Word class

Word class

1. Every language has

   • minor word classes
   • major word classes
   • Noun
     • at least at the level of discourse
   • Verb
   • adjectives, and adverbs
   • Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are the four major word classes.
   • several “smaller,” or “minor,”
     • Such as pronouns, conjunctions, and particles.

2. Prototypical nouns

   • Words which refer to participants in message-world events
     • Tend to not change drastically over time.

3. Nouns

   • may be divided into semantically motivated subclasses.
     • Typical semantic distinctions
       • count vs. mass
       • proper vs. common
       • possessable vs. non-possessable
       • alienably possessed vs. inalienably
       • animacy
       • gender

4. Prototypical verbs

   • words which refer to actions, or events.
     • Verbs are defined grammatically by their grammatical
       • structural
         • properties
       • distributional

5. Semantic roles

   • the roles that participants play in message-world .
     • events, quite apart from any linguistic expression of those events.
       • Verbs often fall into various “subclasses”
         • based on the semantic roles of the participants in the scenes they express

6. Adjectives

   • words that typically express “property concepts”
     • are defined grammatically by their grammatical properties.
   • Not all languages have a grammatically defined class of adjectives.

7. Adverbs

   • semantically rich content words
     • do not fall into any of the previous three major word classes.

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