Parts of speech

This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) – often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) ‘cross-level harmony constraint’, the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically – and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's ‘cross-level harmony constraint’ may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I dis...

Text-type determines the linguistic and paralinguistic means for convey-ing the message. The present study investigates how to discriminate between text-types and which types should be focused on in language teaching. One of the distinctive features of text-type is text formality, determinable from its part-of-speech structure. Our formality analysis concerns 28 oral and written texts. The results indicate that written texts are more formal than oral ones, and monologues more formal than dialogues. The results are applicable in FLT as well as in language technology for automatic identification of text-types.

Ces douze pages décrivent, puis explorent, en onze petits chapitres des points essentiels de la « question » de l'arbitraire du signe. A partir du chapitre 6, on montre comment les noms ont joué un rôle abusif dans cette affaire, et pourquoi. Le dernier chapitre donne une perspective peut-être nouvelle sur la question. (Version 3)

Resumo: A tradição gramatical luso-brasileira dá vital importância ao estudo das classes de palavras. Diferentes teorias gramaticais atuais continuam a revisitar o tópico, que também é matéria de ensino na Educação Básica (nos ensinos fundamental e médio) e na formação de professores de língua portuguesa. O trabalho tem, então, por objetivo fazer um levantamento dos critérios utilizados para a conceituação dos nomes (substantivos) e dos verbos por dois livros didáticos brasileiros do Ensino Médio e dois livros didáticos angolanos da escola secundária (ensino médio). Constatou-se uma preferência por critérios morfossemânticos (i.e., critérios que levam em conta a forma e o significado das palavras) à revelia dos sintáticos (i.e., critérios que levem em conta a posição ocupada pela palavra) para a definição dessas duas classes pelos livros brasileiros e angolanos. Recorrendo à epistemologia e metodologia da Gramática Gerativa (Chomsky, 1986), o trabalho propõe uma série de atividades didáticas pautadas em tarefas de julgamento de gramaticalidade de sentenças (a manipularem sobretudo o critério sintático), de caráter complementar às atividades dos livros didáticos. Palavras-chave: classes de palavras; verbo; nome; Gramática Gerativa; ensino de língua portuguesa. Abstract: The Luso-Brazilian grammatical tradition gives vital importance to the study of the parts of speech. Different current grammatical theories continue to revisit the topic, which is also a subject of teaching in Basic Education (namely, in primary and secondary education) and in Portuguese teacher training programs. The paper aims to discuss the criteria used in the definition of nouns and verbs by two Brazilian and two Angolan secondary education textbooks. It has been verified a preference for morpho-semantic criteria. Morpho-semantic criteria take into account the form and the meaning of words. Individual parts of speech are not defined by syntactic criteria for the definition of these two classes by the Brazilian and Angolan books. By using the epistemology and the methodology of Generative Grammar (Chomsky 1986), the work proposes a series of didactic activities based on grammaticality judgment tasks (which manipulate the syntactic criterion), complementary to the textbook activities.

Adverbs are undoubtedly the most disputable class of Japanese lexicon, which
may be recognized mainly to the fact the there are not too many specialized
(regular, pure, strong) adverbs in Japanese, as this author puts it. In this paper,
the semantics, morphology and syntax of Japanese adverbial elements have
been analysed, along with their tentative classification into regular adverbs and
quasi-adverbs, the latter including the instances of adverbial forms and usage of
other elements. Special emphasis was put on the group of Japanese onomatopeia,
which often tend to be, probably not quite correctly, recognized as adverbs.
While they may often be found in the adverbial position in Japanese sentences,
they reveal surprisingly many similarities to nouns.
KEYWORDS: Japanese grammar, parts of speech, adverbs, onomatopeia.

This paper examines the process of conversion in English in the context of Functional Discourse Grammar. Although conversion has traditionally been considered to be morphological in nature (zeroderivation), different authors have suggested a syntactic approach, in which lexemes are deprived of categorial information in the lexicon and are put to use in different syntactic contexts. It is argued that this approach is essentially correct, but that it requires its integration in a theory of lexical meaning which can account for the creation of meaning in communication. The basics of such a theory and its implications for the architecture of Functional Discourse Grammar are also offered. Conversion in English is finally compared to the postulated flexibility of part-of-speech systems in languages such as Mundari and it is concluded that both operate on a common basis.

Language is a mean of communication which is used by living beings to communicate with each other. There are many important components in language to create a successful communication, such as sound, sentence, meaning, and etc. One of the components is word. Word can be considered as a complex part in language since it has many different forms. Compound word, for example, is a word which is formed through one of the word-formation processes by combining one lexical item with another and thus produces a new word with a new meaning. This paper investigates the types of English compounds and the lexical categories which are resulted from the process of compounding. The first results showed that the types of English compounds are endocentric, exocentric, and copulative compounds. The second results showed that the lexical categories resulted from the process of compounding are noun compound, verb compound, and adjective compound. Based on the results, the researcher hopes that readers can gain deeper insight and knowledge on English compound words.

Abstract: a textbook used for an undergraduate course. It provides Syllabi for the Lectures, Examples and Exercises. It is the second part of the four volume (four semester) English Grammar course which consists of
a) English Morphology
b) English Morphosyntax
c) English Syntax 1
d) English Syntax 2

At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to: 1. State the eight (8) parts of speech, namely, the noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. 2. Recognize the different uses of the eight (8) parts of speech. 3. Construct sentences emphasizing the correct uses of the eight (8) parts of speech. 4. Participate actively in class discussion. 5. Show teamwork and cooperation with zest or gusto and enthusiasm in the prepared activities. 6. Appreciate the uses of the eight (8) parts of speech in our daily life.

Positional classes are based on the positions occupied by the form-classes, which we have studied in the chapter entitled "Parts of Speech: Form-Classes" in the book An Introductory English Morphology. The members of these classes may be words or word groups. The positional classes are four in number, namely nominals, verbals, adjectivals, and adverbials. Following is a discussion of each. A. Nominals There are certain sentence positions that are characteristic places for nouns. These positions are the ones occupied by words / word groups that have these functions: subject of verb (SV), subjective complement (SC), direct object of verb (DO), indirect object of verb (IO), objective complement (OC), object of preposition (OP), and retained object (RO).

In this thesis, I propose that the distribution of nominal phrases is constrained by the relative positions of phi-features that nominal phrases contain. More specifically, I propose a condition according to which two syntactic nodes bearing visible phi-features cannot be directly merged. This constraint results in the well-described generalization according to which Agreement is severely limited in the Nominal Domain and complements to nominals may not bear direct case-marking, unlike the complements of verbs and prepositions. Next, I suggest that the propagation of phi-features can be blocked by a formal feature – epsilon – that is borne on such morphemes as prepositions and linkers, as well as oblique case markers. A nominal phrase merged with an epsilon may combine with another nominal phrase when a bare nominal phrase may not. Next, I argue that the syntactic identity of nouns can be fully reduced to phi-features. The proposed approach is shown to extend to adjectives – another category whose syntactic behavior is largely determined by the presence of phi-features. To that effect, I show that the ban on direct marking of the complements of both adjectives and nouns can be understood as a constraint on the merger of two phi-bearing structures. I show how the proposed theory can account for several well known syntactic phenomena, including the ban on double Absolutives in Ergative languages and the lack of Structural Dative marking in the Nominal Domain. The empirical data is mainly drawn from Slavic, Romance, Germanic and Iranian languages of the Indo-European family and from Nakh-Dagestanian languages.

This chapter is a survey of word classes in indigenous North American languages, with the aim of providing an introduction to the study of parts of speech, and of highlighting the unique place and contribution of North American indigenous languages in this research. Section 2 defines lexical vs. grammatical and open vs. closed classes, and how these distinctions are realized in North American languages. Section 3 summarizes the prominent themes in word classes research in North America: 1) at what level a word is categorized (root, stem, or inflected word), 2) whether a given language distinguishes noun and verb, and 3) whether a given language has an adjective category. The chapter concludes that North American languages present serious challenges to the definition and status of word classes in linguistic theory, and that the development of distinct lexical categories in a language is not necessarily a given.

Основная проблема, рассматриваемая в монографии, – основания для выделения синтаксических частей речи в даргинском языке, точнее, в двух его диалектах –ицаринском и тантынском. В работе приводится несколько частеречных классификаций, выполненных на разных основаниях, и обсуждаются способы выделения синтаксических классов, которые учли бы особенности как базовых классов словоформ, так и многочисленных дериватов.
Монография содержит также краткий очерк грамматики двух указанных диалектов.
Большая часть языкового материала собрана автором в ходе полевой работы.


В статье подробно анализируется процедура выделения частей речи в даргинском языке (нахско-дагестанская семья) – языке с богатой агглютинативной морфологией и многочисленными и продуктивными словообразовательными деривациями. Отдельно анализируются морфологические классы слов, а также синтаксические классы, выделяемые на основе дистрибуции единиц и и их управляющих свойств. В работе предлагается процедура приписывания того или иного синтаксического класса словоформам различных типов, в том числе образованиям, полученным в результате дериваций.


The paper concentrates on the problem of word classes in Dargwa (Nakh-Daghestanian), the language with rich agglutinative morphology and a number of productive derivation rules. The author analyses three different approaches to word classes – based on morphology of word forms, their distribution and, finally, their ability to dominate different phrases. The result is a procedure of ascribing a syntactic class to words of different types including the forms that appeared as the result of a derivation.

The present paper considers how prosodic analysis can assist in the investigation of the status of Tiberian Hebrew (TH) constituents  with respect to their position on the grammatical-lexical cline.  The introduction presents one area of research where such an  analysis is necessary, namely, the presentation of TH in a typological format. The first section summarizes such a format, presented in detail in Anstey (2005). The second section then demonstrates how the Masoretic diacritics, as encoded in the Westminster Hebrew Morphology Database 4.0 (Groves et al. 2003), can be interpreted as an indication of the degree of morphophonological fusion of constituents, which is one variable affecting diagnosis of grammaticalization vis-à-vis lexicalization. Constituents are divided into three ranges of fusion and candidates for grammatical constituents are suggested. Based on this analysis, suggestions are provided for a more fine-grained subdivision of TH parts-of-speech.  The conclusion suggests areas for further research.

In today’s digital world automated Machine Translation of one language to another has covered a long way to achieve different kinds of success stories. Whereas Babel Fish supports a good number of foreign languages and only Hindi from Indian languages, the Google Translator takes care of about 10 Indian languages. Though most of the Automated Machine Translation Systems are doing well but handling Indian languages needs a major care while handling the local proverbs/ idioms. Most of the Machine Translation system follows the direct translation approach while translating one Indian language to other. Our research at KMIT R&D Lab found that handling the local proverbs/idioms is not given enough attention by the earlier research work. This paper focuses on two of the majorly spoken Indian languages Marathi and Telugu, and translation between them. Handling proverbs and idioms of both the languages have been given a special care, and the research outcome shows a significant achievement in this direction.

This article raises the possibility that several grammarians classified ʾilā as a noun (ism), at least in certain constructions. First, we discuss the view attributed by later grammarians to ʾAbū Bakr Ibn al-ʾAnbārī, according to which ʾilā is a noun, as it may follow the preposition min. Secondly, we succinctly address Ibn al-Sarrāj’s ascription to Sībawayhi of the classification of ʾilā under the nominal category of ẓurūf. Finally, and most importantly, we raise the possibility that ʾilā in the interjection (ism fiʿl) ʾilayka was categorized by Sībawayhi as a noun. The discussion of ʾilayka in al-Kitāb as well as by later grammarians may shed some light on grammarians’ conceptions of the noun-ness of the category of ism fiʿl.

The present study was an attempt to investigate the effectiveness of two types of classroom test practice procedures (individual versus collaborative conditions) on enhancing Iranian intermediate EFL learners' knowledge of parts of speech. To do so, a quasi-experimental study was carried out, in which sixty Iranian intermediate EFL learners majoring in TEFL were selected as the target participants to serve the purpose and requirements of the study. Their age range was from 19 to 28. To keep the homogeneity of the participants, a proficiency test titled Comprehensive English Language Test (CELT) was given to 92 sophomore students majoring in TEFL, through which sixty were selected based on their scores. The participants were then randomly assigned into two equal comparison groups: The Collaborative Test Practice (CTP = 30) group and the Individual Test Practice (ITP = 30) group. Both the CTP and ITP groups were administered a pretest on vocabulary parts of speech. The two groups then received a ten-session treatment. The participants in the CTP group were involved in collaborative test practice on vocabulary parts of speech while the participants in the other comparison group were exposed to individual test practice condition with the parts of speech. Following the treatment provision, the two comparison groups were administered a posttest which was similar to the pretest except for the rearrangement of some items. The results of paired-samples t-test and independent-samples t-test revealed that both the CTP and ITP groups had vocabulary parts of speech gain but the effectiveness of collaborative test practice techniques on enhancing the participants' parts of speech in vocabulary was more significant than that of the individual test practice procedures.

ʾAsmāʾ al-fiʿl (lit. ‘verb’s names’) are interjections conveying meanings characteristic to verbs. This article explores medieval grammarians’ views on ʾasmāʾ al-fiʿl, focusing on strategies used by the grammarians to accommodate these expressions in their theory of the parts of speech. I begin by discussing ʾasmāʾ al-fiʿl’s problematic status in light of the grammarians’ definitions of the parts of speech. I demonstrate, inter alia, that the criteria used to determine the categorical identity of ʾasmāʾ al-fiʿl are not necessarily those appearing in the accepted definitions of a noun and a verb. I then argue that the understanding of this categorical identity can be helped, at least in some cases, by elucidating the notions of ʿadl ‘transformation’ and naql ‘(semantic) transfer’.

Описывается разработанный автором аппарат представления элементарных предикативных конструкций, состоящих из одного предиката и зависимых от него референтов. Даются правила соединения двух элементарных семантических формул в сложные при условии заданности доминантного и зависимого предиката. Аппарат этот далее применяется к описанию семантико-синтаксической формулы, общей для предметных существительных, для отглагольных и отадъективных существительных, для прилагательных, наречий и финитных глаголов. Описывается база для классификации частеречных систем в различных языках мира.

Asmāʾ al-fiʿl (also called asmāʾ al-ʾafʿāl and asmāʾ li-l-fiʿl) are a heterogeneous category of interjections that convey meanings equivalent to those of certain (mostly imperative) verbs. Arab grammarians consider asmāʾ al-fiʿl nouns. This article deals with Arab grammarians’ views regarding three issues related to asmāʾ al-fiʿl: limitations on their use, the purpose of replacing verbs with them, and the function of tanwīn in them.

The Danish word øv is traditionally categorized as an interjection. However, in a set of data primarily from chat conversations, several instances of øv do not match any traditional definition of interjections: It is syntactically integrated and thus does not constitute a full utterance on its own, and its semantic-pragmatic use is more nuanced than “expressing an aspect of the speaker’s mental state”. Th e main part of the article is a functionally-based analysis of these instances of øv, the insights from which are used to question the general practice of lexical categorization. I argue that a pragmatically based model of categorization is better able to account for the full range of uses for a word form.

Ponsonnet (2014) has shown that Dalabon, a Gunwinyguan language of northern Australia (non-Pama-nyungan) has very few emotion nouns –  instead, its emotion lexicon contains mostly verbs and adjectives. The language has only two emotion nouns proper: yolh-no ‘pep, feelings’, and yirru ‘conflict, anger’.

What are the causes and implications of this scarcity of emotion nouns in Dalabon? Is this an areal feature? Does it result from a structural property of the language? How does it relate to Dalabon speakers’ shared conceptual representations about emotions? Indeed, it seems that in Dalabon, the rarity of emotion nouns correlates with a limitation on the types of emotion metaphors available – which relates to shared representations of emotions. But the question of the directionality remains open: Does language reflect shared concepts and representations about emotions? Or does the rarity of nouns determine metaphors, which may in turn determine shared representations?

To begin answering these questions, this article presents a pilot survey of emotion nouns in a small sample of nine other Australian languages. The observations resulting from this survey are two-fold. Firstly, Australian languages, in general, seem to have few emotion nouns, although there may be nuances, possibly due to differences in typological profiles. Secondly, there is some semantic convergence among the nouns documented in the ten languages surveyed. Indeed, the semantic profiles of the two emotion nouns (meaning ‘conflict, anger’, and a generic term for ‘feelings’) found in Dalabon are matched by nouns in most of the other languages in the sample.

Where do adverbs come from that is why it is easier to describe adverbials than adverbs
The central problem in this article is the way in which the adverb exists: Is its status similar to the status of verbs, nouns, adjectives or maybe – when we consider that the adverb is usually derived from other parts of speech, like adjectives or nouns – it “doesn’t exist” really? This question evokes next ones: How “real” are parts of speech? What is the difference between them and the categories of speech which are considered as universal? Is it possible to compare adverbs (verbs, nouns, adjectives etc.) in different languages?
In spite of these difficulties, the author tries to defend the thesis that the adverb – considered as Coseriu’s category of speech – really exists.

Glazunova O. I. The actualization of meanings and grammatical functions of the word (on the question of philosophical studies of language). Part II // Vestnik St. Petersburg University. Ser. 9. 2013. Issue 4. P. 137–150.
ABSTRACT
The second part of the article considers the basic meanings of the cases and the differences in using prepositional and  nonprepositional synonymous word forms in Russian.
Keywords: the functional values of cases, the semantics of cases, prepositional and nonprepositional word forms.
РЕЗЮМЕ
Во второй части статьи выделяются основные значения падежей в русском языке, а также выявляется разница в использовании близких по смыслу словосочетаний с предложными и беспредложными падежными формами.
Ключевые слова: функциональное значение падежей, семантика падежей, предложные и беспредложные падежные формы.

Invited online lecture to the event ARCANUM International Festival (IntFest) organized annually by the Ateneo Lingua Ars Cultura (ALAC) student organization, the student arm of the Modern Languages Department of the School of Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University.

Due to modern trends of applied linguistics, statistical linguistics in particular, every text has its own statistical parameters [Köhler, Altmann 2005: 16], such as the number of word-forms and words, text richness, index of nominalization, index of verbal definitions etc.. Linguists consider proportions of parts of speech (PoS) in text, especially the correlation of nouns and adjectives, as relevant style characteristics. Special attention to nouns in text was given even in ancient times by Plato and Aristotle. In the tractate Poetics, two main PoS were distinguished: noun and verb. A noun can occur as the main word in a clause, phrase or sentence. Currently psychologists and sociologists take it into consideration when characterizing cultures, nations, and languages. The adjective plays an important role in text and style too. It gives an attribute and description to the noun, providing new information about it. In the literature it is one of the most important stylistic tropes of poetic speech. Often in the special literature, one can find statements like “This author is more poetic, s/he uses more epithets”, “In this text there are more epithets”, “This writer likes epithets”, etc. Such opinions are not objective unless scrupulous study is made. To measure this notion, the epithetization index was introduced. It is the relation between the number of nouns and the number of adjectives in a given text. This index shows how many nouns occur per one adjective; the lower the value, the more epithets are in the text.
The average value of the epithetization index in long prose fiction by Ivan Franko is 3.05. It is marginally higher than the respective parameter of texts written by other Ukrainian authors (the average values of Ukrainian prose fiction is 3.00). At first glance, it seems that Franko used slightly less epithets than is typical in Ukrainian literature. The difference however is not significant. Considering the fact that Franko's novels have 1.5 times more direct speech, he still used more epithets in author's descriptions than other Ukrainian writers.
This method of epithetization index comparison could also be applied to genre, register or authorship analysis. In future, it will be interesting to obtain this index also for Polish novels by Ivan Franko and compare the data. It will also be important to compare the obtained results with Polish language of Franko's times.

Anaphora and deixis are widespread notions in linguistic analysis. Traditionally considered to be related to each other, they indicate the processes according to which a linguistic unit derive its interpretation from, respectively, something that was mentioned earlier and the situational context. But there is no agreement as regards the definition of such terms as they describe linguistic strategies at different levels: morpho-syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Since the beginning of modern linguistics in the middle of 19th century the study of anaphora and deixis is strongly related, following the traditional part-of-speech system, to the classes of pronouns and articles and, according to more recent studies, of determiners. But what are their origins from a metalinguistic point of view? In what stages of Western linguistic thought were they created? In which contexts have they been used? The answer must to be sought into the Ancient Greek language and linguistic thought, starting with the philosophical perspective on language introduced by Plato. The present dissertation has investigated the domain of use of anaphora and deixis in ancient texts, especially Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the grammarians, i.e. Apollonius Dyscolus, the text of Tékhne Grammatiké by Pseudo-Dionysius Thrax and the scholia to the Tékhne. Such analysis highlighted that Apollonius was the first who intentionally used anaphora and deixis in a theoretical opposition. In particular in the two treatises on pronouns and on syntax he developed a systematic theory of anaphora and deixis based on the common semantic feature of definiteness and different syntactic constraints (e.g. NP constraints like the impossibility for a deictic pronoun – but not for an anaphoric one – to be determined by an article). Apollonius’s work greatly influenced not only the later Greek grammarians, but also the Latin grammatical tradition: thanks to Priscian’s Institutiones the Greek dichotomy of anaphora and deixis was re-interpreted in the light of the Latin language and explained by the new terms of relatio and demonstratio, producing a complex metalanguage which will be transmitted to modern times throughout the centuries.

In this paper I submit the hypothesis that Pre-Basque had two distinct verbal lexical categories, i.e. two distinct parts of speech both of which were related to the Standard Average European concept of verb. Following the literature on Northern Australian languages with two verbal categories and specifically McGregor (2002), I will call the two categories at issue Inflecting Verbs (IVs) and Uninflecting ‘Verbs’ (UVs).