Word Class

Word class

Also known as parts of speech or lexical categories

Open classes

Lexical/content words such as noun, verb, adjectives and adverbs.

These words have relatively concrete (with content) meanings. New words are constantly created and added to these classes.

Closed classes

Function/grammatical words such as determiner, prepositions, pronouns, conjuctions

This class does not generate new words generally. Used to express and understand functional/grammatical relationship between lexical words.

Words that belong to the same class share similar properties, such as:

• morphological possibilities
• distribution/function
• similar types of meanings (not reliable) - will not be used

Morphological possibilities

Refers to what kinds of morphological operations can apply to the word. Generally refers to inflection suffixes.

Distribution

Refers to where the word occurs in a phrase/sentence

Function

Refers to the function of the word

These criterias are sufficient, not necessary.

Sufficiency criteria

Not all the possibilities need to be available in the word for it to qualify for the word class

Mathematically, , but not necessarily .

Identifying a word class

In general, the more evidence found, the better. Since the criterias are sufficiency, instead of necessary, all criterions should be covered.

A good way of “diagnosing” a word class would be to consider a word class a “disease”, and a property, a symptom. This means that the more symptoms, the more backing there is for that said diagnosis.

Nouns

Morphological possibilities

• can be pluralised
• can take possessive marker

Distributional possibilities

• can appear as A or B in the phrase a A of B
• can be preceded by determiners and adjectives in a noun phrase

Verbs

Morphological possibilities

• can be marked for tense
• can exhibit agreement with subject
  • @ the morphological shape of verbs in the present tense depends on whether the subject is singular, etc

Distributional possibilities

• typically appears after subject
• can be negated with do not/don’t
• can appear after auxiliary verbs
  • ~ has, have, had, might, must …

Adjectives

Morphological possibilities

• can be inflected to form comparative or superlative
  • @ -iest, -ier (earliest, earlier)

Distributional possiblities

• can occur between a determiner and a noun
• can follow copula/linking verb be
  • ~ am, are, was, being, be…
• can follow more/most (idea of comparative/superlative)
• can co-occur with other adjectives

Function

• to modify nouns

Adverbs

(traditional ragbag category for content words) - if a content word is not a Noun, Verb, or Adjective, it is generally an Adverb.

Morphological possibilities

• comparative and superlative forms (like adjectives)

Distributional possibilities

• freedom of positioning
• can follow more/most (idea of comparative/superlative, like adjectives)

Function

• to modify things other than nouns, like the sentence, or verbs

Determiner

Noun phrase

String of words that can be replaced by pronouns

Distributional possibilities

• precedes a noun (and optionally adjectives) in a noun phrase

Multiple types:

• possessive her, his
• quantificational every, some
• demonstrative this, those

Pronouns

Morphological possibilities

• ! Does not apply

Distributional possibilities

• Does not precede nouns in a NP (and replace them instead)

Preposition

Morphological possibilities

• ! Does not apply

Distributional possibilities

• precedes a pronoun or an NP (since a NP and pronouns are interchangeable)

Difference between determiner and preposition

The determiners form an NP with the following noun, but prepositions don’t.