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#192154 07/30/10 05:47 PM
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In English, we traditionally learn there are eight parts of speech. That about does it for us. Are there any language that categorize words differently or use different / additional parts of speech?

Are there any that use fewer?

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Lexical categories (link) differ from language to language and within a language. It's a matter of linguistic analysis not some actual property of the words. The trad eight for English are adapted from the Graeco-Roman grammatical tradition, which tended to categorize by endings, e.g., nouns substantive and adjective share the same set of endings. Modern English grammatical theory has a slightly different take, e.g., the articles not being their own category but subsumed under determiners, etc. Reading the Wikipedia article linked to above is a good start, and there are further references at the bottom of the page there. Modern grammatical theory tends to classify words by what slots they fill in a sentence, i.e., by syntactic function.

As for other languages, I don't know much about Chinese grammatical theory and its history, but I would hazard to say it is different from Indo-European traditions. A word in Chinese can be used as a noun, adjective, verb, what have you. It's more about where it occurs in the sentence, Chinese not having much inflectional morphology, if any at all.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Seems odd. Pick an English word with multiple meanings or uses like say, "bounce." It can be a verb or a noun depending on context. In fact, it may not even be possible to discern the intended semantics from a normal usage. For example, the sentence, "Did you see that bounce?" Nevertheless, we would say that it was a noun in one context (or interpretation) and a verb in the other.

Not disputing it. Just noting that it seems odd to me.

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"Duck" can be the bird in the water or flying over head, or
it could mean "be careful" that volley ball is going to hit
your head.


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"Did you see that bounce?"

Yes, these ambiguities are almost always resolved by context. As English got rid of more and more of its derivational morphology, one could verb nouns and noun verbs without anything in the way of suffixes.

Most grammars of English would call what a pronoun, but what is it in the following:

A. I went to see the Oracle at Delphi.
B. The what you say?

But this sort of thing even happens in languages like Latin: e.g., quid 'what' > quidditas 'whatness'.

Many folks don't know a noun from an adverb, but they can speak and understand others speaking. Having names for things like demonstrative pronouns and quotative like gives you a vocabulary to discuss linguistic phenomena, but are not necessary to speak or write a language.


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The what you say? Noun.

Jackie #192168 07/31/10 03:53 AM
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The what you say? Noun.

And she wins a Kewpie doll. But, now I am confused. I thought you believed in rules and such and were a prescriptivo ... So, verbing does not weird the language for thee?


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When it's cute. wink

Jackie #192198 08/02/10 03:45 PM
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Originally Posted By: Jackie
When it's cute. wink



Gee, that was post 192192: some kind of record.


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Oh my gosh, it was, wasn't it?! [preen e] wink Gee, and it's not even 8/9/10 yet...

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