PARTS

OF
SPEECH 24nd
JANUAR
Y 2024

Week 2
TABLE OF CONTENTS

01
General
02 03
PARTS OF
characteristic SPEECH THE NOUN
s of the
grammatical
structure of
language
1. General characteristics of the
grammatical structure of language
The grammatical structure of
language - a system of means used
to turn linguistic units
communicative ones.
(i.e. the units of language
the units of speech.

Such means: inflexions, affixation,

word order, function words and
phonological means.
 Indo-European languages
synthetic analytic
Synthetic languages have Analytical languages have
„internal‟ grammar of the external‟ grammar - most
word – most of grammatical grammatical meanings and
meanings and grammatical grammatical forms are
relations of words are expressed with the help of
expressed with the help of words (e.g. will do).
inflexions (all Slavic l-ges
(Russian – делать, делаю),
Latin, Sanskrit, German, etc.)
However, there are NO purely synthetic or
analytic languages.

The Old English language was more synthetic.

The Modern English l-ge possesses analytical
forms as prevailing.
 Grammatical meanings and
grammatical categories
The semantic structure of a word has two
meanings – lexical and grammatical.
Lexical meaning - the individual meaning of the word (e.g.
table - a definite piece of furniture).
Grammatical meaning - the meaning of the whole class or a
subclass – noun, countable. (see more in the next slide)
 The grammatical meaning:
The implicit The explicit
grammatical meaning grammatical meaning
always marked
morphologically – it has its
marker.
not expressed formally
e.g. Cats – plural noun;
(e.g. the word table does not Cat’s – possessiveness;
contain any hints in its form as … is asked – passiveness.
to it being inanimate)

MORE in the next slide

Grammatical categories
● Grammatical categories
consist of identical
grammatical meanings that
have the same form (e.g.
singular::plural)

● Grammatical categories -
references of the
corresponding objective
categories

● More in Slide 9
mood
degree.
1. State the difference between the
lexical and grammatical meaning of
a word.
2. What types of grammatical
meanings do you know?
3. Define the notion of the
grammatical category.

Reflection
2. PARTS OF SPEECH

The parts of speech are classes of

words.

All the members of these classes

have certain characteristics in
common which distinguish them from
the members of other classes.
Approaches to classify the parts
of speech:
1 Classical (logical-inflectional)

2 Functional

3 Distributional

4 Complex
1. The classical approach
● Goes back to ancient times.
● It is based on Latin grammar.
● According to the Latin classification of the parts of
speech all words were divided into declinable and
indeclinable parts of speech:

1. declinable words, included nouns, pronouns, verbs

and participles,
2. indeclinable words – adverbs, prepositions,
conjunctions and interjections.
● This classification cannot be applied to the English
language because the principle of declinability /
indeclinability is not relevant for analytical languages.
2. The Functional approach
● Was introduced in the XIX century by Henry Sweet.
● Based on the functional peculiarities of the English
language.
● Singled out nominative units and particles.

Nominative parts of speech:

1. noun-words (noun, noun-pronoun, noun-numeral,
infinitive, gerund),
2. adjective-words (adjective, adjective-pronoun,
adjective-numeral, participles),
3. verb (finite verb, verbals – gerund, infinitive,
participles).
Particles of speech:
adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection.
 However, though the criterion for
classification was functional, words
were classified, declinable and
indeclinable.

Henry Sweet
3. The distributional approach
● introduced by Charles Fries.
● It is, the ability of words to combine with other words of
different types.
● BUT! At the same time, the lexical meaning of words
was not taken into account. Charles Fries introduced
four major classes of words and 15 form-classes.
 1st conclusion:
● All the classifications mentioned above
appear to be one-sided because parts of
speech are discriminated on the basis of
only one aspect of the word: either its
meaning or its form, or its function.
3. The complex approach – the Modern
Linguistics
Parts of speech are discriminated according to three
criteria:

● semantic - presupposes the grammatical meaning of

the whole class of words (general grammatical
meaning).
● formal - reveals paradigmatic properties: relevant
grammatical categories, the form of the words, their
specific features.
● functional - concerns the syntactic function of words in
the sentence and their combinability.

Thus, when characterizing any part of speech we are to

describe: a) its semantics; b) its morphological features; c)
its syntactic peculiarities.
The linguistic evidence drawn
from our grammatical study
makes it possible to divide all the
words of the language into:

A
B
C
 b) function or
a) notional grammatical
words which denote things, words that have no references
objects, notions, qualities, etc., of their own in the objective
and have the corresponding reality; most of them are used
references in the objective only as grammatical means to
reality: form up and frame utterances:

nouns, pronouns, numerals, articles, particles,

verbs, adjectives, adverbs prepositions, conjunctions
and modal words.
a) notional
The features of the noun are The features of the adjective:
the following: 1) the categorical meaning of
1) the categorical meaning of property (qualitative and
substance (“thingness); relative);
2) the changeable forms of 2) the forms of the degrees of
number and case; the specific comparison (for qualitative
forms of derivation; adjectives); the specific forms
3) the substantive function in the of derivation;
sentence (subject, object, 3) adjectival functions in the
predicative); prepositional sentence (attribute to a noun;
connections; modification by adjectival predicative).
an adjective.
a) notional
The features of the numeral: The features of the pronoun:
1) the categorical meaning of 1) the categorical meaning of
number (cardinal and ordinal); indication (deixis);
2) the narrow set of simple 2) the narrow set of various
numerals; the specific forms status with the
of composition for compound corresponding formal
numerals; the functions of properties of categorical
numerical attribute and changebility and word-
numerical substantive. building;
3) the substantival and
adjectival functions for
different sets.
a) notional
The features of the verb: The features of the adverb:
1) the categorical meaning of 1) the categorical meaning of
process; the secondary property (the
2) the forms of the verbal property of process or
categories of person, number, another property);
tense, aspect, voice, mood; 2) the forms of the degrees of
the opposition of the finite and comparison for qualitative
non-finite forms; adverbs; the specific forms
3) the function of the finite of derivation;
predicate for the finite verb. 3) the functions of various
adverbial modifiers.
b) function or grammatical
The article expresses the The particle unites the
specific limitation of the functional words of
substantive functions. specifying and limiting
meaning.
The preposition expresses the The modal word expresses the
dependencies and attitude of the speaker to the
interdependencies of reflected situation and its
substantive referents. parts. Here belong the
functional words of
The conjunction expresses probability (probably,
connections of phenomena. perhaps, etc), of qualitative
evaluation (fortunately,
unfortunately, luckily, etc),
and also of affirmation and
negation.
The interjection is a signal of
emotions.
 2nd
● conclusion
The division of language units into
notional and functional words reveals
the interrelation of lexical and
grammatical types of meaning.
● In notional words the lexical meaning is
predominant.
● In function words the grammatical
meaning is predominant.
●
1) Define the notion “parts of speech”. What
classifications of parts of speech do you know?
2) State the difference between notional and functional
parts of speech.

Reflection
3. THE NOUN. General
characteristics.
● The noun is the central lexical unit of
language.
● The noun can be characterised by
three criteria:
1. semantic (the meaning),
2. morphological (the form and
grammatical categories),
3. syntactical (functions).
Semantic features of the noun.
The noun possesses the grammatical
meaning of thingness.
3. Countable
1. Proper and 2. Animate and and
common inanimate uncountable
subclass subclass subclass

human vs. non-

human
Morphological features of the
noun.

Simple Derived Compound

(stem + affix, stem+ stem –
affix + stem e.g. armchair
e.g. thingness
The noun has morphological categories of number and case.
Some scholars admit the existence of the category of gender.
Syntactic features of the noun.
● The noun CAN be used in the sentence in ALL syntactic functions.
● The noun CANNOT be used in the sentence as predicate.
● The noun can go into right-hand and left-hand connections with practically all
parts of speech.
● ALL parts of speech can act as noun determiners.
● The Verb CANNOT act as a noun determiner.

● The most common noun determiners - articles, pronouns, numerals, adjectives

and nouns themselves in the common and genitive case.
RESOURCES
1. https://www.grammar.cl/english/parts-of-speech.htm

2. https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/sentence/category.htm