8.5. Functional parts of speech

Julianne Doner

8. Parts of speech

8.5. Functional parts of speech

***THIS IS A DRAFT***

Functional and lexical parts of speech

So far we’ve only looked at lexical parts of speech. Lexical words are generally easier to define and encode the meaning of the sentence. There are also functional parts of speech. Functional parts of speech are much harder to define and have grammatical functions. Functional parts of speech include determiners, auxiliaries, modals, conjunctions, and complementizers. Adpositions are also a kind of functional part of speech, but they are more on the edge. For example, some prepositions, like of, are very functional and difficult to define, while other prepositions, such as under, are much easier to define.

Open and closed parts of speech

We can also distinguish between open and closed parts of speech. Open parts of speech can easily have new words added to them, while it is generally harder to add words to a closed parts of speech. Most lexical parts of speech are open and most functional parts of speech are also closed.

Frindle

Frindle is a children’s book by Andrew Clements about a fifth-grade boy who decides to start calling pens by a new name, frindle, and gets his friends and classmates to start using the new word, too.

Based on what you know about open and closed parts of speech, do you think it’s realistic that frindle would catch on? Why or why not?

Identifying functional parts of speech

Adpositions

If you recall from Section 1.2, some languages use prepositions, which appear before nouns, and some languages use postpositions, which appear after nouns. Both use the symbol P. The word adposition can be used if you don’t want to distinguish between prepositions and postpositions.

The function of adpositions is to introduce a noun phrase, indicating its relation to the rest of the sentence.

Some examples of English prepositions include before, after, to, from, of, under, over, through, near, off, on, for.

Prepositions in English often appear before nouns and determiners, as shown in (1).

(1)	a.	down the stairs
	b.	by Tuesday
	c.	under the sea
	d.	on a boat
	e.	near Winnipeg
	f.	from my bag

English also has intransitive prepositions, which do not have objects, as shown in (2). Intransitive verbs usually appear either immediately after the verb or immediately after the object.

(2)	a.	I picked the bag up.
	b.	I picked up the bag.
	c.	The machine broke down.
	d.	The dean called the meeting off.
	e.	The dean called off the meeting.
	f.	She eased up on the brakes.

Determiners

The syntactic position of determiners can typically be described with reference to nouns. In English, determiners appear before nouns. There are several subclasses to the category of determiners, as listed in Table 1.

Table 1. Subclasses of the determiner category
Articles	the, an, a
Demonstratives	this, that, these, those
Quantifiers	every, some, many, most, few, all, each, any…
Numerals	one, two, three…
Possessive determiners	my, your, his, her, its, our, their
Some wh-words	which, whose

Determiners may agree with any of the inflectional features of the noun. Nominal inflectional features may also appear on the determiner instead of the noun.

Generally, the semantics of determiners is to pick out which specific entity or entities are being referred to. Whereas cat on its own could be referring to any cats in the world, or even the idea of cats in general, phrases like the cat indicates that there is a single contextually-relevant cat that is being referred to, a cat indicates that there is an individual relevant cat but doesn’t specifically tell you which one, and so on.

Cross-linguistically, then, determiners also encode values such as definiteness and specificity. A definite determiner, like English the, indicates that the reference of the noun is identifiable in the context, while an indefinite determiner, like English a(n), indicates that the reference of the noun is not identifiable. Specificity indicates whether the referent is a unique entity.

(3)	a.	I want to eat that cookie.	definite, specific
	b.	I want to eat the biggest cookie you can make.	definite, non-specific
	c.	My sister gave a cookie to her friend.	indefinite, specific
	d.	Let’s go to the bakery and see if there’s a cookie that looks good.	indefinite, non-specific

In some languages, definiteness and specificity might inflect on the noun instead of on the determiner.

Pronouns

Pronouns are an interesting part of speech. On the one hand, they have the same distribution as noun phrases, so they look like they might be a subcategory of nouns. On the other hand, unlike nouns, pronouns are a functional part of speech: they usually can be defined using only inflectional features, such as person, number, and gender. Like other functional parts of speech, pronouns are also a closed class. It is not easy to coin new pronouns.

Because of this, some people argue that maybe pronouns are a subclass of determiners rather than a subclass of nouns. Some evidence for this approach comes from (4). Although pronouns usually stand on their own, in some contexts a pronoun can co-occur with a noun, as in (4a) us students. However, there are not contexts where a pronoun can co-occur with a determiner, as in (4b).

(4) a. Us students have gathered together to create a formal petition for less homework.

b. *The us/we would like less homework.

Neo-pronouns

psychological studies showing generic he does not get interpreted as gender-neutral cited in Bjorkman 2017 (Martyna 1978; MacKay & Fulkerson 1979; Gastil 1990; Foertsch & Gernsbacher 1997; Miller & James 2009).

Long history of trying to coin a replacement (citations) Newly coined pronouns are called neopronouns.

However, because pronouns belong to a closed class, neopronouns don’t often catch on easily. It is more common for existing pronouns to be used generically, even when it results in awkward or clunky phrases, such as, generic you, coordinated she or he, or the very formal one.

Similarly, some people do not feel like gendered pronouns such as she or he describe them well. Some of these people choose to use pronouns like they or it, but others coin new pronouns that they feel fit them better. For example, in this blog, neopronoun Vagrant Gautam user explains why and how xe chose which pronouns feel the best to xem.

Many different English gender-neutral neopronouns have been coined and are in use. Some are shown below in Table 2.

Table 2. Examples of some gender-neutral neopronouns in English
nominative	accusative	genitive	reflexive
xe	xem	xyrs	xemself
hi	hir	hirs	hirself
ze	zir	zirs	zirself
ey	em	eirs	emself
fae	faer	faers	faerself

One reason functional categories are hard to coin is closed class words are more likely to have irregular inflection, so people don’t know how to predict their inflection and the kinds of agreement they might trigger. For example, if you look at only one column in Table 2, do you feel like you could predict the forms in the other columns?

Neopronouns are being coined in other languages, too. For example, iel in French is a blend of the masculine pronoun il and the feminine pronoun elle. To read more about neopronouns in other languages, check out this article.

examples of neo-pronouns in other languages: iel in French

We might think that it would be better to just switch to using gender-neutral pronouns for everyone all the time.

(I saw a story that Finnish speakers were borrowing English pronoun pins to advertise their identity – fact check this)

Gender-neutral grammar is not correlated with gender ideology in culture (examples, citations)

Question words

Question words are a kind of pro-form, which means that they replace phrases of another part of speech. We can figure out what part of speech a question word is by looking at what it replaces. We can do that by answering the question and determining the part of speech of the answer. Some question words are ambiguous, and can be answered by phrases from more than one part of speech.

Table 1. Some possible parts of speech of question words in English
	Question word	Part of speech	Example
a.	who	N	Who ate the cookie? The cookie monster.
b.	what	N	What did the cookie monster eat? A cookie.
		D	What TV show did you watch? This one.
c.	where	P	Where did you watch it? On the couch.
		N	Where did you watch it? Here.
d.	when	N	When did you watch it? Last week.
		Adv	When will you watch it? Soon.
e.	why	C	Why did you watch it? Because I was bored.
		N	Why did you watch it? No reason.
f.	how	P	How did you watch it? On the TV.
g.	which	D	Which show did you watch? This one.
h.	whose	D	Whose cookie was eaten? Elmo’s.

Tense

Tense markers in English include auxiliaries, modals, and the non-finite marker to, as listed in Table 2.

Table 2. Subclasses of the tense category
auxiliaries	HAVE, BE, and DO
modals	will, would, should, shall, can, could, may, might, must, ought
non-finite	to

In English, elements in the tense category appear in between the subject and the verb.

Each of the three tense subclasses have different properties.

You can have more than one auxiliary, but only one modal and one to (and you can’t have a modal and a to together, either)
- Except for some dialects, like Appalachian English, where they do allow double modals
auxiliaries and modals invert in question formation, but not to
auxiliaries inflect for person, number, and tense like a verb, but modals and to do not

Auxiliaries, especially, seem to have many properties in common with verbs, so some people categorize auxiliaries as subclasses of verbs. But they also have some properties of T! If you continue studying syntax, you will discover why!

***Distinguish between auxiliary and main verb uses of HAVE BE and DO***

Conjunctions

Conjunctions (Conj) connect two units of the same type. English only has four conjunctions: and, or, nor, neither…nor, and either…or.

Complementizers

Complementizers (C or Comp) put one clause inside another. Some of the complementizers in English are that, for, if, and whether.

Negation

Negation (Neg): not

Particles

Free morphemes which encode only inflectional information are often called particles. Calling something a particle is a way to avoid classifying the word into a part of speech, often because it is difficult to identify its part of speech. In some cases, there may be only one or two particles that exhibit the same behaviour, and so there is really little basis for assigning it its own part of speech category.

Key takeaways

Check yourself!

References and further resources

For a general audience

Abraham, Amelia. 2020. Gender neutral pronouns are important: Not everyone identifies with ‘he’ or ‘she’. Vogue India. https://www.vogue.in/culture-and-living/content/gender-neutral-pronouns-are-important-not-everyone-identifies-with-he-or-she

Conrod, Kirby and Vagrant Gautam. 2021. Guest Lecture in pronouns: Vagrant. Medium. https://kconrod.medium.com/guest-lecture-in-pronouns-vasundhara-1c61d3023e0c

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