In grammar, a part of speech (also a word class, a lexical class, or a lexical category) is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items), which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others. There are open word classes, which constantly acquire new members, and closed word classes, which acquire new members infrequently if at all.
Almost all languages have the lexical categories noun and verb, but beyond these there are significant variations in different languages. For example, Japanese has as many as three classes of adjectives where English has one; Chinese, Korean and Japanese have nominal classifiers whereas European languages do not; many languages do not have a distinction between adjectives and adverbs, adjectives and verbs (see stative verbs) or adjectives and nouns, etc. This variation in the number of categories and their identifying properties entails that analysis be done for each individual language. Nevertheless the labels for each category are assigned on the basis of universal criteria.
Read more about Part Of Speech: History, Controversies, English, Functional Classification
Famous quotes containing the words part of, part and/or speech:
“What we’re saying today is that you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.”
—Eldridge Cleaver (b. 1935)
“Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)