THE SYSTEM OF PARTS OF SPEECH

1. Proceeding in the usual order, we start with the noun,or substantive.³

Its characteristic features are the following.

(1) Meaning: thingness. Thus, nouns include not only chair and iron, etc., but also beauty, peace, necessity, journey, and everything else presented as a thing, or object.

(2) Form. Nouns have the category of number (singular and plural), though some individual nouns may lack either a singular or a plural form. They also, in the accepted view, have the category of case (common and genitive); see, however, p. 42 ff.

(3) Function. (a) Combining with words to form phrases. A noun combines with a preceding adjective (large room), or occasionally with a following adjective (times immemorial), with a preceding noun in either the common case (iron bar) or the genitive case (father's room), with a verb following it (children play) or preceding it (play games). Occasionally a noun may combine with a following or a preceding adverb (the man there; the then president). It also combines with prepositions (in a house; house of rest). It is typical of a noun to be preceded by the definite or indefinite article (the room, a room). (b) Function in the sentence. A noun may be the subject or the predicative of a sentence, or an object, an attribute, and an adverbial modifier. It can also make part of each of these when preceded by a preposition.

2. Next, we come to the adjective.

(1) Meaning. The adjective expresses property.¹

(2) Form. Adjectives in Modern English are invariable. Some adjectives form degrees of comparison (long, longer, longest).

(3) Function. (a) Adjectives combine with nouns both preceding and (occasionally) following them (large room, times immemorial). They also combine with a preceding adverb (very large). Adjectives can be followed by the phrase "preposition + noun" (free from danger). Occasionally they combine with a preceding verb (married young). (b) In the sentence, an adjective can be either an attribute (large room) or a predicative (is large). It can also be an objective predicative (painted the door green).

The pronoun.

(1)The meaning of the pronoun as a separate part of speech is somewhat difficult to define. In fact, some pronouns share essential peculiarities of nouns (e.g. he), while others have much in common with adjectives (e. g. which). This made some scholars think that pronouns were not a separate part of speech at all and should be distributed between nouns and adjectives. However, this view proved untenable and entailed insurmountable difficulties. Hence it has proved necessary to find a definition of the specific meaning of pronouns, distinguishing them from both nouns and adjectives. From this angle the meaning of pronouns as a part of speech can be stated as follows: pronouns point to the things and properties without naming them. Thus, for example, the pronoun it points to a thing without being the name of any particular class of things. The pronoun its points to the property of a thing by referring it to another thing. The pronoun what can point both to a thing and a property.

(2) Form. As far as form goes pronouns fall into different types. Some of them have the category of number (singular and plural), e. g. this, while others have no such category, e. g. somebody. Again, some pronouns have the category of case (he — him, somebody — somebody's), while others have none (something).

(3) Function. (a) Some pronouns combine with verbs (he speaks, find him), while others can also combine with a following noun (this room). (b) In the sentence, some pronouns may be the subject (he, what) or the object, while others are the attribute (my). Pronouns can be predicatives.

4. Numerals. The treatment of numerals presents some difficulties, too. The so-called cardinal numerals (one, two) are somewhat different from the so-called ordinal numerals (first, second).

(1) Meaning. Numerals denote either number or place in a series.

(2) Form. Numerals are invariable.

(3) Function. (a) As far as phrases go, both cardinal and ordinal numerals combine with a following noun (three rooms, third room); occasionally a numeral follows a noun (soldiers three, George the Third). (b) In a sentence, a numeral most usually is an attribute (three rooms, the third room), but it can also be subject, predicative, and object: Three of them came in time; "We Are Seven" (the title of a poem by Wordsworth); I found only four.

6. The verb.

(1) Meaning. The verb as a part of speech expresses a process.

(2) Form. The verb is characterised by an elaborate system of morphological categories, some of which are, however, controversial.¹ These are: tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number.

(3) Function. (a) Verbs are connected with a preceding noun (children play) and with a following noun (play games). They are also connected with adverbs (write quickly). Occasionally a verb may combine with an adjective (married young). (b) In a sentence a verb (in its finite forms) is always the predicate or part of it (link verb). The functions of the verbals (infinitive, participle, and gerund) must be dealt with separately.

7. The adverb.

(1) The meaning of the adverb as a part of speech is hard to define. Indeed, some adverbs indicate time or place of an action (yesterday, here), while others indicate its property (quickly) and others again the degree of a property (very). As, however, we should look for one central meaning characterising the part of speech as a whole, it seems best to formulate the meaning of the adverb as "property of an action or of a property".

(2) Form. Adverbs are invariable. Some of them, however, have degrees of comparison (fast, faster, fastest).

(3) Function. (a) An adverb combines with a verb (run quickly), with an adjective (very long), occasionally with a noun (the then president) and with a phrase (so out of things). (b) An adverb can sometimes follow a preposition (from there). (c) In a sentence an adverb is almost always an adverbial modifier, or part of it (from there), but it may occasionally be an attribute.

8. Prepositions. The problem of prepositions has caused very heated discussions, especially in the last few years. Both the meaning and the syntactical functions of prepositions have been the subject of controversy. We will treat of this matter at some length in Chapter XVIII, and here we will limit ourselves to a brief statement of our general view on the subject.

(1) Meaning. The meaning of prepositions is obviously that of relations between things and phenomena.

(2) Form. Prepositions are invariable.

(3) Function. (a) Prepositions enter into phrases in which they are preceded by a noun, adjective, numeral, stative, verb or adverb, and followed by a noun, adjective, numeral or pronoun. (b) In a sentence a preposition never is a separate part of it. It goes together with the following word to form an object, adverbial modifier, predicative or attribute, and in extremely rare cases a subject (There were about a hundred people in the hall).

We have drawn a general outline of the division of the lexicon into part of speech classes developed by modern linguists on the lines of traditional morphology.

It is known that the distribution of words between dif­ferent parts of speech may to a certain extent differ with dif­ferent authors. Thi sfact gives cause to some linguists for calling in question the rational character of the part of speech clas­sification as a whole, gives them cause for accusing it of being subjective or "prescientific" in essence. Such nihilistic criti­cism, however, should be rejected as utterly ungrounded.

Indeed, considering the part of speech classification on its merits, one must clearly realize that what is above all important about it is the fundamental principles of word-class identification, and not occasional enlargements or dim­inutions of the established groups, or re-distributions of individual words due to re-considerations of their subcategor-ial features. The very idea of subcategorization as the ob­ligatory second stage of the undertaken classification tes­tifies to the objective nature of this kind of analysis.

For instance, prepositions and conjunctions can be com­bined into one united series of "connectives", since the func­tion of both is just to connect notional components of the sentence. In this case, on the second stage of classifica­tion, the enlarged word-class of connectives will be subdivided into two main subclasses, namely, prepositional connect­ives and conjunctional connectives. Likewise, the articles can be included as a subset into the more general set of par­ticles-specifiers. As is known, nouns and adjectives, as well as numerals, are treated in due contexts of description under one common class-term "names": originally, in the Ancient Greek grammatical teaching they were not differentiated because they had the same forms of morphological change (declension). On the other hand, in various descriptions of English grammar such narrow lexemic sets as the two words yes and no, the pronominal determiners of nouns, even the one anticipating pronoun it are given a separate class-item status — though in no way challenging or distorting the functional character of the treated units.

It should be remembered that modern principles of part of speech identification have been formulated as a result of painstaking research conducted on the vast materials of numerous languages; and it is in Soviet linguistics that the three-criteria characterization of parts of speech has been developed and applied to practice with the utmost consist­ency. The three celebrated names are especially notable for the elaboration of these criteria, namely, V. V. Vinogradov in connection with his study of Russian grammar, A. I. Smirnitsky and B. A. Ilyish in connection with their study of English grammar