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        For me, the most coherent way to talk about parts of speech
is to describe (for students) the structural characteristics and
functional roles of "base," or "prototypical," nouns, adjectives, etc.,
and then demonstrate that some words in sentences take on some
of those characteristics but not all (they are not prototypical), while
some take on all the characterisitics. And that's basically all that
can be said. For instance:
 
A prototypical adjective...
[1] can occupy both these slots: The ___ actor seems very ___. (Try "tall")
        but some non-prototypical ("imperfect") adjectives can occupy only
        one or the other (e.g. main, alone)
[2] can take comparative and superlative inflections: taller, tallest
        but not "mainer" or even "more main"
 
Or take the prototypical noun. It will take the plural and possessive
inflections; it will take certain words as immediate constituents (or noun
markers), i.e.pre-determiner, determiner, quantifier, particularizer,
adj., adjunct; it will function in certain roles (subject, object); it
will take an initial stress (im' print, as opposed to the verb im print'),
etc.
        It isn't necessary to "explain" words that have some but not all
those characteristics; it is simply a characteristic of our language to
derive words that do not have all the characteristic of the base
categories. Or that have the characteristics of two categories, such as
the adjunct: "tennis" in "tennis shoe" has features of both noun and
adjective. There's no need to argue which it is. Participles, for example,
are simply words that are non-prototypical; they have charateristics of
verbs and adjectives but aren't prototypical forms of either (e.g. "lost"
in "the key lost yesterday" is a non-prototypical verb because it doesn't
have
HAVE in front of it; it is a non-prototypical adjective because, even
though it is only one syllable, it cannot take the -er inflection).
 
        I try to teach my students the underlying categories and
functions, after which I urge them to enjoy the flexibility
of the language without worrying about how to categorize problematic
words.
                   --Bill Murdick