Lexical category

2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Linguistics

In grammar, a lexical category (also word class, lexical class, or in traditional grammar part of speech) is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items), which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others. There are open word classes, which constantly acquire new members, and closed word classes, which acquire new members infrequently if at all.

Different languages may have different lexical categories, or they might associate different properties to the same one. For example, Spanish uses adjectives almost interchangeably as nouns while English cannot. Japanese has two classes of adjectives where English has one; Chinese and Japanese have measure words while European languages have nothing resembling them; many languages don't have a distinction between adjectives and adverbs, or adjectives and nouns, etc. Many linguists argue that the formal distinctions between parts of speech must be made within the framework of a specific language or language family, and should not be carried over to other languages or language families.

Parts of speech

In traditional English grammar, which is patterned after Latin grammar, still taught in schools and used in dictionaries, there are eight parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection (sometimes called an exclamation). Linguists, however, recognize that this list is simplified and artificial. Many traditional parts of speech are defined by semantic criteria instead of morpho-syntactic criteria. For example, "adverb" is to some extent a catch-all class that includes words with many different functions. Numbering eight parts of speech is traditional; it stems from the Greek grammarians. When Romans decided on writing a grammar for their language, they felt compelled to have eight parts of speech, though these were different from the Greek ones, and the same is the case for the English set.

Common ways of delimiting words by function include:

• Open word classes:
  • adjectives
  • adverbs
  • interjections
  • nouns
  • verbs (except auxiliary verbs)

• Closed word classes:
  • auxiliary verbs
  • clitics
  • coverbs
  • conjunctions
  • determiners ( articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
  • particles
  • measure words
  • adpositions (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
  • preverbs
  • pronouns
  • contractions
  • cardinal numbers

English

English frequently does not mark words as belonging to one part of speech or another. Words like neigh, break, outlaw, laser, microwave and telephone might all be either verb forms or nouns. Although -ly is an adverb marker, not all adverbs end in -ly and not all words ending in -ly are adverbs. For instance, tomorrow, slow, fast, crosswise can all be adverbs, while early, friendly, ugly are all adjectives (though early can also function as an adverb).

In certain circumstances, even words with primarily grammatical functions can be used as verbs or nouns, as in "We must look to the hows and not just the whys" or "Miranda was to-ing and fro-ing and not paying attention".