In grade school I was taught the “eight parts of speech,” and that seemed a good, pragmatic way of teaching word categories to third and fourth graders. But for those who say to adults that there actually are only eight (or ten) parts of speech, I’m curious what they do with the parts that don’t fit. Just a few examples:

• The word to can serve at least three different grammatical functions in the following sentences:
  • She came to the meeting.  [preposition, introducing a prepositional phrase]
  • She came to hear the speaker.  [infinitive marker, introducing an infinitive phrase]
  • She passed out but came to.  [particle, completing the phrasal verb “come to”]

Only the first is a preposition. Where do they slot the other two?

• A list of ten parts of speech that was posted earlier included “article.” What about the other determiners that fill the same slot as articles, such as demonstratives (this, that, these, those) and quantifiers (many, every, few, and so on)? They certainly aren’t adjectives.

• What about there in “There are eight parts of speech”?

Of course we could shoehorn several very different functions into one category if we choose—for that matter, we could arbitrarily say there are seven or nine or even two parts of speech (verbs and nonverbs, say). But that wouldn’t be very helpful if the purpose is to understand the different grammatical functions that words actually perform in sentences.

Dick Veit

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Richard Veit

Department of English, UNCW