Word class
grammar, a part of speech or word class is defined as the role that a word (or sometimes a phrase) plays in a sentence. In transformational-generative grammar, parts of speech are known as lexical categories. There are open word classes, which constantly acquire new members, and closed word classes, which acquire new members infrequently if at all.
In traditional English grammar, which is patterned after Latin grammar, and is still taught in schools and used in dictionaries, there are eight parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. Modern grammarians however believe that this list is somewhat simplified and artificial. For example, adverb is to some extent a "catch all" class that includes words with many different functions.
Common ways of delimiting words by function include:
Some of these classes are limited to particular language families, e.g. coverbs seem to be restricted to Australian languages.
English
English is an analytic language and frequently does not mark words as belonging to one part of speech or another. Words like neigh, break, outlaw, laser, microwave and telephone might all be either verb forms or nouns. Although -ly is an adverb marker, not all adverbs end in -ly and not all words ending in -ly are adverbs. For instance, tomorrow, slow, fast, crosswise can all be adverbs, while leisurely, friendly, ugly are all adjectives.
In certain circumstances, even words with primarily grammatical functions can be used as verbs or nouns, as in "We must look to the hows and not just the whys" or "Miranda was to-ing and fro-ing and not paying attention".
Japanese
In Japanese language, aside from some exceptions, the part of speech is defined with called case marker such as な na, に ni. For example, take a noun, 親切 (Shinsetsu kindness). This word can have either an adjective or adverb form:
- 親切な (Shinsetsu-na kind)
- 親切に (Shinsetsu-ni kindly)
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