Dick,

 

I’m just back from three weeks out of touch.  Looking over the “pars orationis” discussion, your posting seems like a good place to start.

 

With characteristic clarity, you point to the problems we face in choosing terminology.  One of these problems is the tension between scientific adequacy and pedagogical practicability.  Linguistically, categories are fuzzy.  They have prototypical members, like count nouns as examples of nouniness, and then there are words that match prototype to varying degrees.  It doesn’t take a lot of work with modal auxiliaries to demonstrate this.  But prototype and fuzzy category aren’t pedagogically useful notions until you reach a pretty high educational level.  A second problem is the matter of criteria we use to determine that a set of words does or does not comprise a category.  Most modern grammars use morphological, syntactic, and notional traits to establish categories.  Number words, for example, are characterized by taking suffixes like –th and -some, by having cardinal and ordinal forms, by occurring after the definite article, if there is one, and before adjectives, and are used to indicate specific quantity.  Of course, quantifiers like “many” and “both” share some but not all of these traits.  A third problem is whether we even need to specify the number of parts of speech rather than just identify them and teach them as students are ready to learn them.

 

Where the problem of parts of speech intersects with scope and sequence is in considering what categories and what heuristics to introduce at what level.  And at some point, fairly late I assume, it is probably necessary to teach students that some words, like “to” and “there” can, in some of their uses, be unique, not members of any category.  Actually, Greenbaum (1996) provides a list of such words.

 

I suspect that Ed Vavra, with the research he’s done on developmental grammar and pedagogy, knows of relevant studies.

 

Herb

 

 

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

________________________

 

Richard Veit

Department of English, UNCW