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.
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 |
(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 |
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
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. These are called neo-pronouns.
MORE ABOUT NEO-PRONOUNS – they are hard to coin, but not impossible
how to conjugate neo-pronouns, what agreement do they trigger?
neo-pronouns in other languages
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).
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.
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
auxiliaries | HAVE, BE, and DO |
modals | will, would, should, shall, can, could, may, might, must, ought |
non-finite | to |
- 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!
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!
Parts of speech that encode the meaning of the sentence, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
Parts of speech that encode grammatical functions, such as determiners, complementizers, and conjunctions.
Parts of speech that can easily have new words added to them.
Parts of speech that cannot easily have new words added to them.
A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase and that occurs before the noun. See also adposition.
A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase and that occurs after the noun. See also adposition.
A preposition or a postposition. A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase.
Not having an object.
Most commonly used to describe verbs that have only a single argument, the subject, although other parts of speech are also occasionally described as being transitive or intransitive.