Практично-семінарське заняття

THEME: FUNCTIONAL PARTS OF SPEECH

Recommended Reading
1. Соловйова Л. Ф. Сніховська, І. Е. Теорія сучасної англійської мови. Навчально-
методичний посібник. – Житомир: Вид-во ЖДУ ім. Івана Франка, 2014. – 232 с.
2. Довідник словотвірних елементів англійської мови / уклад. О. В. Вознюк. –
Житомир : ЖВІРЕ, 2003. – 96 с.
3. Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language. – Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. – 499 p.
4. Brinton, Laurel J. & Donna M. Brinton. 2010. The linguistic structure of Modern English,
2nd edn. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
5. Hopper, Paul J. 1999. A short course in grammar. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
6. Huddleston, Rodney. 1984. Introduction to the grammar of English. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

PARTS OF SPEECH are grammatical classes of words which are distinguished on the basis
of four criteria:
- semantic;
- morphological;
- syntactic;
that of valency (combinability)

There are eight parts of speech in the English language: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective,
adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. The part of speech indicates how the word
functions in meaning as well as grammatically within the sentence.

Parts of speech may be divided into notional (fully lexical, self-dependent functions in the
sentence): Noun, Adjective, Numeral, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb;
and functional (incomplete nominative meaning, non-self-dependent functions in the
sentence): Article, Preposition, Conjunction, Particle, Modal Word, Interjection.

Notional parts of speech are open classes - new items can be added to them, they are indefinitely
extendable. Functional parts of speech are closed systems, including a limited number of
members. They cannot be extended by creating new items.

Functional parts of speech are prepositions, conjunctions, articles, particles. The distinctive
features of functional parts of speech are: 1) very general and weak lexical meaning; 2)
obligatory combinability; 3) the function of linking and specifying words.

The boundaries between different parts of speech are not clear out:

notional - I have a ticket to the theatre, have

auxiliary - I have quitted my studies.

1) Meaning. Each part of speech is characterized by the general meaning which is an abstraction
from the lexical meaning of the constituent word. Thus, the general meaning of nouns is
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thingness (substance), the general meaning of verbs is action, state, process; the general meaning
of adjectives — quality, quantity.

The general meaning is understood as categorial meaning of the class of words.

Semantic properties of every part of speech find their expression in their grammatical
properties. If we take "to sleep, a night sleep, sleepy, asleep" they all refer to the same
phenomena of the objective reality but belong to different parts of speech as they have different
grammatical properties.

Meaning is supportive criterion in the English language which only helps to check purely
grammatical criteria - those of form and function.

Глокая куздра штэка будланула бокра и кудрячит бокрёнка. V. V. Vinogradov

Such examples though being artificial help us to understand that - grammatical meaning is an
objective thing by itself though in real speech it never exists without lexical meaning.

2) Form, (morphological properties) The formal criterion concerns the inflectional and
derivational features of words belonging to a given class. That is the grammatical categories they
possess, the paradigms they form and derivational and functional morphemes they have.

With the English language this criterion is not always reliable as many words in English are
invariable, many words have no derivational affixes and besides the same derivational affixes
may be used to build different parts of speech.(e.g. "~ly": quickly , daily , weakly(n.)).

Because of the limitation of meaning and form as criterion we should rely mainly on words'
syntactic functions (e.g. "round" can be adjective, noun, verb, preposition).

3) Function. Syntactic properties of any class of words are: combinability (distributional

Parts of speech are heterogeneous classes and the boundaries between them are not clearly cut
especially in the area of meaning. Within a part of speech there are subclasses which have all the
properties of a given class and subclasses which have only some of these properties and may
even have features of another class.

So a part of speech may be described as a field which includes both central (most typical)
members and marginal (less typical) members. Marginal areas of different parts of speech may
overlap and there may be intermediary elements with contradicting features (modal words,
statives, pronouns and even verbs).

Words belonging to different parts of speech may be united by common feature and they may
constitute a class cutting across other classes (e.g. determiners or quantifiers).

Possible Ways of the Grammatical Classification of the Vocabulary.

The parts of speech and their classification usually involves all the four criteria mentioned and
scholars single out from 8 to 13 parts of speech in modern English. The founder of English
scientific grammar Henry Sweet finds the following classes of words: noun-words ( here he
includes some pronouns and numerals), adjective-words, verbs 4 particles (by this term he

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denotes words of different classes which have no grammatical categories).

The opposite criterion - structural or distributional - was used by an American scholar Charles
Freeze. Each class of words is characterized by a set of positions in a sentence which are defined
by substitution test. As a result of distributional analysis Freeze singles out 4 main classes of
words roughly corresponding to verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and 15 classes of function-
words.

Notional and Functional Parts of Speech.

Both the traditional and distributional classification divide parts of speech into notional and
functional. Notional parts of speech are open classes, new items can be added to them, we extend
them indefinitely. Functional parts of speech are closed systems including a limited number of
members. As a rule they cannot be extended by creating new items.

Main notional parts of speech are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Members of these four
classes are often connected derivationally. Functional parts of speech are prepositions,
conjunctions, articles, interjections & particles. Their distinctive features are:

- very general & weak lexical meaning;

The function of linking and specifying words.

Pronouns constitute a class of words which takes an intermediary position between notional and
functional words: on the one hand they can substitute nouns and adjectives; on the other hand
they can be used as connectives and specifiers. There may be also groups of closed-system items
within an open class (notional, functional and auxiliary verbs).

A word in English is very often not marked morphologically. It makes it easy for words to pass
from one class to another. Such words are treated as either lexico-semantic phonemes or as
words belonging to one class. The problem which is closely connected with the selection of parts
of speech is the problem of conversion.

There are usually the cases of absolute, phonetic identity of words belonging to different parts
of speech. About 45% of nouns can be converted into verbs and about 50% of verbs - into nouns.
There are different viewpoints on conversion: some scholars think that it is a syntactic word-
building means. If they say so they do admit that the word may function as parts of speech at the
same time.

Russian linguist Galperin defines conversion as a non-affix way of forming words. There is
another theory by French linguist Morshaw who states that conversion is a creation of new words
with zero-affix. In linguistics this problem is called "stone-wall-construction problem".

Another factor which makes difficult to select parts of speech, in English is abundance of
homonyms in English. They are words and forms identical in form, sounding, spelling, but
different in meaning. Usually the great number of homonyms in English is explained by
monosyllabic structure of words but it’s not all the explanation.

The words are monosyllabic in English because there are few endings in it, because English is
predominantly analytical. We differentiate between full and partial homonymity, we usually
observe full homonymity within one pan of speech and partial - within different parts of speech.
If we have two homonyms within one part of speech their paradigms should fully coincide.

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Homonyms can be classified into lexical, lexico-grammatical and purely grammatical. We
should differentiate between homonymity and polysemantic words.

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