Mass of words
1:57pm Wednesday 6th August 2008
Having asked, in last month's Wordplay article, if we really need punctuation marks (and having answered my own question decisively in the affirmative), I started wondering if we need parts of speech.
Most of us have been through the agonies of being taught grammar at school and had to do things like parsing' to drum into us how to recognise a noun, a verb, an adverb, etc.
Writing about his early schooling, Stephen Leacock recalled the experience thus: "We learned by heart, out of a little book called Grammar, the statement that There are eight parts of speech, the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the verb, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection.' It was just a mass of words.
We hadn't the least idea of what a part of speech meant."
Grammarians (and teachers) tend to make sweeping statements about parts of speech. For instance, a 1901 textbook says that the word adverb comes from Latin ad to and verbum word or verb. "So Adverb = a word added to a verb." Yet this is not always true - even is an adverb in "It was even noisier" but it modifies an adjective, not a verb. And an adverb isn't always a single word: it can be a phrase like for a while' or if possible'.
Parts of speech are at least useful to lexicographers. You only have to open a dictionary to see words marked as adj., adv. and n. (the Oxford English Dictionary strangely describes a noun as sb. - meaning substantive'). But how useful are these designations?
I have always wondered about the value of the description pronoun'. Surely it is just a kind of noun, not a part of speech in its own right?
In the sentence "The man panicked, and he ran away," man and he both refer to the same person, so why do they need two different parts of speech? Besides, a pronoun can represent a whole phrase, not just a noun. Randolph Quirk's Grammar (1985) gives the example: "The man invited the little Swedish girl because he liked her." In this case, the pronouns he and her represent phrases of two and four words respectively.
Parts of speech are really only labels for categories, which can fluctuate a great deal. Many words can be used as different parts of speech. The word Sunday is normally classed as a noun, but it serves as an adverb in the exchange: "When are you going?" "Sunday." The word round can be a noun, adjective, verb, adverb and preposition - as well as sometimes serving as a suffix.
How did we get the idea of parts of speech'? In India as well as Greece around the first century BC, scholars began to analyse language. The Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax decided that there were eight parts of speech: noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb and conjunction.
This idea was adapted into Latin, although grammarians made the interjection separate from the adverb (where the Greeks had placed it) and excluded the article (which doesn't exist in Latin). The same categories were transferred from Latin into English.
One of the earliest publications about English grammar - William Bullokar's Pamphlet for Grammar (1586) - listed the same eight parts of speech as Dionysius Thrax, except that he replaced Thrax's article' with interjection'. Like Thrax, he omits the adjective but refers to a noun-adjective' (like black or hard) and later calls this simply an adjective.
Ben Jonson's English Grammar (1640) says: "In our English speech, we number the same parts with the Latins: Noun, Pronoun, Verb, Participle, Adverb, Conjunction, Preposition, Interjection. Only, we add a ninth, which is the Article the and a."
Note that Jonson also omits the adjective. There are disputes as to how many parts of speech there are. Some people would add extra designations, such as the numeral (two, twice, third), and others would regard the participle (having, being) as a verb, not a separate part of speech.
Other grammarians avoid using the phrase parts of speech' and instead call these things word classes' or even grammatical (or lexical) categories'.
In English Grammatical Categories (1970), Ian Michael estimated that, up to the year 1800, "Grammarians gave their approval to 56 different systems of parts of speech."
Parts of speech are supposed to help us identify what function a word serves, but the variety of categories is simply confusing. The confusion can be further complicated by the many other terms that grammarians use - like mood, case, number, gender, tense, gerunds, prefixes and suffixes, comparatives and superlatives.
Even if the concept of parts of speech has its uses, it still leaves us uncertain what part of speech to assign to such words as yes, no, not, or very. Is alone an adjective or adverb? Is five a noun or an adjective? What part of speech is however - or whatever?
David Crystal wrote: "Any classification of words which raises so many problems is clearly suspect."
I am inclined to agree.
Tony Augarde is the author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games (OUP, £14.99) and The Oxford A to Z of Word Games (OUP, £4.99)