Kernel (basic) sentence and their transforms

15. Descriptive approach to establishing classes of words (Ch. Fries` classification)

(Charles Frieze’s Classification)

The principle motto was: ‘formal analyses of formal linguistic units’. The authors of this slogan were P. Hook and J. Mathews. Meaning was excluded from the analysis. These authors criticized severely all the previous classifications of parts of speech and claimed to work out quite a new system of word classes. They rejected the term ‘part of speech’ and called them classes. It would be original and more objective. The leading principle was the principle of form.

In order to prove the importance of form they worked out a method of nonsense words (woggle ugged diggles, uggs wogged diggs). The meaning isn’t important but it’s necessary to take into consideration the distribution of word in a sentence (its typical position) and the neighboring word to the right and to the left.

The second method – the method of substitution (putting words into the position of the certain word; if several words can occur in the same position, it means they belong to the same class). Ch. C. Fries distributed all the words into four ‘word-classes’ and the 15 groups of function words, which were given the names of E. letters. In order to describe four word-classes he used the so-called substitutional

Leonard Bloomfield critisized the tradit approach: groups of wds must be identified on the basis of their position. The syntactico-distributional classification of wds is based on the study of their combinability by means of substitution testing. The testing results in developing the model of 4 main positions of notional wds in E. sentence: those of the N,V,A, D. Pron are included into the corresponding positional classes as their substitutes. Wds standing outside the positions in the sentence are treated as function wds of various syntactic values. Here Ch Fries presented the scheme of e-wd classes.

He presented 3 test-frames: Frame A:the concert was good (always)- wds that occupy the position of a N.

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

Frame C: the team went there. = as the result of the test on these frames the following lists of positional wds:

Class 1. A- concert, B- clerk, C- team;

Class 2. A- was, B- remembered, C- went;

Class 3. A- good, large etc.;

class 4. A- there, here, always, B- soon, repeatedly, C- there, back, out etc.

All these wds can fill the positions of the frames without affecting their general structural meaning.

The words of four classes described above are very frequent in every text and they make 67% of all the words in the text. The other 33% are represented by the function words and their number is very limited.

154 functional wds: 12 groups: determiners, Vaux/mod, wds of the very type, conj, prep, introducers (there,it), interrogative wds (when), interject, wds yes/no, attention getting signals (look, listen), the polite formula please, let’s. Thus the general scheme is the opposition of notional and functional wds, the 4 cardinal classes of notional wds.

Criticism: Fries criticized all the previous classifications of parts of speech but he himself didn’t give any definition of this grammatical category. He simply described all the possible distributions of the word of each class. He was not very consistent in describing the words of group A. he called them ‘class I determiners’, but some of these words can occur in the position of Class I themselves.

Modal words remained unclassified and particles as well. Interrogative pronouns and adverbs firstly appear in Group I and secondly as subordinate conjunctions in Group J.

Summary.

Thus, classification is not so exact as the author claimed. In Transformational Grammar, which was preoccupied with a problem of S. even no attempts were made to classify parts of speech.