Word Classes in English

Gibu Sabu M.

Introduction: Language is the means by which information is encoded and decoded. The tool
called language is highly creative and can present a multitude of semantic nuances. A better
understanding of the structure of English and many of its nuances help the learner to be master of it
rather than be limited by the language.
Word classes in English
Words are the smallest building blocks in the sentence. In this paper we are trying to analyse the
different word classes in English according to the numerous studies in the field of linguistics. The
traditional definition for word classes such as nouns and verbs give only a part of what it denotes.
So an elaborate sketch is given below that is an amalgamation of different approaches like the
semantic (meaning), morphological (the inflections), the syntactic (structure/ distribution) and also
draws from the traditional approach. As English is morphologically very poor, I will focus more on
a distributional definition for words. A distributional definition explains the word class in terms of
its syntactic behaviour. A word belongs to a particular class of words because of its relation with
other words in a sentence.
Constituents
Sentence is a string of words that is arranged according to certain rules. A word or group of words
that semantically and syntactically act as a unit is called constituents.
Constituent analysis
1 movement
constituents can be moved around in the sentence without changing
2 substitution
3 elipses
4 conjunction
Head and Modifier
these are terms that are used in the phrase structure. Head gives the phrase its basic characteristics
(grammatical features). The kind of modifiers attached and its semantic relations are dependent on
the head.
Lexical words/ open class/ content words
Word classes that expands with the progress in time are called open class words. The following are
the different open class words in English.
1 Verbs: Verbs can be seen as lexical items that inherently describe different situation types.
Semantically (according to the meaning that it conveys) it refers to an action, state or
possession. Accordingly a verb is divided into two. The difference between event and situation
can be made with the help of the ‘when’ test by Vlach. The situation denoted by the main clause
can be construed as overlapping an event denoted by a temporal clause introduced by ‘when it is
a state’. This can be divided into different sub parts:
Verbs
ru
States/ Stative Dynamic
ru
Processes Events
ru
Inchoatives resultatives
Processes can again be subdivided into durative versus punctual and telic versus atelic.
1.1 Stative: They are inherently unchanging conditions (be, feel, have, like) or static
positions (be at home, stay, live). State predication includes their reference times, this also
 accounts for the fact the situations denoted by the stative predications are always temporally
extensible. (E.g. the driver was Latvian = the driver still can be/ is.) It is at the same time
unchanging during this time period.
1.2 Dynamic: they are eventualities that persist through time and involve change. These
verbs are either natural (grow, rust, float, leak) or agent controlled (walk, read, play). Every
event whether iterated or not has both an anterior state (the state that holds before the state
occurs) and posterior state (the state that holds after the event has occurred)1
1.2.1 telic:
1.2.1.1 achievements
1.2.1.2 accomplishments
1.2.2 atelic:
Tense: The most important category that a verb carries is the tense. It is described as the
eventuality that is described by the verb has to be placed in Tense. A grammatical notion that
refer to the way language encodes the semantic notion of time is called tense. A verb that
carries tense is called finite verb and those verbs that carry no tense forms are called non-
finite. Tense is an inflectional category whose basic role is to indicate the time of an event,
etc in relation to the moment of speaking in the main clause and to the event time of the
main clause in a subordinate clause. It is divided notionally into present (at the moment of
speaking), past (earlier than the moment of speaking) and future (later than the moment of
speaking). Semantically a tensed sentence introduces the possibility that what is true when
uttered at one time may be false when uttered at other times. A car may be red at one time
and then be painted blue. So the sentence ‘The car is red’ is not true now. The tense
interpretation can be pictured as below.
Time Line

Before/Past Speaking Time/Present After/Future

– I sleep.
– I slept.
– I will sleep.
Modal auxiliary – Mood is a morphosyntactic category. In a sentence 'He may enter the
room' we have two different readings. The first reading 'Perhaps he will enter the room' that
expresses the speaker's belief concerning the state of affairs 'He enters the room’. In the
second reading 'He is permitted to enter the room' the permission of performing the act is
expressed. “The former is referred to as 'epistemic modality,' the latter as 'deontic modality.'
Epistemic modality is concerned with matters of knowledge and belief. Deontic modality, on
the other hand, is concerned with the necessity or possibility of acts performed by morally
responsible agents”. (Kiefer, 1999) Alethic modality a third type of modality describes the
necessary or contingent and possible truth of propositions, e.g., in a sentence He must be on
this train means 'It is not possible that he is not on this train.' Structurally as well the
epistemic and alethic modals differ. The epistemic modals occupy a position distinct from,
and higher than, alethic modals that is intervened by the T(future) T(past) and negative
heads. will, can, must, may, shall are some of the modal auxiliary verbs in English. These
verbs add the meaning of ability, permission, possibility, obligation, necessity, intention or
prediction. The English modal verbs are inflected for only past tense (not for future).
Aspectual auxiliary – The term 'aspect' refers to the grammatical categories that describe
the structure of a situation or the speaker's perspective on it. In other words it is a general
term that verbal categories take in order to distinguishe the status of events, etc in relation to
specific time periods as opposed to their simple location in time. Be and have the two most
common aspects that English verbs encode continuous and perfective aspect. The perfective

1 Laura Michaelis p. 11 & 14

 aspect perceives the event as one complete whole without any concern as to how the event
was started, ended or even how the event proceeded (Comrie, 1976,18). Imperfective on the
other hand views the situation from within that is the internal temporal structure. The two
most common imperfective aspect are progressive and habitual.
Passive Auxiliary – be. The term voice refers to an alternation of the verb form that
changes the grammatical function of subjects and objects.
Dummy Auxiliary – do. Dummy auxiliary is used when we need to negate a sentence (do-
support) or make an yes/no question from a sentence (subject – auxiliary inversion) that
does not have an auxiliary verb. It is also used as an emphatic particle in English.
syntactically (according to the number of NPs that is allowed) it is divided into three. It is
also called the valency (argument structure) of the verb.
1 intransitive
2 transitive
3 ditransitive
A verb carries the PNG, TAM and Voice
2 Nouns: A notional definition explains nouns as words that refer to name, place, thing or animal.
But this does not explain why or how words that denote abstract ideas (sincerity, success),
emotional states (love, happiness), bodily sensation (pain, dizzy), etc forms part of the noun
class. Another criteria can be the morphological endings. Words that end in -ance, -hood, -tion, -
ship, etc and plural ending -s, or genitive ending 's forms part of the noun class. But there are
words that does not have these endings that are part of the noun class and words that take
irregular plural ending (child – children, sheep – sheep).
A distributional definition of nouns says that a word belongs to the class of nouns if it can be
preceded by a determiner and/or adjective. Nouns can be divided into
2.1 common nouns
2.1.1 mass nouns - nouns that cannot be counted (milk, flour, etc). Mostly they describe
things that are amorphous and sometimes abstract.
2.1.2 count nouns – nouns that can be counted (book, cat, fork, etc ) or individuated
2.2 Proper nouns – it is also called Referring Expressions in that they uniquely refer to
one individual in the real world. Jack, London, etc
2.3 Numerals
2.3.1 Cardinal – one, two, three, etc
2.3.2 Ordinal – first, second, third, etc
2.4 Pronouns: the word pronoun consists of two words pro and noun. The word pro in
Latin means for and so the compound word means for a noun or instead of a noun. Thus
pronouns derive their referential content from the noun (or NP) that precedes it in the main
clause. The problem with pronouns are illustrated in the narration that follows. “An old
blacksmith realized he was getting on in years and would quit work soon, so he took on an
apprentice. The old fellow was crabby and exacting. “Don’t ask me a lot of questions,” he
told the boy. “Just do whatever I tell you to do.” One day the old blacksmith took an iron out
of the forge and laid it on the anvil. “Get the hammer over there,” he said. “When I nod my
head, hit it good and hard.” The boy did as he was told . . . and now the town is looking for a
new blacksmith.”2 And again for a question “How can you drop an eggi onto a concrete
floorj without breaking iti,j?” the answer can be “It is very difficult to break a concrete
floor.”
2.4.1 personal – I, me, you, she, he. etc
2.4.2 possesive – my, mine, yours. etc
2.4.3 reflexive – myself, yourself, herself. etc
2.4.4 demonstrative – this, that those, these. Etc. It is a word whose basic role is to locate a
referent in relation to a speaker, an addressee, or some other person, etc. referred to. E.g.

2 English Words
 proximal this (physically and thence subjectively closer to the speaker) and distant that
(physically and subjectively remote from the speaker)
2.4.5 reciprocal – each other, one another. etc
2.4.6 relative – that, who, which. etc
2.4.7 interrogative – what, why, where. etc
2.4.8 indefinite – anybody, somebody. Etc
PNG, Case
Case: a case signals the relationship between the nouns and the verbs in a clause.(it is derived from
a latin word for fall casus). is the grammatical category by which the form of a noun phrase
varies for grammatical or semantic reasons. In other words it is a grammatical category used in
the analysis of word classes to identify the syntactic relationship between word classes in a
sentence through such constants as nominative accusative, etc.
The word case comes from the Latin word ‘casus’ (=falling or derivation). It is a variation in the
form (from its normal upright form) of a lexeme according to the syntax of the language. In a
language that express grammatical relationships by means of inflection this term refer to the
form taken by a word. Only transitive verbs and prepositions can assign case.
Morphological case: It is a situation where the distinct cases are overtly marked as distinct
morphemes on nouns, adjectives, determiners and pronouns.
Abstract cases: overt case markings are not present.
Nominative- mark the subject of the sentnece
Accusative - mark the object of a transitive verb
Dative – marks the indirect object
Genitive – marks the case of possession
Vocative – case fo address
Instrumental – marking the instrument with which something is done
1 Person: there are three person marker in English. First, second and third
1.1 first: the speaker of a sentence
1.2 second: the person addressed by the speaker.
1.3 third: other participants or people, things talked about by the speker
2 Number
3 Gender
3 Adjectives: Morphologically adjectives end with suffixes such as -full, -less, -ive, etc. but not
all adjectives have such endings. Adjectives are gradable (that is they can be preceded by words
such as very and extremely), and can take comparative and superlative endings.
Adjectives in its attributive position qualify the nouns that succeed in terms of the character, nature
or state of the noun.
3.1 appearance
3.1.1 size
3.1.2 shape
3.1.3 condition
3.2 age
3.3 material
Adjectives also has a predicative position when it appears after a linking verb or copula. some
adjectives in English has a valency like verbs for eg; dependent (on something), independent (of
something), angry (with somebody), free (from something),
4 Adverbs: word class that modify the verb, adjective and adverb. The main classes of adverbs
include manner, frequency
4.1 manner
4.2 method
4.3 degree
4.4 aspect
4.5 time
 4.6 speaker oriented

closed class/ function words/ grammatical or form words

Function words logically connects the content words together into one unit called sentence. Word
classes that remains static with the progress in time are called closed class words. The meaning of a
word also refer to the specific condition in which the word can be used truthfully and that is called
Truth condition. If we want to study the meaning of function words we need to understand the
term called entailment.
5 Preposition
6 Determiners - articles & quantifiers. these words specify more precisely the meaning of the
nouns that they precede. There are two types of determiners quantifying and deictic. the
determiners that refer to how much or how many of the noun are referred to are called
quantifiers. There’s a joke that illustrates the interaction of the quantifiers with each other: “Did
you know that someone is hit by a car every three minutes in the United States?” “Oh, that poor
person!”3
6.1 Definite determiner – the
6.2 demonstrative determiner – this, that, etc.
6.3 possessive determiner – my
7 Connectives: They stick two elements of the same type together. And, or, but are the three
connectives that is more common in English. If two sentences that is connected by and is true
then the resultatant single sentence will also be true. In case of or only one sentence needs to be
true in order for the connected sentence to be true.
8 Complementisers/ subordinating conjunction: they tell us about the truth condition of the
subordinate clause.

Exercises
Find out to which word class the words in the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll belong to and
why?
Jabberwocky
by: Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

3 English Words
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.