The term ‘ivory” is part of everyone’s vocabulary. Words are often viewed as units of meaning, such as when someone shouts “Pier'”, or as units of sentence structure, for instance when one is analyzing a sentence comprised of more than one word. Traditionally, these building blocks of language have been categorized under the label “parts of speech”. Members of the Indo-European group Of languages hue been analyzed in terms Of parts Of speech categories since classical antiquity.
According to the Webster Dictionary, part of speech refers to one Of the traditional class Of words Of a language according to their unction (adjective, adverb, conjunction, etc. ). Following a traditional perspective, will begin this essay by defining what has been classically understood by each of the terms proposed in the title.
In this perspective, if we are to exemplify with words, these would be in their dictionary form and not inflected as they may often appear in sentences, when they function as constituents of phrases and sentences. Noun: a word that names a person, place, thing or idea; e. G. Kook.
- Verb: a word that shows action, or links the subject to a word or phrase that tells about the subject: e. G. Produce. Adjective: a word that tells what kind, hove many or which one; e. G. Good.
- Adverb: a word that tells when, where, how or how much: e. G. Highly. Determiner: a word that goes in front of a noun to identify what the noun refers to; e. G. This. * preposition: a word that shows a relationship between a noun and another’s in a sentence;
- Pronoun: a word that takes the place off noun or nouns; e. G. We. E. G. To, Conjunction: a word that connects words or groups of words; e. G. And. K Demonstrative: a word that serves to point out; e # those.
- Article: a word used to indicate nouns and to specify their application; e. . The. ;k Interjection: a word that expresses a strong feeling; e. G. Ouch! Although can understand the possible pedagogical need for the definitions and examples above, especially when we are dealing With children or beginning foreign learners, there are some limitations in traditional labeling which are worth mentioning. First of all, a simplification such as nouns as “thing-words” and verbs as “doing-words” can generate a deceiving idea that all words in that category will have similar features.
If we take a verb such as “seem”, we would definitely not qualify it as depicting an action. Besides, there is the problem of ambivalence; the noun Mambo”, for instance, could actually be a verb in the sentence “He will book a room”. There is evidence in derivation morphology of word conversion with different meanings depending on the part of speech, but also with the same meaning, such as “produce” that just varies in terms of pronunciation, Additionally, there is the issue tooth taxonomy adopted by different authors and trends.
We cannot expect to get the same list of parts of speech such as the one provided previously in all tooth grammar reference books we use. Swan and Walters Good Grammar Book (2001), for instance, consider a demonstrative a determiner, and not a class apart. Fuchs and Banner’s Grammar Express (2003) do not mention either determiners or demonstratives, instead, they add the class quantifiers. Formal analysis, under our scrutiny so tar, tends to be primarily interested in abstract representations and relationships between structures and less interested in meaning and context.
Functional analysis, on the other hand, tends to view language as a communicative resource and to be primarily interested in how linguistic structures express meaning. In Functional English Grammar (LOCK, 1996), parts Of speech are named word classes. Pronouns are considered a subcategory of nouns. Articles (an), demonstratives (that), possessives (my) and inclusive (all) are referrers, lexemes that function Within the noun group. There is no reference to the part of speech “interjection”. In traditional grammar, lexical categories are given notional definitions, which means they are categorized in terms of their semantic context.
In modern linguistics, they are defined morph-syntactically in terms of their grammatical properties. The alternative term “morphology’s” explicitly recognizes the important relationship between syntax (sentence formation) and morphology (word formation) and may be more appropriate when analyzing the complexity embedded in a word. In any one phrase or sentence, the decision to select a particular word at one place in the structure Nipponese great constraints on what can be selected at another.
Functional linguists categorize word classes as closed and open classes, leaving numerals (first) and interjections (phew) outside this label due to the ambiguity they offer. Closed class words are those hat rarely have added members, such as pronouns, prepositions, determiners, conjunctions, modal and primary verbs. They are also known as function words, grammatical words or structure words. Open class words are indefinitely extended, like nouns, adjectives, full verbs and adverbs.
They are also known as major word classes and may be divided into secondary Word classes, for instance, the subdivision of proper and common categories when it comes to nouns. Believe English teachers as a foreign or second language should be aware of traditional and functional premises so that they are able to make informed choices on how to teach in a contemporary context Larsen-Freeman (2002) proposes more fluid and dynamic notions of reason-driven “grammarian”, which would be the ability to use grammar structures accurately, meaningfully and appropriately.
Grammatical knowledge consists of knowing when to use the forms to convey meanings that match our intention in particular contexts and also to understand meanings conveyed by others. As an English teacher, I will raise some situations in which parts of speech/word classes/lexical categories may he taught and why they should be taught. First of all, they are an important knowledge students should have when they are looking up words in a dictionary.
A dictionary definition is usually comprised of lexeme (dictionary entry), phonetic transcription (in an online dictionary also the recorded pronunciation), part of speech (sometimes just an abbreviation) and word definition (sometimes followed by word in context). It would be important for students to understand what that part of speech means especially because this may determine the meaning of the word Let’s take the lexeme ‘Well” as an example: as an adverb, it may mean “in a manner that gives satisfaction”; as a noun, it usually refers to a pep hole.
Also, it is very useful to tackle parts of speech when eve are focusing on reading skills The awareness of suffixes which generally define that word within a particular class, such as “news” (goodness), %TTY” (purity), and fish” (radicalism) for nouns; “able” (breakable), “ant” (expectant) and Wives” (repulsive) for adjectives; “IIS’ (organize), “i” (beautify) and “en” (deepen) for verbs; and “I/ ; (quickly) for adverbs, Will definitely broaden the students’ vocabulary knowledge. Finally, knowing the part of speech a word belongs to will help the students in the word order Within a sentence.
A noun is generally part of the subject or object of a sentence. An adjective usually precedes the noun. Thus, having this in mind, students may come up more easily With sentences such as “Great teachers inspire”, instead of “Inspire teachers great”. All in all, it is important to point out that grammar is not a straitjacket, so using the examples have just given, it is wise to notice that not all adverbs are affixed with “Y’ and not always adjectives come before nouns. Therefore, teachers should teach critically no matter what they are teaching and try to foster that in students too.
