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:
“Part of the pain in leaving our children to go to work is that we miss them, wish we could be with them. We also hate to turn them over to someone who is not identical to us, who will do things, at best, differently—at worst, in ways we don’t believe are good for children. We are up against this whenever we share the care of our children with others—even grandparents or trusted and loved ones.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion (20th century)
“Awareness has changed so that every act for children, every piece of legislation recognizes that children are part of families and that it is within families that children grow and thrive—or don’t.”
—Bernice Weissbourd (20th century)
“What is this conversation, now secular,
A speech not mine yet speaking for me in
The heaving jelly of my tribal air?
It rises in the throat, it climbs the tongue,
It perches there for secret tutelage....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)