
verbs
have affixes indicating tense (present, past, future), aspect (imperfective, perfective,
progressive), mood (indicative, imperative, optative, subjunctive, etc.),
polarity (affirmative, negative), valence- changing operations (passive
causative, see Valency and Argument Structure in Syntax), and the
person}number of subject and object(s) (see Grammatical Agreement).
Semantic notions that are more rarely expressed morphologically are spatial
orientation and instrument. Some examples follow:
Example
: read, talk, walk, write, etc.
c. Adjective
In a
fair number of languages, adjectives have affixes indicating comparison
(comparative degree, superlative degree, equative degree), and in a few
languages, adjectives are in¯ected for agreement with the noun they modify.
Some examples follow.
Example
: beautiful, handsome, hard, angry, etc.
d. Adverb
A word
that modifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb, expressing manner, place,
time or degree; a word that can modify a phrase, clause or sentence.
B. CONVERSION
Conversion is the word formation process
in which a word of one grammatical form becomes a word of another grammatical
form without any changes to spelling or pronunciation. For example, the
noun email appeared in English before the verb: a
decade ago I would have sent you an email (noun) whereas now I can either send
you an email (noun) or simply email (verb) you. The original noun email experienced conversion, thus resulting in the new
verb email. Conversion is also referred to as zero
derivation or null derivation with the assumption that the formal change
between words results in the addition of an invisible morpheme. However, many
linguistics argue for a clear distinction between the word formation processes
of derivation and conversion.
Zero Derivation (Conversion)
Corversion is a linguistic prosses that assigns an already
existing word to a new syntactic (grammatical) category (part of speech)
without any concomitant change in form (Lieber 2005: 418). It is the processes
that may take part in the creation of new lexemes in English (Valera 2004: 20).
This process is also known as a functional shift or zero derivation.
The most productive form of conversion in English is noun to verb conversion. The following list
provides examples of verbs converted from nouns:
1.
Noun – Verb
·
access – to access
·
bottle – to bottle
·
closet – to closet
·
email – to email
For example:
·
My grandmother bottled
(verb) the juice and canned (verb) the pickles.
·
My grandmother put the juice
in a bottle (noun) and the pickles in a can (noun).
·
She microwaved (verb) her
lunch.
·
She heated her lunch in the
microwave (noun).
·
The doctor eyed (verb) my
swollen eye (noun).
Noun to verb conversion is also referred to as verbification
or verbing, as humorously discussed by Calvin and Hobbes.
Another productive form of conversion in English is verb to noun conversion. The following list
provides examples of nouns converted from verbs:
2. Verb – Noun
·
to alert – alert
·
to attack – attack
·
to call – call
·
to clone – clone
·
to command – command
For example:
·
The guard alerted (verb) the
general to the attack (noun).
·
The enemy attacked (verb)
before an alert (noun) could be sounded.
·
Sometimes one just needs a
good cry (noun).
·
The baby cried (verb) all
night.
·
We need to increase (verb)
our productivity to see an increase (noun) in profits.
Verb to noun conversion is also referred
to as nominalization.
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