Craig,

I agree that the four open classes are the clearest, easiest to define
notionally, and probably the best to present at lower levels.  As to
auxiliaries, "have", "do" and "be" are examples of words that can be in
two different classes, auxiliary and verb, and their behavior differs
depending on which class a particular example represents.  Multiple
class membership and auxiliary are both items for later introduction, I
would think.

As to the status of "numeral", number words do not inflect.  Adjectives
do.  Number words can take derivational suffixes like "-th" and "-some",
which adjectives cannot take.  Notionally, they can't be comparative or
superlative.  Number words must occur initially in a noun phrase or
between the determiner and any adjectives, so they are syntactically
distinct as well.  They are like adjectives in that they are
post-determiner, pronominal, and are attributive and can, to a degree,
be predicative, as in the somewhat archaic "Now they were three",
indicating number, not age.  Unlike nouns, they don't take plurals, and
when they are used as sole noun phrases, as in "I saw three on the
table", they are usually elliptical ("three books").  So there are both
morphological and syntactic criteria for considering numerals a word
class.  However, it's one I'd present rather late in K12.  

Like you, I'm uncomfortable with "adverb".  The distinctions among
sentence-modifying, verb phrase modifying, and adjective-modifying words
are too great, from my perspective, to allow them to be properties of
one word class.  I would prefer at least distinguishing intensifiers,
like "very" and "sort of".  But it's also a practical pedagogical
question, and I wouldn't oppose keeping the term as is.  I would, later
on in K12, want to distinguish carefully among types of adverb, though.

I'm not comfortable speculating on scope and sequence, since I don't
teach K12 and have no expertise in K12 curriculum.  I would want such
decisions made by people who know those areas well.

Herb

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 8:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Greenbaum's word classes

Herb,
   I think this is a wonderful place to start. A number of people have
suggested the four "open classes", and so maybe we can start with that
as a consensus position. (These also carry over from traditional
grammar.) Notional criteria seem the current way of going about it for
early grades, so I wonder if people think morphology and syntax are a
more mature perspective. I notice even with the NATE glossary (I don't
have it with me) they tend to oversimplify in the early grades. They
define "subject", for example, as "what carries out the action," which
seems a terrible mistake to me.
   It's hard to imagine getting far without prepositions and
conjunctions.
For auxiliaries, you need to determine whether "have", "do", and "be"
verbs are verbs used as auxiliaries, which would mean it's a function
label and not just a category label (as it would be for the modals, I
presume.) What are the arguments for numeral as its own catgory and not
just noun or adjective?
   I know we have talked a number of times on list about the category
"adverb" being too large. Do we want to add "qualifier"? It shows up
very early, I think, with "so" and "very". Unlike other "adverbs", they
can't head a phrase.     >
   I like the idea of "typical" or "prototypical", especially for
notional
definitions. Even in early stages, I would opt for presenting language
as very flexible.
   These categories would have sub-categories, I assume. At what age
would
we assume that a typical child is ready for a full description?

Craig
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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