Phrase Combinability

Ability to combine ability to be a part of a sentence

With words of other classes

 

All three criteria must be presnt in every part of speech but it is not the case.

 

The formal parts of speech we refer preposition, partial interjections.

The lexical meaning is vague because there are used to denote relations between notional words in the sentence. Some of them can be explained.

Grammatical function – no not members of the sentence, no grammatical categories.

 

The main problems are how many PS and what are they.

Ahm: PS are lex-gram classes of wds possessing

1. certain common meaning

2. the system of gram categ typical for this class

3. pecularities of syntactic functions

4. special types of N-form derivation.

Ahm- 11 PS – notional- NVAdjDPronNum and formal PrepConjInterjArticParticles.

Ilyish- 13PS- +Modal wds, Statives.

The criteria of defining PS

1.meaning (semantic)

2.form (gram categ)

3.function (syntactic) – on the phrase level (combinability) and on the sentence level (syntactic functions).

The features of the noun within the identificational triad "meaning -form - function" are, correspondingly, the following:

1) the categorial meaning of substance ("thingness");

2) the changeable forms of number and case; the specific suffixal forms of derivation (prefixes in English do not discriminate parts of speech as such);

3) the substantive functions in the sentence (subject, object, substantival predicative); prepositional connections; modification by an adjective.

The Semantic Approach In many schools this principle was used for PS classification. It is based on the universal forms of human thought which are reflected in 3 main categorial meanings of words:

substance (предметность),

process (процессуальность),

property (свойства, качества).

It doesn’t always work; it can be hard to define a categorial meaning of a word e.g.whiteness - is it substance of a noun or property of an adjective? action – it denotes process, but it isn’t a verb.

The Formal Approach- Only form should be used as a criterion for the classification of the PS. (Henry Sweet, Cruisinga). They distinguished btw two classes of wds: declinable (changeable forms) and indeclinable (static forms- articles, prepositions, must). But it doesn’t take into account the way a word functions in the sentence. Must functions as many other verbs, but for instance shall which has a declinable form.

The Syntactic (Functional) Approach - Only the syntactic function of a word should be taken into consideration as a criterion for PS classification.

Some notional PS are not easily to define. – pron.

Blokh- notional ps are NANumPronVD, formal- article, prep, conj, particle, modal w, inteject.

Wds are divided into n/fml ps on the principle: some wds denote things/actions and other extraling phenomena (notional), other wds denote relations btw the notional wds and thus we have nothing extralinguistic (formal).

But fml wds also express smth extralinguistic – prep exp relations bwn things (the letter is on the table/in the table), conj denote connections btw extraling things and phenomena (the match was postponed because it was raining=casual connection; it was raining but the match took place all the same- contradiction).

The term fml wd would seem to imply that wd thus denoted has some function in building up a phrase or a sentence (prep/conj). We can’t classify fml PS as such if we consider the same criteria- prep- their lex mg is rather vague they are used to denote relations btw notional wds in the sentence- no gram categories; fml PS have neither gram functions nor can be member of the sentence

Criticism of the theory of PS.

2 reasons- not all notional PS are characterized as PS. Fml PS do not follow the criteria. Sweet Frieze Jesperson, Barhudarov- critisized tradit definition of ps as they are based on semantic criteria. There are such wds in the rus l-ge (pryzok, begstvo) which do not define any things – expresses neither action nor state.

Notional parts of speech have both lexical & grammatical meanings (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, numerals, statives, pronouns, modal words). Functional parts of speech are characterized mainly by the grammatical meaning while their lexical meaning is either lost completely or has survived in a very weakened form.

a thingness

A table

a piece of furniture (meant for working etc.)

no lexical meaning

of (functional word)

to express relations between 2 nouns

Functional parts of speech—the article, the preposition, the conjunction.

Notional parts of speech are characterized by word-building & word-changing properties & functional words have no formal features & they should be memorized as ready-made units (but, since, till, until) & another most important difference between functional & notional parts of speech is revealed on the level of sentence. Where every notional word performs a certain synthetic function while functional words have no synthetic function at all. They serve as indicators of a certain part of speech (to + verb; a, the + noun). Prepositions are used to connect 2 words & conjunctions to connect 2 clauses or sentences.

(Charles Frieze’s Classification)

The principle motto was: ‘formal analyses of formal linguistic units’. The authors of this slogan were P. Hook and J. Mathews. Meaning was excluded from the analysis. These authors criticized severely all the previous classifications of parts of speech and claimed to work out quite a new system of word classes. They rejected the term ‘part of speech’ and called them classes. It would be original and more objective. The leading principle was the principle of form.

In order to prove the importance of form they worked out a method of nonsense words (woggle ugged diggles, uggs wogged diggs). The meaning isn’t important but it’s necessary to take into consideration the distribution of word in a sentence (its typical position) and the neighboring word to the right and to the left.

The second method – the method of substitution (putting words into the position of the certain word; if several words can occur in the same position, it means they belong to the same class). Ch. C. Fries distributed all the words into four ‘word-classes’ and the 15 groups of function words, which were given the names of E. letters. In order to describe four word-classes he used the so-called substitutional

Leonard Bloomfield critisized the tradit approach: groups of wds must be identified on the basis of their position. The syntactico-distributional classification of wds is based on the study of their combinability by means of substitution testing. The testing results in developing the model of 4 main positions of notional wds in E. sentence: those of the N,V,A, D. Pron are included into the corresponding positional classes as their substitutes. Wds standing outside the positions in the sentence are treated as function wds of various syntactic values. Here Ch Fries presented the scheme of e-wd classes.

He presented 3 test-frames: Frame A:the concert was good (always)- wds that occupy the position of a N.

Frame B: the clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).

Frame C: the team went there. = as the result of the test on these frames the following lists of positional wds:

Class 1. A- concert, B- clerk, C- team;

Class 2. A- was, B- remembered, C- went;

Class 3. A- good, large etc.;

class 4. A- there, here, always, B- soon, repeatedly, C- there , back, out etc.

All these wds can fill the positions of the frames without affecting their general structural meaning.

The words of four classes described above are very frequent in every text and they make 67% of all the words in the text. The other 33% are represented by the function words and their number is very limited.

154 functional wds: 12 groups: determiners, Vaux/mod, wds of the very type, conj, prep, introducers (there,it), interrogative wds (when), interject, wds yes/no, attention getting signals (look, listen), the polite formula please, let’s. Thus the general scheme is the opposition of notional and functional wds , the 4 cardinal classes of notional wds.

Criticism: Fries criticized all the previous classifications of parts of speech but he himself didn’t give any definition of this grammatical category. He simply described all the possible distributions of the word of each class. He was not very consistent in describing the words of group A. he called them ‘class I determiners’, but some of these words can occur in the position of Class I themselves.

Modal words remained unclassified and particles as well. Interrogative pronouns and adverbs firstly appear in Group I and secondly as subordinate conjunctions in Group J.

Summary.

Thus, classification is not so exact as the author claimed. In Transformational Grammar, which was preoccupied with a problem of S. even no attempts were made to classify parts of speech.