Criteria for classification

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 499.

Classes of words

The problem of word classes is one of the most complicated in the history of language. The earliest attempts to describe them go back to such countries as India & Asia. Each stage of linguistics brought in its own way of dividing words into classes. The fact is quite natural, because classes of words inflect not only the structure of language, but also the depth of grammatical description.

The first attempt at classifying words was made by Henry Sweet. He thought that semantic, morphological and syntactic characteristics of a word should be taken into consideration at one & the same time. It was the opinion of Otto Jesperson as well. He classified the vocabulary into declinables (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and indeclinables (adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections). With a slight variation this classification appeared in most traditional grammar books.

The Russian linguistics approach is more consistent. Russian linguists divided the word classes by the following 5 principles:

1. The general lexico-grammatical meaning of words.
2. The lexicogrammatical morphemes or stem-building elements; e.g. signify
3. Grammatical categories or paradigms
4. Distribution (combinability)
5. The function in sentence.