Chapter 2

Word Classes
 In this chapter we are going to discuss two
main points;

 1- How to distinguish word classes.

 2- The different word classes and the

categories that can fall under each one of
them.
 Distinguishing Word
Classes
 Word classes can generally be open or closed.
 Closed word classes e.g. prepositions,
pronouns, determiners, conjunctions,
auxiliaries, are usually easy to recognize
mainly due to their relatively small number.

Prepositions: in, on, at, to, from, for, since…

Pronouns: I, you, we, him, us…
Determiners: the, this, my, their, many…
Conjunctions: and, but, because, although…
continued
 On the other hand, nouns, verbs, adjectives
and adverbs are open word classes and
therefore more numerous.*

 So coming back to the main question; how

can we identify nouns, verbs, adjectives and
adverbs?
 The answer is; either through their

FORM or DISTIRBUTION
continued: Form
 The form of a word can often help us
identify its class. For example, in English

 words ending with tion, ment, ness, ty, ism,

ship, hood, etc. are usually nouns.
 Words ending with ize and fy are usually

verbs.
 Words ending with able, ful, less, etc. are

usually adjectives, while those ending with

ly are usually adverbs.
continued: Distribution
 However, there are many words that do not have
a form typical of a word class or that can belong
to more than one word class. For example,
 answer, book, call, drink, email, help, move,
plan, risk, shock, test, etc. can be both nouns
and verbs,* while clean, dry, empty, fancy,
mean, secure, etc. can be both verbs and
adjectives.

 So in such cases we can identify the class of a

word by looking at where/with whom it occurs
i.e. its distribution.
continued: Distribution
 For example, in a sentence like

In the fall of 2014 the economic development

team presented a comprehensive plan to the
council for marketing city property adjacent to
the airport to aviation industrial
manufacturers.*

we know that ‘plan’ is a noun because it is

preceded by the adjective ‘comprehensive’ and
the determiner ‘a’.
continued: Distribution
 We can also identify the class of a word by trying to
replace it with other words and seeing what class
they belong to. For example, ‘empty’ in

September is going to be a really busy month for us

as we empty the museum, carefully packing away
all the things currently on display.*

can be replaced by go to, visit, tour, establish, build,

which means that it must be a verb because all the
other words that can replace it are verbs as well.
 Word Classes and their
Categories
 In this section we are going to look at five word classes and
the categories that can fall under each one of them.
 Please remember that a given language does not
necessarily have all the features we will discuss under each
word class. English nouns, for example, do not have
grammatical gender.

 The five word classes we will discuss are

 Verbs
 Nouns
 Adjectives
 Adverbs
 Prepositions
Verbs
 Verbs usually convey an action, an
occurrence or a state of being (predication).*
 They can be categorized in terms of:

 Transitivity
 Tense
 Aspect
 Mood
 Agreement
 Voice
Verbs: Transitivity
 Intransitive verbs: subject only
The incident happened on Thursday night.
 Transitive verbs: subject + object
I made a big mistake.
 Ditransitive verbs: subject + indirect object +
direct object
The doctor gave her a painkiller.
 Ambitransitive verbs: can be transitive and
intransitive
Adam is reading.
Adam read the whole book in one night.
Verbs: Tense
 Tense is the “grammaticalized expression of
location in time” (Comrie,1985, p.9).*

 English distinguishes past from non-past;

Past: He visited his friends last week.
Non-past: He visits his grandmother every
month.

 The future time is not expressed

morphosyntactically in English, but usually
through an auxiliary verb i.e. will, be going to.
Verbs: Aspect
 Aspect expresses how an action, event, or state,
denoted by a verb, extends over time.*

Aspect in English
 Simple/Indefinite
I speak English.
 Progressive
I am watching a movie.
 Perfect
The students have understood everything.
 Perfect progressive
I have been talking for one hour.
Verbs: Mood
 Mood “marks properties such as possibility,
probability and certainty.” (Tallermann,
2020, p.45).*

 Indicative (most common)

I sleep late on the weekend.
 Subjunctive (less common in English)

If I were a billionaire, I would go live in a

remote island.
Verbs: Agreement
 In many languages verbs have to agree with
the subject by changing their form. For
example, English ‘invite’ and Spanish
‘invitar’ are conjugated as follows:
 I invite Yo invito
 You invite Tú invitas
 He/She/It invites Él/Ella invita
 We invite Nosotros invitamos
 They invite Ellos/Ellas invitan
Verbs: Voice
 Voice can usually be active or passive.

 Active
 Three thugs beat up my neighbor yesterday.
 Passive
 My neighbor was beaten up yesterday.
Nouns
 Nouns are words that function as the name of
some specific thing or set of things, such as
living creatures, objects, places, actions,
qualities, states of existence, or ideas.*
 They can be categorized in terms of:

 Argument
 Number
 Gender
 Case
 Definiteness
Nouns: Argument
 An argument is any expression or syntactic
element in a sentence that serves to
complete the meaning of the verb.*
 Nouns and noun phrases often function as

the arguments of verbs.

 The core arguments of a verb are usually

the subject and the object(s) (if any).

 The food just disappeared.

 My cat killed five rats last week.
Nouns: Number
 Nouns can be singular or plural.*

 Regular
Guy : Guys
Book : Books

 Irregular
Child : Children
Sheep : Sheep
Nouns: Gender
 Unlike English, which uses natural gender,
many languages assign grammatical gender
to nouns. For example, all nouns in Arabic,
French, Hindi/Urdu and Spanish are either
masculine or feminine, while in German and
Russian a noun can masculine, feminine, or
neuter.*
 In German, for instance, day (Tag) is

masculine, week (Woche) is feminine, while

year (Jahr) is neuter.
Nouns: Case
 Case serves to identify a noun’s function
or grammatical relation in the sentence (for
instance, whether a noun is a subject or object).*
 In languages with a case system, nouns and
pronouns usually take different inflected forms
depending on what case they are in.*
 For example, with the exception of ‘you’ and ‘it’,
English subject and object pronouns change their
form depending on whether they are a subject or
an object. So ‘I’ becomes ‘me’, ‘he’ ‘him’…
 Except for possessive ‘s/s’ (the genitive case),
English nouns do not have case markings.*
continued: Nouns: Case
 Some of the common cases include
nominative, accusative, dative, genitive,
locative, ablative, instrumental, vocative…
Some of these cases perform the job of
prepositions in some languages.
 Some languages do not have a case system

(Malay, Mandarin), while others may have

three (Arabic), four (German) or six cases
(Russian, Turkish).
Nouns: Definiteness
 Definiteness is a feature of noun phrases,
distinguishing between referents/entities
that are identifiable in a given context
(definite nouns) and entities which are not
(indefinite nouns).*
 In English they include articles (a/an, the),

demonstratives (this, these, that, those),

quantifiers (some, every, many…), and
possessive determiners (my, your, his…).
Adjectives
 Adjectives are describing words. They
usually describe nouns and pronouns.

 They can be categorized in terms of:

 Position
 Degree
 Gradability
 Agreement
Adjectives: Position
 Attributive adjectives are part of a noun
phrase i.e. they occur next to a noun, either
before it (English*, Russian, Turkish,
Hindi/Urdu…), or after it (Malay, Arabic, Farsi,
Spanish…). For example, an angry man, a
cute cat, a happy ending, serious problems…
 Predicative adjectives, in contrast, occur as

part of the predicate.

The house is expensive.
The movie was wonderful.
Adjectives: Degree
 Adjectives can usually occur in the comparative
or superlative forms.*

 Comparative
 I need a better computer.
 Books are more interesting than movies.

 Superlative
 The most important thing in life is peace of
mind.
 Chocolate indulgence is simply the best.
Adjective: Gradability
 Adjectives can generally be gradable or non-
gradable.

 Gradable adjectives can be used with intensifiers

like ‘very’ and ‘so’ and can occur in the
comparative and superlative forms. Examples
include good, cheap, tall, fast, intelligent…
 Non-gradable adjectives cannot usually be used
with ‘very’ and do not occur in the comparative
or superlative forms. Examples include annual,
wooden and dead…
Adjectives: Agreement
 In many languages, but not in English,
adjectives have to agree with the nouns they
describe. Such languages include Arabic,
Spanish and Russian. Consider the following
examples from Spanish,

The Colombian government

El Gobierno colombiano

The Colombian police

La policía colombiana
Adverbs
 Adverbs are words that modify verbs, adjectives,
other adverbs, sentences and, roughly speaking,
anything that cannot be described by adjectives.

 With verbs
 My friend writes quickly.
 With adjectives
 He is also extremely smart.
 With adverbs
 But he talks really slowly.
 With sentences
 Unfortunately, that makes people think he is stupid!
Prepositions
 Prepositions are words that express time,
location, manner, direction, source…
 Prepositions typically occur with nouns phrases,
but can also have other complements.
 Prepositions precede nouns and are therefore
called prepositions. This is the case in English,
Malay, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, Hausa…

 At school
 Di sekolah
continued: Prepositions
 In some other languages, however, nouns
come first, followed by postpositions.
Examples include Turkish, Japanese and
Hindi/Urdu.
 English: with Yusuf Turkish: Yusuf ile

 The cover term both prepositions and

postpositions is ADPOSITION.
Thank you 