Word classes Noun Adjective Adverb Verb Preposition Lexical

Word classes Noun Adjective Adverb Verb Preposition

• Lexical words • Content words • Grammatical or form words

Criteria for word classes • • Syntactic Morphological Morpfo-syntactic Semantic Suffixes Derivational suffixes Inflectional suffixes

Morphological criterion • The singular form criterion is used in the heading because what is at stake is simply whether a given word allows grammatical suffixes or not.

Morpho-syntax criteria • These criteria have to do with inflectional suffixes. • English does not have the rich system of inflections possessed by languages such ass Russian. • English adjectives are not associated with number or case, but many of them take suffixes signalling a greater quantity of some property or the greatest quantity of some property.

Syntactic criteria • The syntactic criteria for word classes are based on what a given word occurs with and the types of phrase in which a given word occurs.

Semantic criteria: what words mean • There are no semantic criteria, aspects of the meaning of the different classes of words, that would enable us to decide whether any given word is a noun, adjective, verb, adverb or proposition.

Semantic criteria: what speakers do with words • Even more important is what speakers and writers do with language. When they produce utterances they perform actions. They act to produce sounds or marks on paper, but the purpose of producing the sounds is to draw the attention of their audience to some entity and to say something about it – to predicate a property of it.

Video • https: //www. youtube. com/watch? v=FDbh. U 8 Dhy_k • Crown Academy of English