Parts of speech classification

Analytical forms in English

Analytical forms have 2 or more elements but they all make one word .(is reading,has been done,will have been done.)

Only one lexical meaning is present here and it is expressed in the final component. Such forms use grammatical elements that are called- auxiliary verbs. Such mechanism is typical of analytical languages. In English passive,continuous,perfect,future,suppositional and conditional moods are formed only analytically.

Syntactical languages use such forms very seldom. In Russian only future (буду читать) degreeof compression (более умный,самый умный) passive forms are expressed analitically.

The problem of parts of speech classification is rather ancient because the first attempts to divide

words were made in ancient home and Greece.

Аристотель singled out 4 groups of words:l)the name 2)the verb 3)the participle 4)the link

later in Alexsandry 8 classes and this tradition was bond to the Latin language and from it this

division languages: l)noun 2)the verb 3)the pronoun 4)participle 5)adverb 6)preposition

7)conjunction 8)interjection. The term part of speech is rather convectional and it docs not the linguistic phenomenon correctly

Classification of words into classes is based on 3 criteria:

l)semantic 2)formal (morphological)3)fictional

At the beginning of the 20^th century descriptivists added the 4th criteria-distribution the first semantic criteria is connected with the general category meaning of a whole part of speech. Substantively for nouns process for verbs quality for adjectives. The formal criteria is connected with ways of form building and with grammar categories of this part of speech. The functional criteria is based on syntactic roles of the word in the sentence. It means that different part of speech have a definite number of functions (e.g. Noun-subject or object) the forth distributional criteria describes each part of speech from the view point of its environment. In fact none of these criteria is absolute because each of them works not for all parts of speech (e.g. Among nouns we find words whose categorical meaning is equalities) (e.g. Depth, whiteness, mind, reading) but still such words are also refereed to nouns on the basic of the rest criteria. They change forms and function as typical nouns. Some nouns are not changeable and they behave like functional words but they function as nouns (метро.какаду)- this words can not be characterized. Functions and distribution can not be regarded as absolute criteria either because the same part of speech have several functions which at the same time can be fulfilled by words of other speech. The list of possible neighbors is also rather wide and very often it is the same.

Conclusion. This situation demands that we should rely upon all the criteria he necessary an only all the in this case the states of the word can be identified correctly.

11. Notional words and functional words