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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