![]() ![]() What about the word to in an infinitive like to see? What about the there in there are?Ĭurrent-day grammarians don't even like to use "parts of speech," preferring "word classes" or "lexical categories." A recent trend has been to accept some fuzziness. In the term baseball player, is the word baseball a noun or an adjective? Reasonable people differ on this point. In the 1920's, Edward Sapir wrote that "no logical scheme of the parts of speech - their number, nature and necessary confines - is of the slightest interest to the linguist." The fact is, any parts-of-speech scheme leaves gaping holes. But for some time there have been rumblings of discontent in the higher reaches of the linguistics community. This slate has been generally accepted for the last quarter-millennium and is familiar to the population at large from "Schoolhouse Rock" and the italicized abbreviations ( adj., etc.) after words in the dictionary. There was a lot of shuffling around, until Joseph Priestley's 1761 "Rudiments of English Grammar" finally established the baseball-size lineup that included adjectives and booted out participles. This presented problems, since English does have articles. Early formulations of English grammar adopted the Latin list. Perhaps to keep the eight-part scheme, they added - golly! - interjections. The Latin-speaking Romans obviously had to drop articles. Thrax counted eight parts: adverbs, articles, conjunctions, nouns, participles, prepositions, pronouns and verbs. Even in our own tradition, the roster keeps shifting. For example, Latin, Russian and Japanese all lack articles. One problem with such reverence is that different languages are set up differently. The anonymous author of the 1733 book "The English Accidence" called the parts of speech "the foundation upon which the beautiful fabrick of the language stands." John Stuart Mill felt they represented universal categories of human thought. ![]() Eventually, grand claims were made for it. For a long time, the idea was pretty much universally accepted. The notion of dividing words into discrete parts of speech is generally credited to the ancient Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax. ![]()
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