Scientific Principles for the Classification of Parts of Speech in Native Grammars of English. The Notion of Grammatical Category.

Since parts of speech belong to the field of linguistic universals, Russian grammars borrowed some ideas of such prominent Russian scholars as Щерба и Виноградов. The general approach to the classification of words is based on the same three principles.

For the first time these principles were described by H. Sweet at the very end of the 19 th. century. He was the originator of classical scientific grammar. His idea was that while distributing words into various classes it is necessary to take into consideration their grammatical meaning, form and function. He worked out his own system of types of speech.

I stage: declinable and indeclinable (изменяемые и неизменяемые). Declinable: 1) noun-words - nouns proper, noun-pronoun, noun-numeral (cardinal – hundreds of people), infinitive, gerund;

2) adjective- words – adjective proper, adjective-pronoun, adjective-numeral (ordinal), participle I and II;

3) verb-words – finite verbs, infinitive, gerund, participle I and II;

Indeclinable: adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections.

This system of parts of speech isn’t very consistent, as the author didn’t use all the three principle, which he had proclaimed simultaneously but at various stages various principle were made leading by him. At the first stage when declinable words were opposed to indeclinable the principle of form was leading. At the second stage when declinable words were subdivided further on the principle of function became leading. Due to this fact some words occurred in two groups simultaneously. Such classes as pronoun and numerals have no status of their own, but are distributed between nouns and adjectives. The adverb, included into the group of indeclinable words, has degrees of comparison, which means it can change its forms.

O. Jesperson (scientific grammar) put forward the same three principles above mentioned. He distributed all the words into 5 parts of speech: 1)Nouns; 2)Adjectives; 3)Pronouns, including numerals and pronominal adverbs (where, why, how, when); 4)Verbs, including verbids or verbals (inf., ger., part.); 5)Participle: participle proper (just, too, enough, only, yet, etc.), prepositions, conjunctions. The 5 th. class was a kind of dump where he included the words which didn’t fit into the four previous classes.

The Notion of Grammatical Category.

All notional parts of speech are characterized by certain grammatical categories. Grammatical category is a unity of a certain grammatical meaning & grammatical form of its expression. The grammatical form of the category is expressed or summarized in paradigm. The paradigm is a set of word-changing forms which are united by the same grammatical meaning.

парадигма рода времени

пел comes

пела come

пело will come

To possess a grammatical category a part of speech should have at least a binary apposition of forms. Thus, in E-sh the categories of number & case of the noun are represented by binary oppositions each. The first member in each opposition is called a non-marked member, the 2^nd –the marked member.

dog—dogs

a dog—dog’s

In some cases 2 categories are expressed simultaneously through 1 & the same form. This is the case with the categories of tense & aspect or person & number of the word. Here 1 & the same form expresses 2 grammatical meanings at once. E.g. (was speaking, has come, we speak—they speak. Such categories combining 2 grammatical meanings are called conjugated.

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