The English Language english language

7 The Minor Parts of Speech

key concepts

Minor parts of speech

Pronouns

Articles

Auxiliary verbs

Negation

Prepositions

Intensifiers

Conjunctions

introduction

In addition to the major parts of speech—nouns, verbs, adjectives, ad-
verbs—there are many minor classes of words. Their number varies accord-
ing to the level of detail in a particular analysis; more important is the clarity
with which classes are distinguished. Our approach in the previous chapter
used formal criteria to try to arrive at consistent assignments of words to
parts of speech. Our approach in this chapter will be similar.
The minor word classes are often referred to as closed classes. This is
because they have relatively few members, which are added to only occa-
sionally. As a result, some of the minor form classes can be defined simply
by listing their members. We will distinguish about a dozen of these classes,
but the largest of them, the prepositions, has only about 50 members. Na-
tive English-speaking students do not need to memorize the members of
these classes; they can become as consciously familiar as they need to be with
them through presentation and practice. Some memorization may help
some non-native English speaking students, but, again, proper presentation
and lots of practice should enable them to develop control over these words.
Minor word classes have several properties in common. First, they tend
not to alter the basic content of a sentence. For this reason, they have some-
times been called function or grammatical words, in contrast to the major
parts of speech, called content words. Content words bear the main se-
mantic burden in communication. They are the words that you would use
to send a text message: Broke. Send money. Minor words, in contrast, signal
modificational, relational, and interactional aspects of meaning; contextual
information; or redundant grammatical information. Compare I am broke;
will you please send some money with Broke. Send money. The words omitted
from the second version are all minor class words.
Members of the minor word classes occur more frequently than mem-