Parts of Speech

From KneeQuickie

This is a paraphrased summary of Paul Schachter's "Parts-of-Speech Systems" from Volume I ("Clause Structure") of Timothy Shopen's "Language Typology and Syntactic Description" (Center for Applied Linguistics, 1985, Cambridge University Press).

A language's words can be divided into word-classes that have similar syntactic distributions and undergo similar morphological processes.

CAVEAT: it's really difficult to define "word", and for some languages the notion of "word" might not really be worth definining.

Once the word-classes have been found, it will usually be fairly clear for most of them that it is either an "open" word-class or a "closed" word-class.

An "open" word-class is one in which lexicogeny or rhematopoeisis or "word-coining" is still going on; it is (relatively) easy to coin or borrow new words into that class, and that happens (relatively) frequently.

A "closed" word-class is one in which lexicogeny or rhematopoeisis or "word-coining" is not going on; it is (relatively) difficult to coin or borrow new words into that class, and that happens (relatively) seldom.

"Interjections" are usually considered a closed word-class, and AFAAK (as far as anybody knows) every language has interjections. Also, AFAAK, every language has at least one other closed word-class; though AFAAK there is no other universal closed word-class. Schachter said "interjections may be a universal closed class". Most linguists agree the evidence indicates they're probably universal, but whether or not they're closed is much more open to doubt.

Different languages differ more in both their number of closed word-classes and in their types of closed word-classes than they do in either the number or type of open word-classes.

Highly synthetic languages may have very few closed word-classes and make little use of the ones they do have. Highly isolating languages may have dozens of closed word-classes and make very frequent use of many of them.

COMMON OPEN WORD CLASSES.

Ordinarily most open word-classes can be grouped into Verbs, Nouns, Adjectives, and Adverbs.

• Verbs is the union of all open word-classes whose principal function is to provide the nuclei of predicates.
• Nouns is the union of all open word-classes whose principal function is to provide the participants of clauses.
• Adjectives is the union of all open word-classes whose principal function is to provide modifiers of nouns.
• Adverbs is the union of all open word-classes whose principal function is to provide modifiers of anything else other than nouns; this includes not only verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs, but also constituents larger than a single word, such as phrases, clauses, and sentences.

CAVEAT: "Adverbs" is a much less cohesive and homogeneous category than any of the others.

CAVEAT: Many highly synthetic languages do without an open class of "Adverbs", having affixes to do the same function instead.

CAVEAT: Many languages don't really distinguish between "Adjectives" and "Adverbs"; essentially, "Modifiers" is just one part-of-speech in these languages.

CAVEAT: Many languages, especially many highly synthetic languages, do without an open class of "Adjectives"; instead, they have a sub-category of "Verbs", or a sub-category of "Nouns", having the same semantic function.

CAVEAT: Some languages apparently don't really distinguish much between "Nouns" and "Verbs"; essentially, these are two (or more) sub-classes of a single part-of-speech.

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Each of the above word-classes may have sub-classes that are important for certain purposes. For instance, nouns may be divided between those that are verbal or deverbal, and those that are not; or between proper and common; or between concrete and abstract; or between count nouns and mass nouns; or between possessible and non-possessible. Verbs may be divided between active and stative; or between transitive and intransitive; intransitive verbs may be divided between monovalent and bivalent, or between unaccusative and unergative; transitive verbs may be divided between monotransitive and ditransitive. Adverbs may be divided between those that can modify adjectives and those that cannot; or between those that must be within a verb-phrase and those that cannot interrupt a verb-phrase. And so on.

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COMMON CLOSED WORD CLASSES.

• Pronouns and other pro-forms
  • pronouns
    • personal pronouns
    • reflexive pronouns
    • reciprocal pronouns
    • demonstrative pronouns
    • indefinite pronouns
    • relative pronouns
    • interrogative pronouns
  • pro-sentences
  • pro-clauses
  • pro-verbs
  • pro-adjectives
  • pro-adverbs
  • interrogative pro-forms
• Noun adjuncts
  • role markers
    • case markers
    • discourse markers
    • other adpositions
  • quantifiers
  • classifiers
  • articles
• Verb adjuncts
  • auxiliaries (not necessarily verbs and not necessarily inflectible; inflected auxiliaries behave more in accord with certain universals than uninflectable ones do)(the following are not necessarily disjoint)
    • temporal
    • aspectual
    • modal
    • voice
    • polarity (see also negators)
  • verbal particles
• Conjunctions
  • co-ordinating
    • "pre-positional"
    • "post-positional"
  • sub-ordinating
    • complementizers
    • relativizers
    • adverbializers
• Other common closed word-classes
  • clitics
    • proclitics
    • enclitics
  • copulas
  • predicators
  • emphasis markers
  • existential markers
  • interjections
  • mood markers
    • request markers
    • other mood markers
  • negators
    • general negators
    • imperative and/or optative negators
    • paired negators
  • politeness markers

CAVEAT: not all of the above occur in every language.

CAVEAT: not every two classes above which do occur in a language are necessarily distinct in every language.

CAVEAT: the above list is not intended to be exhaustive. Some languages may have other closed classes; some may divide one of the above into two or more classes.