Problems of parts-of-speech class.in ME.

Main notions of grammar. Gr.meaning, gr.form, gr.categorie.

The term ‘gram category’ has been used to cover a wide variety of things, including what traditional grammars call "parts of speech." A grammatical category is a set of syntactic features that:express meanings from the same conceptual side,occur in contrast to each other, are typically expressed in the same way(a set of auxiliary verbs that express modality). the gr. categories can be innate for a given class (immanent) or only be expressed on the surface of it (reflective). GMis a general abstract meaning which unites classes of forms or words & finds its expression through formal markers thus placing a linguistic unit in a grammatical category or a gr.class. The g form unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics. 3 types of oppositions: privative, gradual, equipollent. Privative- It is formed by a contrastive pair of members; one member (the marked/ strong/ positive member) is characterised by the presence of a certain differential feature, the other (the unmarked/ weak/ negative member) expresses the absence of this feature: play(weak) - played(strong). gradualis formed by a contrastive group of members which are distinguished by the degree of a certain feature: [i] - [i:] are differentiated by the degree of their openness. equipollent is formed by a contrastive pair/ group where the members are distinguished by different positive features. E.g., the phonemes [m] and [b], both bilabial consonants, form an equipollent opposition, [m] being sonorous nasalized, [b] being plosive.

Problems of parts-of-speech class.in ME.

The principles on which the classification is based are three in number, viz. (1) meaning, (2) form, (3) function. Each of these requires some additional explanations.

By meaning we do not mean the individual meaning of each separate word (its lexical meaning) but the meaning common to all the words of the given class and constituting its. essence. Thus, the meaning of the substantive (noun) is "thingness". This applies equally to all and every noun and constitutes the structural meaning of the noun as a type of word. Similarly, the meaning of the verb as a type of word is that of "process", whatever the individual meaning of a separate verb may happen to be. We shall have to dwell on this later in considering every part of speech in detail.

By form we mean the morphological characteristics of a type of word. Thus, the noun is characterised by the category of number (singular and plural), the verb by tense, mood, etc. Several types of words (prepositions, conjunctions, and others) are characterised by invariability.

By function we mean the syntactical properties of a typo of word. These are subdivided into two, viz. (a) its method of com-bining with other words, (b) its function in the sentence; (a) has to deal with phrases, (b) with sentence structure. Taking, as we did previously, the verb as a specimen, we can state that, for example, a verb combines with a following noun (write letters) and also with a following adverb (write quickly). As to (b), i. e. the syntactical function of a verb in a sentence, it is that of a predicate.

In giving a list of parts of speech, we have not so far mentioned the terms "notional" and "formal". It is time now to turn to this question. According to the view held by some grammarians, 2 words should be divided into two categories on the following principle: some words denote things, actions, and other extralinguistic phenomena (these, then, would be notional words), whereas other words denote relations and connections between the notional words, and thus have no direct bearing on anything extralinguistic (these, then, would be the formal words, or form words). Authors holding this view define prepositions as words denoting relations between words (or between parts of a sentence), and conjunctions as words connecting words or sentences.

Now, the term "formal word" would seem to imply that the word thus denoted has some function in building up a phrase or a sen-tence. This function is certainly performed by both prepositions and conjunctions and from this point of view prepositions and conjunc-tions should indeed be singled out.

But this definition of a formal word cannot be applied to parti-cles. A particle does not do anything in the way of connecting words or building a phrase or a sentence.

There does not therefore seem to be any reason for classing particles with formal words. If this view is endorsed we shall only have two parts of speech which are form words, viz. prepositions and conjunctions.