MORE ABOUT PARTS OF SPEECH…

MORE ABOUT PARTS OF SPEECH…

As we have learnt, depending upon the meaning and use in a sentence, a word can be assigned different parts of speech. Accordingly, eight parts of speech are recognised in traditional English – noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.

However, there are views that suggest creation of new part of speech, or even deletion of some. For example,  the classification of the British council (https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english.../determiners-and-quantifiers) recognises nine parts of speech, Determiners being the ninth one, in addition to the eight mentioned above. Determiners include some groups of words that are traditionally considered as adjectives.

In a conventional sense, an adjective is a word used to describe or provide additional information about the noun. Adjectives used to describe about the size, shape, age, colour, origin, material, etc., of a noun or pronoun is termed as descriptive adjectives and those used to signify how much, how many, which one, whose, etc., are termed as limiting adjectives. Some grammarians consider the limiting adjectives as a separate part of speech, the Determiners.

On the othjer hand, as per http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/wordclas/wordclas.htm, the Internet Grammar of English   recognises seven major word classes (or parts of speech): noun, verb, determiners, adjective, adverb, preposition and conjunction. They treat the pronouns as a subclass of nouns.

Without going into the merit of various classifications,  we prefer to follow the classification of the British council https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english.../determiners-and-quantifiers and recognise nine parts of speech, including the  Determiners. The nine parts of speech in turn can be sub-grouped into content words and structure words.

Content words

Words that we use in a sentence to express our ideas and concepts are content words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections are the content words. In every language content words form the bulk of its vocabulary, constantly being added, modified, or removed. Content words are also taken from one language and assimilated into other languages.

Structure words

In order to convey the desired meaning, Structure words facilitate sentence formation as per grammar rules. These words link up the content words together and create a grammatically correct sentence. Pronouns, determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions are structure words.

We can also categorise words as open and closed word classes. The Open word class is such that if need arises, we can add more words to this category. For instance, new words are constantly generated due to inventions in science, introduced from social or political narratives, or necessitated by developments in the information technology, and so on.  Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are open words.

In that sense the content words belong to open word class. For example, words from the information technology field that are being introduces as content words:

Nouns: internet, e-mail, website, multimedia, etc.

Verbs: download, upload, reboot, double-click, etc.

On the other hand, we hardly hear about new determiners, prepositions, or conjunctions. These are Closed word class, because they are made up of finite sets of words which are never expanded, or new words are rarely introduced. In a language, the structure words remain more-or-less constant, hence, closed word class.