The Minor Parts of Speechour prepositions, except that they follow rather than precede their associated
noun phrases. Thus English of a book would be rendered in Japanese as hon ni
(literally, book of). Because they follow their nouns, these Japanese words are
often called postpositions.
Those familiar with traditional grammar will also recall one part of
speech that we have not mentioned, the interjection. This class includes
words such as shucks, darn, gee, wow, and a host of saltier expressions. Usu-
ally a grammar will list the tamer interjections and let the matter drop.
Interjections have some interesting properties. First, they are not gram-
matically connected to other parts of the sentences in which they occur, and
consequently are typically separated from the remainder of their sentence
by commas. They typically indicate the speaker’s attitude or feelings about
what he is expressing (e.g., Well, our budget deficit is not as large as that of the
Axis of Evil).
Individual expressions also have certain unusual properties. Darn, for
example, enters into a variety of constructions:
(45) a. Darn it!
b. That darn cat!
c. I don’t give a darn.
In (45a), darn, seems to act like a verb expressing a wish for damnation
(darn, of course, is a euphemism for damn), though its literal meaning is
rarely intended, since even atheists can use it. In (45b), darn seems to mod-
ify cat though it is not an adjective by formal criteria: that darner cat, that
darnest cat, *that very darn cat, though we can say, The darndest thing hap-
pened. (45c) suggests that darn could be a noun, though we don’t seem to be
able to give more than one darn at a time: ?I don’t give two darns.
Aside from interjections, we have already seen one important way in
which new parts of speech may emerge. They may be distinguished from
other classes of which they were thought to be normal members. For in-
stance, we separated intensifiers from the category of adverbs and particles
from prepositions. In distinguishing a group of words as a separate part of
speech, linguists attempt to direct our attention to a set of formal, func-
tional, or semantic similarities and differences. As a result, some catego-
ries will be particular to a specific book rather than to English grammar in
general. The practice of reclassifying words is, in fact, relatively common,
especially as we discover more about language. Studying parts of speech
mirrors the study of ecological characteristics of plants and animals in na-
ture, so it should not be surprising that, as we learn more about a particular