Definition:
Traditional term for the categories into which words are classified according to their functions in sentences:
In contemporary linguistics, the term part of speech has generally been discarded in favor of the label word class or syntactic category.See also: The Basic Parts of Speech.
Observations:
- "Writing in about 100 B.C.E., the Greek grammarian Thrax, who invented the whole idea of the parts of speech, counted eight of them: adverbs, articles, conjunctions, nouns, participles, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs. The Romans had to drop articles (that is, a and the), since such words didn't exist in Latin, and added--hot damn!--interjections. The early English grammarians started out by adopting the Latin scheme, and it wasn't until Joseph Priestley's The Rudiments of English Grammar, published in 1761, that someone came up with the familiar baseball-team sized list that included adjectives and booted out participles for good."
(Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, Broadway Books, 2007) - "A part of speech outside of the limitations of syntactic form is but a will o’ the wisp. For this reason no logical scheme of the parts of speech--their number, nature, and necessary confines--is of the slightest interest to the linguist."
(Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, 1921) - "When linguists began to look closely at English grammatical structure in the 1940s and 1950s, they encountered so many problems of identification and definition that the term part of speech soon fell out of favour, word class being introduced instead. Word classes are equivalent to parts of speech, but defined according to strict linguistic criteria."
(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003)
Also Known As: word classes, grammatical categories
