The Major Parts of Speechpredicate adjective: adjective (phrase) that appears after the verbs be, be-
come, seem, etc. See subject complement.
present participle: the Ving inflectional form of a verb.
principal parts: a list of the infinitive and inflectional forms of a verb: V,
Vs, Ving, Ved, and Ven.
productivity: the degree of freedom with which a linguistic process, e.g.,
nominalization, applies to items in its range.
progressive: aspect indicated by be + Ving.
proper noun: a noun that refers to individual entities rather than to classes
of entities, e.g., Thomas Jefferson, Denver, the Koran. See common noun.
sentence modifier: a function of adverbials to describe such things as the
speaker’s manner of presenting information in a sentence, or the speaker’s
judgment about the truth of the sentence.
stem: form of word to which affixes may be attached.
structure word: See function word.
subject complement: function of an adjective phrase or noun phrase after
verbs such as be, become, and seem.
superlative: degree of an adjective or adverb, signaled by -est or most.
transitive verb: a verb that requires a direct object.
zero derivation: See conversion.
Appendix to major parts of speech
Prototypes
Perhaps the greatest frustration for students—and teachers—of grammar
is the discovery that seemingly clear and airtight definitions and tests fail
to work smoothly in all cases. We argued in our chapter on Major Parts of
Speech that one source of this difficulty is the faulty status of definitions, for
instance, those that determine parts of speech on the basis of their meanings
or functions. Our system augments such definitions with a set of formal
conditions pertaining to morphological (inflectional and derivational) and
syntactic (positional) characteristics of words. As some of our exercises dem-
onstrate, not all conditions will apply in all cases. For instance, the condi-
tion that nouns can be made plural might seem to exclude many words that
are clearly nouns by other criteria, e.g., cattle and furniture. On the other
hand, these words can accept the genitive, as in the cattle’s thirst and the
furniture’s delivery. Additionally, the {-ure} morpheme on furniture is typical
to nouns: armature, ligature, caricature, and signature, though other words
besides nouns may appear to end in the {-ure} morpheme: mature (adjective
or verb), and insure (verb). In other words, we seem to find cases where our