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21
of the undertaken classification testifies to the objective nature of this kind of analysis.
For instance, prepositions and conjunctions can be combined into one united series of "connectives", since
the function of both is just to connect notional components of the sentence. In this case, on the second stage of
classification, the enlarged word-class of connectives will be subdivided into two main subclasses, namely,
prepositional connectives and conjunctional connectives. Likewise, the articles can be included as a subset into
the more general set of particles-specifiers. As is known, nouns and adjectives, as well as numerals, are treated
in due contexts of description under one common class-term "names": originally, in the Ancient Greek
grammatical teaching they were not differentiated because they had the same forms of morphological change
(declension). On the other hand, in various descriptions of English grammar such narrow lexemic sets as the
two words yes and no, the pronominal determiners of nouns, even the one anticipating pronoun it are given a
separate class-item status - though in no way challenging or distorting the functional character of the treated
units.
It should be remembered that modern principles of part of speech identification have been formulated as a
result of painstaking research conducted on the vast materials of numerous languages. The three celebrated
names are especially notable for the elaboration of these criteria, namely, V.V. Vinogradov in connection with
his study of Russian grammar, A.I. Smirnitsky and BA. Ilyish in connection with their study of English
grammar.
§ 5. Alongside the three-criteria principle of dividing the words into grammatical (lexico-grammatical)
classes modern linguistics has developed another, narrower principle of word-class identification based on
syntactic featuring of words only.
The fact is that the three-criteria principle faces a special difficulty in determining the part of speech status
of such lexemes as have morphological characteristics of notional words, but are essentially distinguished from
notional words by their playing the role of grammatical mediators in phrases and sentences. Here belong, for in-
stance, modal verbs together with their equivalents - suppletive fillers, auxiliary verbs, aspective verbs,
intensifying adverbs, determiner pronouns. This difficulty, consisting in the intersection of heterogeneous
properties in the established word-classes, can evidently be overcome by recognizing only one criterion of the
three as decisive.
Worthy of note is that in the original Ancient Greek grammatical teaching which put forward the first
outline of the part of speech theory, the division of words into grammatical classes was also based on one
determining criterion only, namely, on the formal-morphological featuring. It means that any given word under
analysis was turned into a classified lexeme on the principle of its relation to grammatical change. In conditions
of the primary acquisition of linguistic knowledge, and in connection with the study of a highly inflexional
language this characteristic proved quite efficient.
Still, at the present stage of the development of linguistic science, syntactic characterization of words that
has been made possible after the exposition of their fundamental morphological properties, is far more
important and universal from the point of view of the general classificational requirements.
This characterization is more important, because it shows the distribution of words between different sets in
accord with their functional specialization. The role of morphology by this presentation is not underrated, rather
it is further clarified from the point of view of exposing connections between the categorial composition of the
word and its sentence-forming relevance.
This characterization is more universal, because it is not specially destined for the inflexional aspect of
language and hence is equally applicable to languages of various morphological types.
On the material of Russian, the principles of syntactic approach to the classification of word stock were
outlined in the works of A.M. Peshkovsky. The principles of syntactic (syntactico-distributional) classification
of English words were worked out by L. Bloomfield and his followers Z. Harris and especially Ch. Fries.
§ 6. The syntactico-distributional classification of words is based on the study of their combinability by
means of substitution testing. The testing results in developing the standard model of four main "positions" of
notional words in the English sentence: those of the noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A), adverb (D). Pronouns are
included into the corresponding positional classes as their substitutes. Words standing outside the "positions" in
the sentence are treated as function words of various syntactic values.
Here is how Ch. Fries presents his scheme of English word-classes [Fries].
For his materials he chooses tape-recorded spontaneous conversations comprising about 250,000 word
entries (50 hours of talk). The words isolated from this corpus are tested on the three typical sentences (that are
isolated from the records, too), and used as substitution test-frames: