substitute for concert (e.g. food, coffee, taste, etc.) are Class 1
words. The same
holds good for words that can substitute for clerk, tax and team
these are typical
positions of Class 1 words. The next important position is that of
was, remembered
and went; words that can substitute for them are called Class 2
words. The next
position is that of good. Words that can substitute for good are
Class 3 words. The
last position is that of there; words that can fill this position are
called Class 4
words. According to the scholar, these four parts of speech
contain about 67 per
cent of the total instances of the vocabulary. He also distinguishes
15 groups of
function words set up by the same process of substitution but on
different patterns.
It is obvious that in classifying words into word-classes Charles
Fries in fact
used the principle of function, or combinability (the position of a word
in the
sentence is the syntactic function of word). Being a structuralist,
he would not
speak of function: function is meaning while position is not. His
classification is
not beyond criticism. No wonder, other structuralists deemed it
necessary to return to traditional terminology and to use the
criterion of form and, additionally, position.
4. Complex
In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated according
to three
criteria: semantic, formal and functional. This approach may be
defined as
complex. Thus, when characterizing any part of speech we are to
describe: a) its semantics; b) its morphological features; c) its
syntactic peculiarities.
In accordance with the said criteria, we can classify the words of
the English
language into notional and functional. To the notional parts of
speech belong the
noun, the adjective, the numeral, the verb, and the adverb. To the
functional parts
of speech belong the article, the pronoun, the preposition, the
conjunction, the
particle, the modal words, and the interjection. The notional parts
of speech present
open classes while the functional parts of speech present closed
classes, i.e. the
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