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