Peter, Webster's Unabridged defines "speech* as: 1.the faculty or power of speaking; oral communication; ability to express one's thoughts and emotions by speech sounds and gesture: Losing her speech made her feel isolated from humanity. 2.the act of speaking: He expresses himself better in speech than in writing. 3.something that is spoken; an utterance, remark, or declaration: We waited for some speech that would indicate her true feelings. 4.a form of communication in spoken language, made by a speaker before an audience for a given purpose: a fiery speech. 5.any single utterance of an actor in the course of a play, motion picture, etc. 6.the form of utterance characteristic of a particular people or region; a language or dialect. 7.manner of speaking, as of a person: Your slovenly speech is holding back your career. 8.a field of study devoted to the theory and practice of oral communication. All these definitions restrict the meaning of *parts of speech* to the spoken language, or utterances. But speech is only one part of language. The other part is writing. Also, when grammarians refer to *parts of speech* they actually mean different morphological classes of words. For these reasons I believe that *word classes* defines much better the items grammarians refer to than *parts of speech.* Eduard On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, Peter Adams wrote... > >In a message dated 7/26/06 10:46:14 AM, [log in to unmask] writes: > > >> >> Parts of Speech if fine for me. It recognizes the more primary aspect of >> language as Speech. The ability to analyze all Speech (not just writing) is >> what grammar offers. >> > >But wouldn't phrases and clauses and, for that matter, paragraphs also >qualify as parts of speech? It seems to me that "word classes" captures much more >precisely the meaning we intend. I fear that parts of speech doesn't only >"recognize the more primary aspect of language as speech," but it could be >understood as applying only to speech, which, of course, is not the case. "Word >classes" more accurately captures the fact that what we are talking about is a >feature of both speech and writing. I would love to see the term "word >classes" used more widely. > > > >Peter Adams > >To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: > http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html >and select "Join or leave the list" > >Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ > To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/