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Word Classes and Parts of Speech
There is a long tradition of classifying words, for the
purpose of grammatical description, into the ten word
classes (or parts of speech) noun, verb, adjective,
adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, numeral,
article, interjection. While each of these terms is useful,
and they are indispensable for practical purposes, their
status in a fully explicit description of a language or in
general grammatical theory remains disputed. Al-
though most of the traditional word class distinctions
can be made in most languages, the cross-linguistic
applicability of these notions is often problematic.
Here I focus primarily on the major word classes
noun, verb, and adjective, and on ways of dealing with
the cross-linguistic variability in their patterning.
1. The Classification of Words
Words can be classified by various criteria, such as
phonological properties (e.g., monosyllabic vs. poly-
syllabic words), social factors (e.g., general vs.
technical vocabulary), and language history (e.g.,
loanwords vs. native words). All of these are classes
of words, but as a technical term, word class refers to
the ten traditional categories below (plus perhaps a
few others), most of which go back to the Greek and
Roman grammarians. In addition to the terms, a few
examples are given of each word class.
Noun book,storm,arrial
Verb push,sit,know
Adjective good,blue,Polish
Adverb quickly,ery,fortunately
Pronoun you,this,nobody
Preposition\adposition on,for,because of
Conjunction and,if,while
Numeral one,twice,third
Article the,a
Interjection ouch,tsk
16538
Women’s Suffrage
(In this article, the more general term ‘adposition’ will
be used rather than preposition, because many lan-
guages have postpositions rather than prepositions,
and word order is irrelevant in this context.)
The special status of the classification above derives
from the fact that these are the most important classes
of words for the purpose of grammatical description,
equally relevant for morphology, syntax, and lexical
semantics. This makes the classification more interest-
ing, but also more complex and more problematic
than other classifications of words. Besides the term
word class, the older term part of speech (Latin pars
orationis) is still often used, although it is now quite
opaque (originally it referred to sentence constituents).
The term word class was introduced in the first half of
the twentieth century by structuralist linguistics. An-
other roughly equivalent term, common especially in
Chomskyan linguistics is ‘syntactic category’ (al-
though technically this refers not only to lexical
categories such as nouns and verbs, but also to phrasal
categories such as noun phrases and verb phrases).
The main two problems with the maximal word-
class above are (a) that some of the classes intersect
(e.g., the English word ‘there’ is both a pronoun and
an adverb), and (b) that the different classes do not
have equal weight; while most languages have hun-
dreds of verbs and thousands of nouns, there are far
fewer pronouns and conjunctions, and often only a
handful of adpositions and articles. The solution that
is often adopted explicitly for the second problem is to
make a further subdivision into major word classes
(nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and minor word
classes (all others). (Alternative terms for major and
minor classes are content words\function words and,
especially in Chomskyan linguistics, lexical cate-
gories\functional categories.) This distinction is dis-
cussed further in Sect. 2. The solution to the first
problem that is implicit in much contemporary work is
that pronouns and numerals are not regarded as word
classes on a par with nouns, verbs, prepositions, and
so on. Instead, they are regarded as semantically
highly specific subclasses of the other classes. For
instance, there are nominal pronouns (e.g., he, who),
adjectival pronouns (e.g., this, which, such) and ad-
verbial pronouns (e.g., here, thus). Similarly, there are
adjectival numerals ( fie, fifth), adverbial numerals
(twice), and nominal numerals (a fifth, a fie). Some
languages also have verbal pronouns and verbal
numerals. Accordingly, this article will not deal with
pronouns (see Pronouns) and numerals (see Numeral
Systems).
2. Content Words and Function Words
In all languages, words (and entire word classes) can
be divided into the two broad classes of content words
and function words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs are content words, and adpositions, conjunc-
tions, and articles, as well as auxiliaries and words
classified as ‘particles’ are function words. While there
is sometimes disagreement over the assignment of
words and even entire word classes to these two broad
categories, their usefulness and importance is not in
doubt. Content word classes are generally open (i.e.,
they accept new members in principle) and large
(comprising hundreds or thousands of words), and
content words tend to have a specific, concrete
meaning. They tend to be fairly long (often disyllabic
or longer), and their text frequency is fairly low. By
contrast, function word classes are generally closed
and small, and function words tend to have abstract,
general meaning (or no meaning at all, but only a
grammatical function in specific constructions). They
tend to be quite short (rarely longer than a syllable),
and their text frequency is high. This is summarized in
Table 1.
The reason why auxiliaries are not included in the
traditional list of word classes is probably merely that
they are not prominent in Greek and Latin grammar,
but in many languages these ‘function verbs’ are very
important (English examples are be, hae, can, must,
will, should ). The class ‘particle’ is really only a waste-
basket category: function words that do not fit into
any of the other classes are usually called particles
(e.g., ‘focus particles,’ such as only and also, ‘question
particles,’ such as Polish czy in Czy mo
Twisz po polsku?
‘Do you speak Polish?,’ or ‘discourse particles’ such as
German ja in Das ist ja scho
Wn! ‘That’s nice! (expressing
surprise).’
The precise delimitation of function words and
content words is often difficult. For instance, while the
conjunctions if, when, as, and because are unequivo-
cally function words, this is less clear for words like
suppose, proided that, granted that, assuming that.
And while the adpositions in, on, of, at are clearly
function words, this is less clear for concerning,
considering, in iew of. In the case of adpositions,
linguists sometimes say that there are two subclasses,
‘function adpositions’ and ‘content adpositions,’ anal-
ogous to the distinction between content verbs and
function verbs (lauxiliaries). Another widespread
view is that word-class boundaries are not always
sharp, and that there can be intermediate cases
between full verbs and auxiliaries, between nouns and
adpositions, and between nouns\verbs and conjunc-
tions. Quite generally, function words arise from
content words by the diachronic process of gram-
maticalization (see Grammaticalization), and since
grammaticalization is generally regarded as a gradual
diachronic process, it is expected that the resulting
function words form a gradient from full content
words to clear function words. When grammatic-
alization proceeds further, function words may
become clitics and finally affixes, and again we often
find intermediate cases which cannot easily be classi-
fied as words or word-parts.
16539
Word Classes and Parts of Speech
3. Defining Nouns, Verbs, and Adjecties
In the following, the emphasis will be on the content
word classes nouns, verbs, and adjectives (for adverbs,
a problematic class, see Section 5.3 below). The
properties of the function words are more appro-
priately discussed in other contexts (e.g., auxiliaries in
the context of tense and aspect, conjunctions in the
context of subordinate clauses, and so on).
Before asking how nouns, verbs, and adjectives are
defined, it must be made clear whether a definition of
these word classes in a particular language (e.g.,
English or Japanese) is intended, or whether we want
a definition of these classes for language in general.
The widely known and much-maligned definitions of
nouns as denoting ‘things, persons, and places,’ of
verbs as denoting ‘actions and processes,’ and adjec-
tives as denoting ‘properties’ is, of course, hopelessly
simplistic from the point of view of a particular
language. In most languages, it is easy to find nouns
that do not denote persons, things, or places (e.g.,
word, power, war), and verbs that do not denote
actions or processes (e.g., know, lack, exist), and many
languages also have adjectives that do not denote
properties (e.g., urban, celestial, ehicular). However,
if the goal is to define nouns, verbs, and adjectives in
general terms that are not restricted to a particular
language, these simplistic notional definitions do not
fare so badly.
In the first part of the twentieth century, the
structuralist movement emphasized the need for rig-
orous language-particular definitions of grammatical
notions, and notionally based definitions of word
classes were rejected because they patently did not
work for individual languages or were hard to apply
rigorously. Instead, preference was given to mor-
phological and syntactic criteria, e.g., ‘if an English
word has a plural in –s, it is a noun,’ or ‘if a word
occurs in the context the…book, it is an adjective.’
But of course this practice was not new, because words
like power and war have always been treated as nouns
on morphological and syntactic grounds. Some older
grammarians, neglecting syntax, defined nouns, verbs,
and adjectives exclusively in morphological terms, and
as a result nouns and adjectives were often lumped
together in a single class in languages like Latin and
Greek, where they do not differ morphologically. But
Table 1
Content words and function words
Content words Function words
word classes nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs
adpositions, conjunctions,
articles, auxiliaries, particles
class membership open closed
class size large small
meaning concrete, specific abstract, general (or none)
text frequency low high
the predominant practice in Western grammar has
been to give priority to the syntactic criterion. For
instance, adjectives in German have a characteristic
pattern of inflection that makes them quite unlike
nouns, and this morphological pattern could be used
to define the class (e.g., roter\rote\rotes ‘red (mascu-
line\feminine\neuter)’). However, a few property
words are indeclinable and are always invariant (e.g.,
rosa,asindie rosa Tapete ‘the pink wallpaper’). These
words would not be adjectives according to a strictly
morphological definition, but in fact everybody re-
gards words like rosa as adjectives, because they can
occur in the same syntactic environments as other
adjectives.
Thus, there is universal agreement among linguists
that language-particular word classes need to be
defined on morphosyntactic grounds for each indi-
vidual language. However, two problems remain. (a)
The generality problem: how should word classes be
defined for language in general? Morphological pat-
terns and syntactic constructions vary widely across
languages, so they cannot be used for cross-lin-
guistically applicable definitions. (b) The subclass
problem: which of the classes identified by language-
particular criteria count as word classes, and which
only count as subclasses? For instance, English has
some property words that can occur in the context is
more … than, e.g., beautiful, difficult, interesting. An-
other group of semantically similar words (e.g., pretty,
tough, nice) does not occur in this context. Nobody
takes this as evidence that English has two different
word classes where other languages have just a single
class (adjectives), but it is not clear why it does not
count as sufficient evidence.
The solution to the generality problem that is
usually adopted (often implicitly, but cf. Schachter
1985 and Wierzbicka 2000) is that one defines word
classes on a language-particular basis, and then the
word class that includes most words for things and
persons is called ‘noun,’ the word class that includes
most words for actions and processes is called ‘verb,’
and the word class that includes most words for
properties is called ‘adjective.’ However, the subclass
problem has not been solved or even addressed
satisfactorily, and the use of word-class notions in a
general or cross-linguistic sense remains problematic.
16540
Word Classes and Parts of Speech
4. Characterizing Nouns, Verbs, and Adjecties
Despite the theoretical problems in defining word
classes in general, in practice it is often not difficult to
agree on the use of these terms in a particular language.
This is because nouns, verbs, and adjectives show great
similarities in their behavior across languages. Their
most common characteristics are briefly summarized
in this section.
4.1 Nouns
In many languages, nouns have affixes indicating
number (singular, plural, dual, see Grammatical
Number), case (e.g., nominative, accusative, ergative,
dative), possessor person\number (‘my,’ ‘your,’ ‘his,’
etc.), and definiteness. Some examples follow.
(a) Number. Khanty (Western Siberia) xot ‘house,’
xot-yyn ‘two houses’ (dual), xot-yt
‘houses’ (plural).
(b) Case. Classical Arabic al-kitaab-u
‘the book’ (nominative), al-kitaab-i
‘the book’s’ (genitive), al-kitaab-a
‘the book (accusative).’
(c) Possessor person\number. Somali xoolah-ayga
‘my herd,’ xoolah-aaga ‘your herd,’ xoleh-eeda
‘her herd,’ xooli-hiisa ‘his herd,’ etc.
Syntactically, nouns can always be combined with
demonstratives (e.g., that house) and often with defin-
iteness markers (the house), and they can occur in the
syntactic function of argument (subject, object, etc.)
without additional coding. Thus, in a simple two-
argument clause we can have the childNcaused the
accidentN, but not *smokeVcauses illA. (Here and in the
following, the subscripts N,Vand Aindicate nouns,
verbs and adjectives.) Verbs like smoke and adjectives
like ill need additional function-indicating coding to
occur in argument function (smok-ing causes ill-ness).
Because reference is primarily achieved with nouns, it
is nouns that can serve as antecedents for pronouns
(compare Albania’s destruction of itself vs. *the
Albanian destruction of itself (impossible)). Finally,
nouns are often divided into a number of gender
classes which are manifested in grammatical agree-
ment (see Grammatical Gender).
4.2 Verbs
In many languages, verbs have affixes indicating tense
(present, past, future), aspect (imperfective, perfective,
progressive), mood (indicative, imperative, optative,
subjunctive, etc.), polarity (affirmative, negative), va-
lence-changing operations (passive causative, see
Valency and Argument Structure in Syntax), and the
person\number of subject and object(s) (see Gram-
matical Agreement). Semantic notions that are more
rarely expressed morphologically are spatial orienta-
tion and instrument. Some examples follow.
(a) Tense. Panyjima (Australia) wiya-lku
‘sees,’ wiya-larta ‘will see,’ wiya-rna ‘saw.’
(b) Subject person\number. Hungarian la
Tt-ok
‘I see,’ la
Tt-sz ‘you see,’ la
Tt‘s\he sees.’
(c) Valence-changing. Turkish unut- ‘forget,’
unut-ul- ‘be forgotten’ (passive), unut-tur-
‘make forget’ (causative).
(d) Spatial orientation. Russian y-letat’ ‘fly out,’
-letat’ ‘fly in,’ pere-letat’ ‘fly over ,’ z-letat’
‘fly up.’
Syntactically, verbs generally take between one and
three nominal arguments, e.g., fall (1: patient), dance
(1: agent), kill (2: agent, patient), see (2: experiencer,
stimulus), gie(3: agent, patient, recipient). Nouns
and adjectives may also take arguments, but they are
not nearly as rich as verbs, and nouns that correspond
to verbs often cannot take arguments in the most
direct way (compare Plato defined beauty vs. *Plato
definition beauty (impossible); additional coding is
required: Plato’s definition of beauty. Verbs always
occur as predicates without additional coding, whereas
nouns and adjectives often need additional function-
indicating coding when they occur as predicates,
namely a copular verb (cf. Halim worksVvs. *Halim a
workerN(impossible), *Halim hard-workingA(impos-
sible); here the copula is is required).
4.3 Adjecties
In a fair number of languages, adjectives have affixes
indicating comparison (comparative degree, superla-
tive degree, equative degree), and in a few languages,
adjectives are inflected for agreement with the noun
they modify. Some examples follow.
(a) Comparison. Latin audax ‘brave,’ audac-ior
‘braver’ (comparative), audac-issimus
‘bravest’ (superlative).
16541
Word Classes and Parts of Speech
(b) Comparison. Tagalog (Philippines) mahal
expensive;’ sing-mahal ‘as expensive as.’
(c) Agreement. Hindi acchaa ‘good’ (masculine
singular), acchee (masculine plural),
acchii (feminine singular\plural).
In many languages, adjectives show no inflectional
properties of their own. Syntactically, a peculiarity of
adjectives is that they can typically occur in com-
parative constructions (whether they show affixes
marking comparison or not), and they can be com-
bined with degree modifiers of various kinds that do
not co-occur with verbs and nouns (e.g., ery hotA,too
difficultA, cf. *workVery,*too mistakeN(impossible)).
Adjectives generally occur as nominal modifiers with-
out additional coding (cf. a baldAman), whereas nouns
and verbs mostly need additional function-indicating
coding when they occur as modifiers (*a beardNman\a
man with a beard,*a shaeNman\a man who shaes).
5. Difficulties of Classification
The general properties of nouns, verbs, and adjectives
that were sketched in Sect. 5 are sufficient to establish
these classes without much doubt in a great many
languages. However, again and again linguists report
on languages where such a threefold subdivision does
not seem appropriate. Particularly problematic are
adjectives (Sect. 5.1) but languages lacking a noun-
–verb distinction are also claimed to exist (Sect. 5.2),
and Sect. 5.3 discusses adverbs, which present dif-
ficulties in all languages.
5.1 The Uniersality of Adjecties
In contrast to nouns and verbs, adjectives are some-
times like function words in that they form a rather
small, closed class. For instance, Tamil (southern
India) and Hausa (northern Nigeria) have only about
a dozen adjectives. Interestingly, in such languages the
concepts that are denoted by adjectives in the small
class coincide to a large extent (Dixon 1977): di-
mension (‘large,’ ‘small,’ ‘long,’ ‘short,’ etc.), age
(‘new,’ ‘young,’ ‘old,’ etc.), value (‘good,’ ‘bad’), color
(‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘red,’ etc.). Other concepts for which
English has adjectives (e.g., human propensity con-
cepts such as ‘happy,’ ‘clever,’ ‘proud,’ ‘jealous,’ and
physical property concepts such as ‘soft,’ ‘heavy,’
‘hot’) are then expressed by verbs or by nouns. For
instance, in Tamil, ‘heavy man’ is ganam-ul
cl
ca manus
can,
literally ‘weight-having man,’ and in Hausa, ‘intel-
ligent person’ is mutum mai hankali, literally ‘person
having intelligence.’
But even more strikingly, many languages appear to
lack adjectives entirely, expressing all property con-
cepts by words that look like verbs or like nouns. For
instance, in Korean, property concepts inflect for tense
and mood like verbs in predication structures, and
they require a relative suffix (see Relatie Clauses)
when they modify a noun, again like verbs (cf. (b) (i),
(ii)) below.
(a) Predication
(i) Event
salam-i mek-ess-ta
person- eat--
‘the person ate’
(ii) Property
san-i noph-ess-ta
hill- high--
‘the hill was high’
(b) Modification
(i) Event
mek-un salam
eat- person
‘a person who ate’
(ii) Property
noph-un san
high- hill
‘a high hill’
While languages where all property words can be
classified as verbs are very common, languages where
all property concepts are nouns are less widely
attested. A language for which such a claim has been
made is Ecuadorian Quechua: in this language, prop-
erty concept words can occur in argument position
and take the same inflection as nouns (cf. (a)(i), (ii)
below), and nouns can occur as modifiers without
additional coding, like property words (cf. (b) (i), (ii)
below).
(a) argument position
(i) Thing
wambra-ta-mi
child--
wajta-rka
hit-.3.
‘he hit the child’
16542
Word Classes and Parts of Speech
(ii) Property
jatun-ta-mi
big--
wajta-rka
hit-.3.
‘he hit the big one’
(b) modification
(i) Thing
rumi wasi
stonehouse
‘stone house’
(ii) Property
jatun wambra
big child
‘big child’
Thus, it is often said that while nouns and verbs are
virtually universal, adjectives are often lacking in
languages. However, it is generally possible to find
features that differentiate a property subclass within
the larger class to which property words are assigned.
For instance, Korean property verbs do not take the
present-tense suffix -nun, and Ecuadorian Quechua
thing words do not combine with the manner adverb
suffix -ta (e.g., sumaj-ta ‘beautifully,’ but not *duktur-
ta ‘in a doctor’s manner’). Here the subclass problem
arises: on what grounds do we say that Korean has
two classes of verbs (non-property verbs vs. property
verbs), rather than two word classes (verbs and
adjectives)? Since this question is difficult to answer,
some linguists have claimed that most languages have
adjectives after all, but that adjectives have a strong
tendency to be either verb-like or noun-like (e.g.,
Wetzer 1996).
5.2 The Uniersality of the Noun–Verb Distinction
For a few languages, it has been claimed that there is
no (or only a very slight) distinction between nouns
and verbs, for instance for several North American
languages of the Wakashan, Salishan, and Iroquoian
families, as well as for a number of Polynesian
languages. For instance, in Samoan (a Polynesian
language), full words referring to events and things
show intriguingly similar behavior. Both thing (or
person) words and event words seem to occur in the
same predication structures (a) and in argument
positions (b) below.
(a) Predication
(i) Thing
sa fo
`ma’i le fafine
doctor the woman
‘the woman was a doctor’
(ii) Event
sa alu le fafine
go the woman
‘the woman went’
(a) Argument
(i) Thing
e lelei le fo
`ma’i
good the doctor
‘the doctor is good’
(ii) Event
e lelei le alu o le asi
good the go of the bus
i Apia
to Apia
‘it’s good that the bus goes to Apia’
Clearly, the similarity of thing-words and event-
words in such languages is quite striking and differs
dramatically from what is found in the better-known
European languages. But thing-words and event-
words do not behave exactly alike in Samoan; the
pattern above is asymmetrical in that fo
`ma’i means ‘be
a doctor’ and ‘person who is a doctor,’ but alu does not
mean both ‘go’ and ‘person who goes,’ but rather ‘the
fact of going.’ Upon closer examination, it has usually
turned out that major word classes which can be called
nouns and verbs can be distinguished even in the
problematic languages.
5.3 The Problem of Aderbs
Adverbs are the most problematic major word class
because they are extremely heterogeneous in all lan-
guages, and unlike for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, no
semantic prototype can be identified easily for them
(cf. Ramat and Ricca 1994). The most that can be said
in general about adverbs is that they serve to modify
non-nominal constituents (verbs or verb phrases,
adjectives, other adverbs, sentences). Perhaps the
16543
Word Classes and Parts of Speech
concept of adverb should not be taken too seriously,
because there are very few properties that adverbs of
different kinds share. Five broad subclasses of adverbs
are often distinguished: setting adverbs (locative: here,
there, below, abroad; temporal: now, then, yesterday,
always), manner adverbs (quickly, carefully, beauti-
fully), degree adverbs (ery, too, extremely), linking
adverbs (therefore, howeer, consequently), and sen-
tence adverbs (perhaps, fortunately, frankly) (see Quirk
et al. 1985 for the most comprehensive semantic
classification of adverbs).
Setting adverbs, degree adverbs, and linking ad-
verbs are relatively small, closed classes, and they
often share properties with function words. Sentence
adverbs are rare in most languages, and their great
elaboration is probably a peculiarity of the written
languages of Europe (Ramat and Ricca 1998). The
only sizable subclass of adverbs that has equivalents in
many languages is the class of manner adverbs. Many
languages have a productive way of forming manner
adverbs from adjectives (e.g., English warm\warmly,
French lent ‘slow,’ lentement ‘slowly’). But this also
makes manner adverbs problematic as a major word
class, because one could argue that adjective-derived
manner adverbs are just adjectives which occur with a
special inflectional marker to indicate that they are not
used in their canonical noun-modifying function. This
point of view is non-traditional, but it seems quite
reasonable, and it is strengthened by the fact that in
quite a few languages, adjectives can be used as manner
adverbs without any special marking.
One of the main features that unifies the various
subclasses of adverbs in languages like English and
French is that four of the five classes contain adjective-
derived words ending in -ly\-ment (only setting ad-
verbs are almost never of this type). This is certainly no
accident, but it should also be noted that this is
probably a feature typical of European languages that
is hardly found elsewhere.
6. Theoretical Approaches
While the identification and definition of word classes
was regarded as an important task of descriptive and
theoretical linguistics by classical structuralists (e.g.,
Bloomfield 1933), Chomskyan generative grammar
simply assumed (contrary to fact) that the word classes
of English (in particular the major or ‘lexical’ cate-
gories noun, verb, adjective, and adposition) can be
carried over to other languages. Without much ar-
gument, it has generally been held that they belong to
the presumably innate substantive universals of lan-
guage, and not much was said about them (other than
that they can be decomposed into the two binary
features [pN] and [pV]: [jN, kV] lnoun,
[kN, jV] lverb, [jN, jV] ladjective, [kN,
kN] ladposition) (see Linguistics: Theory of Prin-
ciples and Parameters).
Toward the end of the twentieth century, linguists
(especially functionalists) became interested in word
classes again. Wierzbicka (1986) proposed a more
sophisticated semantic characterization of the differ-
ence between nouns and adjectives (nouns categorize
referents as belonging to a kind, adjectives describe
them by naming a property), and Langacker (1987)
proposed semantic definitions of noun (‘a region in
some domain’) and verb (‘a sequentially scanned
process’) in his framework of Cognitive Grammar.
Hopper and Thompson (1984) proposed that the
grammatical properties of word classes emerge from
their discourse functions: ‘discourse-manipulable par-
ticipants’ are coded as nouns, and ‘reported events’ are
coded as verbs.
There is also a lot of interest in the cross-linguistic
regularities of word classes, cf. Dixon (1977), Bhat
(1994) and Wetzer (1996) for adjectives, Walter (1981)
and Sasse (1993a) for the noun–verb distinction,
Hengeveld (1992b) and Stassen (1997) for non-verbal
predication. Hengeveld (1992a) proposed that major
word classes can either be lacking in a language (then
it is called rigid) or a language may not differentiate
between two word classes (then it is called flexible).
Thus, ‘languages without adjectives’ (cf. Sect. 6) are
either flexible in that they combine nouns and adjec-
tives in one class (N\Adj), or rigid in that they lack
adjectives completely. Hengeveld claims that besides
the English type, where all four classes (VkNk
AdjkAdv) are differentiated and exist, there are only
three types of rigid languages (VkNkAdj, e.g.,
Wambon; VkN, e.g., Hausa; and V, e.g., Tuscarora),
and three types of flexible languages (VkNkAdj\
Adv, e.g., German; VkN\Adj\Adv, e.g., Quechua;
V\N\Adj\Adv, e.g., Samoan).
The most comprehensive theory of word classes and
their properties is presented in Croft (1991). Croft
notes that in all the cross-linguistic diversity, one can
find universals in the form of markedness patterns;
universally, object words are unmarked when func-
tioning as referring arguments, property words are
unmarked when functioning as nominal modifiers,
and action words are unmarked when functioning as
predicates. While it is not possible to define cross-
linguistically applicable notions of noun, adjective,
and verb on the basis of semantic and\or formal
criteria alone, it is possible, according to Croft, to
define nouns, adjectives, and verbs as cross-linguistic
prototypes on the basis of the universal markedness
patterns.
For a sample of recent work on word classes in a
cross-linguistic perspective, see Vogel and Comrie
(2000), and the bibliography in Plank (1997). Other
overviews are Sasse (1993b), Schachter (1985), and
further collections of articles are Tersis-Surugue (1984)
and Alpatov (1990).
See also: Lexical Processes (Word Knowledge): Psy-
chological and Neural Aspects; Speech Production,
16544
Word Classes and Parts of Speech
Neural Basis of; Speech Production, Psychology of;
Word, Linguistics of; Word Meaning: Psychological
Aspects; Word Recognition, Cognitive Psychology of
Bibliography
Alpatov V M (ed.) 1990 C
vasti rec
\i: Teorija i tipologija. Nauka,
Moscow
Bhat D N S 1994 The Adjectial Category: Criteria for Differ-
entiation and Identification. Benjamins, Amsterdam
Bloomfield L 1933 Language. Holt, New York
Croft W 1991 Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations:
the Cognitie Organization of Information. The University of
Chicago Press, Chicago
Dixon R M W 1977 Where have all the adjectives gone? Studies
in Language 1: 19–80
Hengeveld K 1992a Parts of speech. In: Fortescue M, Harder P,
Kristoffersen L (eds.) Layered Structure and Reference in a
Functional Perspectie. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 29–56
Hengeveld K 1992b Non-erbal Predication: Theory, Typology,
Diachrony. de Gruyter, Berlin
Hopper P J, Thompson S A 1984 The discourse basis for lexical
categories in universal grammar. Language 60: 703–52
Langacker R W 1987 Nouns and verbs. Language 63: 53–94
Plank F 1997 Word classes in typology: recommended readings
(a bibliography). Linguistic Typology 1: 185–92
Quirk R, Greenbaum S, Leech G, Svartvik J 1985 A Com-
prehensie Grammar of the English Language. Longman,
London
Ramat P, Ricca D 1994 Prototypical adverbs: On the scalarity\
radiality of the notion of adverb. Riista di Linguistica 6:
289–326
Ramat P, Ricca D 1998 Sentence adverbs in the languages of
Europe. In: van der Auwera J (ed.) Aderbial Constructions in
the Languages of Europe. de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 187–275
Sasse H-J 1993a Das Nomen—eine universale Kategorie?
Sprachtypologie und Uniersalienforschung 46: 187–221
Sasse H-J 1993b Syntactic categories and subcategories. In:
Jacobs J et al. (eds.) Syntax: An International Handbook
of Contemporary Research. de Gruyter, Berlin, Vol. 1,
pp. 646–86
Schachter P 1985 Parts-of-speech systems. In: Shopen T (ed.)
Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, UK, Vol. 1, pp. 3–61
Stassen L 1997 Intransitie Predication. Oxford University Press,
Oxford
Tersis-Surugue N (ed.) 1984 L’opposition erbo-nominale dans
dierses langues du monde. (Special issue of Mode
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logischer Sicht. Fink, Mu
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M. Haspelmath
Word, Linguistics of
In thinking about words, the first question is how to
divide an utterance up into them. The simple answer is
that words are demarcated by spaces, just as they are
on this page. But this simple answer depends on the
existence of writing. In speech, we do not normally
leave a space or pause between words. Most languages
throughout history have not been written down.
Surely we do not want to say that only written
languages have words, and, even with written lan-
guages, spacing does not provide an entirely satisfying
answer. For example, English compounds can be
spelled in three ways: open, closed, or hyphenated,
and some items can be spelled in any of these three
ways without being affected in any detectable way:
birdhouse,bird-house,bird house. We do not want to
say that the first spelling is one word, the last spelling
two words, and the middle one neither one word nor
two, which we would have to do if we accepted spaces
as criterial. The better conclusion is that spelling con-
ventions are not a completely reliable clue to whether
something is a word or not.
Some linguists avoid the problem by claiming that
the whole notion ‘word’ is theoretically invalid, just an
artifact of spelling. In their favor is the fact, which
people are always surprised to learn, that not all
languages have a word for ‘word.’ The classical
languages, biblical Hebrew, classical Greek, and clas-
sical Latin, for example, all have terms that are
systematically ambiguous among ‘speech,’ ‘word,’ and
‘utterance’ but none has terms that distinguish clearly
among these notions and certainly none has a special
term that means just ‘word.’ Even in the opening verse
of the Gospel of John, ‘In the beginning was the
Word,’ it is still not clear just what is the meaning of
the Greek word λο
Tγο| [logos] that we conventionally
translate as ‘word.’ Many scholars believe that the best
translation is ‘thought’ or ‘reason.’
The classical languages are not alone. The anthro-
pologist Bronislaw Malinowski declared that the
distinction between word and utterance was not an
obvious one to most peoples, that ‘isolated words are
in fact only linguistic figments, the products of an
advanced linguistic analysis’ (Malinowski 1935, p. 11),
suggesting that there was no reason for most languages
to distinguish between words and utterances. None-
theless, most modern linguists believe that all lan-
guages do have words, whether their speakers are
aware of the units or not. The question then becomes
how to figure out what a word is and how to identify
words in a way that is valid for all languages, written
or spoken, and, since language is first and foremost
spoken, our answer must not depend on writing.
The earliest explicit discussion that we have of the
notion ‘word’ and of words in the speech stream is in
the work of Aristotle. Aristotle made a distinction
between an utterance or sentence, for which he used
the term λο
Tγο| [logos] (confusingly, the term that we
16545
Word, Linguistics of
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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7
