The English Language english language

6 The Major Parts of Speech

key concepts

Parts of Speech

Major Parts of Speech

Nouns

Verbs

Adjectives

Adverbs

Appendix: prototypes

introduction

In every language we find groups of words that share grammatical charac-
teristics. These groups are called “parts of speech,” and we examine them in
this chapter and the next. Though many writers on language refer to “the
eight parts of speech” (e.g., Weaver 1996: 254), the actual number of parts
of speech we need to recognize in a language is determined by how fine-
grained our analysis of the language is—the more fine-grained, the greater
the number of parts of speech that will be distinguished. In this book we
distinguish nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (the major parts of speech),
and pronouns, wh-words, articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, intensifiers,
conjunctions, and particles (the minor parts of speech).
Every literate person needs at least a minimal understanding of parts
of speech in order to be able to use such commonplace items as diction-
aries and thesauruses, which classify words according to their parts (and
sub-parts) of speech. For example, the American Heritage Dictionary (4th
edition, p. xxxi) distinguishes adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, definite ar-
ticles, indefinite articles, interjections, nouns, prepositions, pronouns, and
verbs. It also distinguishes transitive, intransitive, and auxiliary verbs. Writ-
ers and writing teachers need to know about parts of speech in order to be
able to use and teach about style manuals and school grammars. Regardless
of their discipline, teachers need this information to be able to help students
expand the contexts in which they can effectively communicate.
A part of speech is a set of words with some grammatical characteristic(s)
in common and each part of speech differs in grammatical characteristics
from every other part of speech, e.g., nouns have different properties from
verbs, which have different properties from adjectives, and so on. Part of
speech analysis depends on knowing (or discovering) the distinguishing
properties of the various word sets. This chapter describes several kinds of
properties that separate the major parts of speech from each other and de-