4 word classes

4.1 What are word classes

Every day definitions

- Nouns being the names of persons, places and things.

- Verbs being the names of actions or states.

These definitions are not adequate for serious investigation for several
reasons:

1. They appeal superficially to one part of meaning: the kind of things that
a given word denotes.
2. These definitions are not inclusive. i.e. doesn’t include all class members.
3. They ignore where a given word is placed in a clause or a phrase.
 Nouns can be preceded by the, a, this but verbs cannot.
 Adjectives can precede nouns or follow verbs.
 New books – is new –seemed new.
 That is, we know words by ‘the company they keep’ and, thus, we group
them into classes called word classes.

Words can be classified into lexical (content) words and grammatical

(form) words.

1. Lexical words include nouns (e.g. villa, baby, idea), verbs (e.g. buy,
destroy, think), adjectives (e.g. wooden, strong, abstract) and adverbs
(e.g. rapidly, hopefully).
2. Grammatical word are the definite and indefinite articles the and a, the
demonstrative adjectives this, these, that and those and the auxiliary
verbs is, has and so on (as in is reading a book, has read this book)
 The term ‘auxiliary’ reflects the fact that these verbs do not refer to
actions or states but ‘help’ main verbs such as read to build a
construction.
 Verbs like may, could and must and prepositions such as with, from and
by are considered grammatical words but such words seem to be on the
borderline between content and form.
- The telegram example
 Arriving Tuesday 5pm instead of We are arriving on Tuesday at 5pm

But………..

- Press the button above the green light.

- press the button below the green light
- Before 5 pm and after 5 pm
 Therefore, prepositions along with models are regarded in this book as
lexical or content words. They are not as central as nouns but neither
are they grammatical items such as the and a.

4.2 Criteria for word classes

Four types of criteria are employed to set up word-classes: syntactic,

morphological, morpho-syntactic and semantic.

The tiger is smiling.

The tigers are smiling. Tigers = tiger (stem) +s (suffix)

 adding s does not change the word category (inflectional suffix)

tiger tigerish tiger (stem) + ish (suffix)

 adding ish derive new lexical item (derivational suffix)

4.2.2 Morphological criterion

 This criterion concerns whether a given word allows grammatical

suffixes or not.
 This criterion is the least important of the four criteria mentioned above.
 It is more relevant to some languages like Arabic and Russian than
others like English.
(nominative case) ‫نبح الكلب – نبح الكلبان‬

(accusative case) ‫ خبش القط الكلبين‬- ‫خبش القط الكلب‬

(genitive case) ‫أعطى عمر العظم للكلب – أعطى عمر العظم للكلبين‬

Look at the examples from Russian in the book p.43-44.

  English nouns typically take a plural ending such as cat/cats , dog/dogs.
However there are some invariable nouns like sheep and deer.

4.2.2 Morpho-syntactic criteria

 This criteria has to do with inflectional suffixes.

 Some language like Arabic and Russian take different suffixes which
signal the relationship between nouns and verbs in a clause.
 These relationships are known as case and nouns are said to be inflected
for the category of case.
 Case suffixes signal information about case and about number and
person

Look at the examples from Russian in the book p.44. Can you think of examples
from Arabic?

‫هو تكلم عن موسكو‬ .‫هو يتكلم عن موسكو‬

‫هما تكلما عن موسكو‬ .‫هما يتكلمان عن موسكو‬
‫هم تكلموا عن موسكو‬ .‫هم يتكلمون عن موسكو‬
‫هن تكلمن عن موسكو‬ .‫هن يتكلمن عن موسكو‬
‫أنت تكلمت عن موسكو‬ . ‫أنت تتكلمين عن موسكو‬

 In traditional terms nouns are inflected for case and number while verbs
are inflected for tense, person and number.
 In some languages like Arabic, adjectives too are inflected for case and
number ‫ تحية للطالب المجدين‬.‫ جاء الطالب المجدون‬.‫جاء الطالب المجد‬
 Adverbs and prepositions are typically not inflected

English does not have the rich system of inflections like Russian and Arabic but
….

 English nouns do take suffixes expressing number cat – cats / child –

children.
 English verbs do take suffixes expressing tense pull- pulls vs pulled.
 English adjectives are not associated with number or case but many of
them take suffixes expressing greater or the greatest quantity:
big- bigger- biggest
4.2.3 Syntactic criteria

 The syntactic criteria for word classes are based on what words a given
word occurs with and the types of phrases in which a given word occurs.
 This is the most important criteria type in English due to its relative
poverty of morpho-syntactic criteria.
 In spite of their importance, the application of these criteria is not
straightforward. Consider the following examples
a. The dog stole the turkey
b. The children chased the dog
c. The cook saved no scraps for the dog.
Major criteria
 All nouns meet the criteria of occurring to the left of a verb in an active,
declarative transitive clauses
 All nouns meet the criteria of occurring to the right of a verb but
preceded by a preposition
Minor criteria
 Not all nouns combine with an article *the Ethel
 Not all nouns allow a plural suffix *Ethels
 Therefore, noun classes are split into subclasses when dealing with
minor criteria and thus we have central and peripheral members of a
class.
a. A tall building
b. This building is tall
c. A very tall building

d1. A taller building

d2. A more beautiful building

- Regarding the comparative form, adjectives are split into two subclasses
one takes the suffix er (tall-taller), the other takes more (beautiful-more
beautiful)
- Some adjectives meet all the criteria above and thus considered central
or prototypical members of the class.
- Others do not meet all the criteria above and thus considered peripheral
members.
 a. A unique building A woolen cloak
b. This building is unique This cloak is woolen
c. A very unique building * A very woolen cloak
d. * a uniquer building * A woolener cloak
* a more unique building * A more woolen cloak

a. *The asleep child

b. The child is asleep
c. *The very asleep child
d. *The more asleep child

4.2.4 Semantic criteria: what words mean

 There are no sematic criteria that would enable us to decide whether

any given word is a noun, adjective, verb, adverb or preposition.
 The traditional definition of nouns as words denoting people, places or
things does not explain why words such as anger, idea and death are
classified as nouns.
 Race the noun and race the verb both denote an event as do the verb
transmit and the noun transmission
They transmitted the concert
The live transmission of the concert
 However, it would be surprising if there were no parallels at all between
patterns of grammar and semantic patterns. Careful analysis does bring
out patterns.
 The starting point is to accept that word classes must be defined on the
basis of formal criteria: morphological properties, morphosyntactic
properties and syntactic properties.
 Only when these formal patterns have been established can we move on
to investigate connection between meaning and word classes.
 Interestingly, the traditional description of nouns as referring to persons,
places and things turns out to be adequate for central nouns. Use the
following criteria with the noun words girl, town and car.
1. Combining with the and a (syntactic)
2. Taking a plural suffix s (Morpho-syntactic)
3. Modified by adjectives (syntactic)
 4. Occurring to the left or right of verbs in non-copula, active
declarative clauses (syntactic)
5. In addition, they refer to observable entities such as
people, places and things (semantic)
 Many people argue that nouns such as anger, property and event do not
denote things. However, they do possess all or many of the syntactic and
morphosyntactic properties possessed by nouns referring to people,
places and things such as girl, town and car.
 A property – the property
 An interesting property
 This property surprised us.

 The anger frightened him but *an anger

The fact that the major formal criteria for prototypical nouns apply to words
such as property and anger is what justifies the latter being classes as nouns

4.2.5 Semantic criteria: what speakers do with words

The purpose of producing an utterance is to draw the attention of their

audience to some entity and to say something about it. That is, to predicate a
property of it.

 Speech acts in the broadest sense are making statements, asking

questions and issuing commands
 These speech acts are prominent in and central to human
communication and are allotted grammatical resources in every
language (i.e. constructions)
 Two such speaking acts are referring to entities and predicating
properties of them.
 For example, the class of nouns contains words denoting entities, and
nouns enter into noun phrases, the units that speakers use to refer to
objects.
 The notion of prediction as a speech act is prevalent in traditional
grammar and is expressed in the formula ‘someone saying something
about a person or thing’.
  For example, English verbs, including BE signal the performance of
prediction.
 Therefore, different word classes are used to fulfill certain speech acts.
 For example, nouns are used when referring, verbs when predicting,
adjectives when modifying nouns and adverbs when modifying verbs
and adjectives.