Junior, III, Ph.D., Lord Dudley
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| Traditionally grammar has been presented as the syntax of a set of eight parts of speech. (For the reader not acquainted with traditional grammar I have published a Basic Grammar of Engish on this site.) The classification seems to have come about from the kind of idea conveyed or the role the word plays in the sentence in the classical languages of Indo-European (Latin, Greek). Two driving forces seem to be involved: the interpretation of the utterance (semantics), the formal patterns of the expression (syntax). I have retained the traditional names for the parts: 1) noun, 2) pronoun, 3) adjective, 4) verb, 5) adverb, 6) preposition, 7) conjunction, and 8) interjection (pro-sentence). |
Morpheme analysis.Continuing the study of grammar beyond the basics exposes some of the difficulties linguists have with the traditional model that classifies words in terms of parts of speech. An overriding principle would be that the major categories of words are characterized by their typical use. There is usually a set of words that seem to fit the semantic definition prototypically, while many words diverge to a certain degree in one way or another. And then there is the difficulty arising from the fact that words are often comprised of multiple morphemes. How does the linguist decide the categories of the pieces? Sometimes a phrase or a set of morphemes that is not a word may serve the same syntactic function as a part of speech. A part of speech may spread across several morphemes: e.g., idioms, and other co-occurring words. The linguist finds it necessary to assign terms to these combinations as comprising a single syntactic function. Very quickly the distinction between actual and typical syntactic function becomes less clear and the part of speech is not more than the definition of a prototype. |
Rules of grammar.The set of BNF rules that describe English syntax were formerly called phrase structure rules. Chomsky set up this formalization for English in 1957, but his school of linguistics abandoned them by 1980. Such rules are indispensible for describing syntactic structure and the present grammar includes 34 of them. Because they are specific to the language being described, their use flies in the face of the Chomskyan goal of characterizing a universal grammar. Each rule rewrites one element as a combination or alternation of one or more elements. Whenever an element is not rewritten, i.e., there is no PS-rule for it, the rule concerns a terminal constituent. In the 34 rules, which rewrite 34 kinds of phrases, there are 33 terminal constituents. These include all eight of the traditional parts of speech (prototypes) and 24 various particular syntactic uses of them as separate categories. This means that we include such subclasses as the adverbial nouns of number, which are syntactically phrases and not single parts of speech. There are also negative quantifying limiting adjectives, whose analysis as combinations of morphemes from separate words into single morphemes make them composite. In this way morphology imposes its own set of structure rules. There are several examples in the following summary that suggest that a more nearly accurate model cannot be limited to a “part of speech” but must split the word up into more basic elements. |
Noun.On the following chart we give those morphemes that have been traditionally analyzed as nouns of various sorts. Some of these, the so-called proper nouns, may be syntactically more complex (cf. Processing Names). Some linguists use the term nominal to refer to nouns without the typical morphological distribution of nouns. The linguist may use this term to describe the typical syntactic function of an noun. |
| Name | Symbol | PS-rule | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| noun | | 23 | apple, star, water, basket, Empire State Building, concept, reference, parthenogenesis, news, information |
| title | | 24 | King, Mr., Miss, Dr., His Most Reverend Sir Junior, III, Ph.D., Lord Dudley |
| surname | | 24, 25 | Smith, Jones, Despain, van der Kamp, Chulalongkorn |
| given name | | 25 | George, Thomas, Beverly, Yüan-chang |
| adverbial noun of number | + | 30 | twenty-one thousand forty-six, sixteen score, a baker’s dozen |
Pronoun.There are two main occurrences of the pronoun and both of them are as nominals. The first is as an argument to the predicate, a verb, or preposition. The second is as a determiner before a noun (attributively) or predicatively. Many linguists take determiners in general as a part of speech, which are then pronominalized to serve as nominals. The rest of these determiners are listed below as traditionally adjectives. |
| Name | Symbol | PS-rule | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| personal pronoun |  + | 23 23, 22 | I, he, her, it, them my, his, her, its, their mine, his, hers, —, theirs |
| pronominalized article |  +  ++ | 23 | some, one none |
| indefinite pronoun |  ++++++++ | 23 23, 22 23 23, 22 | someone, somebody, something anyone, anybody, anything someone’s, somebody’s, something’s anyone’s, anybody’s, anything’s no one, nobody, nothing no one’s, nobody’s, nothing’s |
Adjective.Those adjectives that show a periphrastic comparative are sometimes called adjectivals. If the morphological distribution is not felt important, the linguist may use the term adjectival to describe the typical syntactic function of an adjective. Some of the adjectivals are associative adjectives and some are specifiers, which include relational or operational adjectives. |
| Name | Symbol | PS-rule | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| adjective adjectival |     | 6, 12, 33, 34 | beautiful, dumbstruck, frustrating, good perfect, unique, empty, philosophical, polar |
| demonstrative |  | 21, 30 | this, these, that, those |
| article | | 21 | Ø, an, the |
| identifier | | 21, 30 | some, any, no |
| specifier | | 28, 33, 34 | certain, particular, similar, next, sixteenth |
| quantifying limiting adjective | + | 30 28, 30 | much, many little, few |
| prepositive quantifier |  | 27 | both, all, half |
Verb.Those verbs that fail to show separate finite forms are sometimes called verbals. Usually this specific morphological distribution is not felt important and the linguist uses the term verbal to refer to any verb form that does not serve in the syntactic function of a finite verb. Also included on this list are some dependent morphemes (in curly brackets) on verbs that mark them as forms that appear in distinctive syntactic environments. |
| Name | Symbol | PS-rule | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| verb |  | 6 | sit, hit, run, break, resemble, proclaim, transform, seem, reiterate |
| pro-verb |  | 4 | do |
| copula |  | 4 | be, is, am, are, was, were, (art, wast, wert) |
| modal auxiliary |  | 5 | must, may, might, shall, should, can, could, will, would, ought, need, dare |
| tense marker |  | 4 | {-ED}, {-S}, {-EST}, {-ETH} |
| perfect aspect marker |  | 4, 5 | have + {-EN} {-EN} = -en or -ed |
| progressive aspect marker |  | 4, 5 | be + {-ING} |
| passive voice marker |  | 4, 5 | be + {-EN} {-EN} = -en or -ed |
Adverb.Those adverbs that fail to show a separate manner form (–ly) of an adjective are sometimes called adverbials. Usually, however, the linguist uses the term adverbial to refer to any of the many typical syntactic functions of an adverb. The three adverbs of degree that pronominalize could easily be termed adverbial pronouns. |
| Name | Symbol | PS-rule | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| adverb |  | 10 | expertly, fast, quickly, often, daily, long, far |
| adverb of degree |  + | 30 30 | very, how, so so, as, enough, too, less, more |
| negative particle | | 4, 28 | not |
| adverb of approximation |  | 32 | almost, about, nearly, hardly |
| adverb particle |  | 32 | just, very, (not) |
Preposition.The term prepositional is used almost exclusively to refer to the phrase introduced by a preposition, which is sometimes called a transitive adverb. There is still much analysis to be done on prepositions. |
| Name | Symbol | PS-rule | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| preposition |  | 11, 14 | before, above, around, into, over, without |
| partitive preposition |   | 17 | of |
| verbal particle |  | 6 | to, in, on, up, down, out, over, through |
| infinitive marker |  | 5 | to |
Conjunction.When the conjunction has the same use or form as an adverb or adjective, some linguists prefer to call it a conjunctive adverb or a conjunctive adjective. These may be considered amalgamations of the two parts of speech. |
| Name | Symbol | PS-rule | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| conjunction |  | 2, 19, 29, 31 | and, that, who, whether, which, when, because |
Interjection (pro-sentence).Some linguists call all these words interjections, but some make the more emphatic or taboo ones expletives. The adverbs of this class are often called “sentence adverbs” and I like to think of them all as “pro-sentence” words. What I have called “interjections” are limited to words not found elsewhere in the grammar and known sometimes as ejaculations. |
| Name | Symbol | PS-rule | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boolean reply |  | 18 | Yes, No Absolutely, Undoubtedly, Maybe |
| vocative |  | 18 | God!, Judas Priest!, My gads! |
| interjection |  | 18 | Oh!, Phew!, Ugh!, Wow! |
