In a previous posting, I mentioned Greenbaum's treatment of word classes
in The Oxford English Grammar (OUP 1996).  I thought I'd summarize what
he lays out (pp. 90-95).

 

He proposes four open classes (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) and seven
closed classes (auxiliary, conjunction, preposition, determiner,
pronoun, numeral, and interjection) and notes that many words belong to
more than one class.  In his treatment of the classes, he combines
determiner and pronoun into one section because there is a great deal of
overlap between them, even though there are words, like "the" and "she",
that are clearly one or the other.  (It's a good example of the fact
that category boundaries are fuzzy.)  In his two-page discussion of the
criteria that are used to determine word classes and their membership he
presents three types of criterion, notional, morphological, and
grammatical (syntactic), with the combination of morphological and
grammatical being the most useful where inflectional variants or affixal
characteristics are available.  For word classes that don't have
morphological variants, like prepositions and conjunctions, notional and
grammatical criteria work better.  He "notes that notional criteria are
often a useful entry to a recognition of a class."  He also touches on
the notion "prototype", commenting that "some members of a class are
central (or prototypical), whereas others are more peripheral", pointing
out that "tall" is a central member of the adjective class because it
exhibits all the criteria of adjectives while "afraid" is peripheral
since it can only be predicative.  He points out also that members of a
class may contain more than one word, like "book review", "no one", or
"in spite of", which are a compound noun, pronoun, and preposition,
respectively.

 

I'm not suggesting that we simply adopt Greenbaum's description but
rather that it is a useful starting point for part of speech terminology
and concepts.  Clearly any such system must be analyzed in terms of
scope and sequence, deciding which criteria and which categories to
present when and in which order.  I'm also not suggesting that
terminology be limited to parts of speech.  Johanna's proposal is, I
think, an excellent place to start for more comprehensive terminology.

 

Herb


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