way to characterize various parts of speech. It also isn’t terribly scientific or accurate. The first thing to notice about definitions like this is that they are based on semantic criteria. It doesn’t take much effort to find counterexamples to these semantic definitions. Consider the following:
5) The destruction of the city bothered the Mongols.
The meaning of destruction is not a “person, place, or thing”. It is an action. By semantic criteria, this word should be a verb. But in fact, native speakers unanimously identify it as a noun. Similar cases are seen in (6):
6)
1 Sincerity is an important quality.
2 the assassination of the president
3 Tucson is a great place to live.
Sincerity is an attribute, a property normally associated with adjectives. Yet in (6a), sincerity is a noun. Similarly in (6b) assassination, an action, is functioning as a noun. (6c) is more subtle. The semantic property of identifying a location is usually attributed to a preposition; in (6c) however, the noun Tucson refers to a location, but isn’t itself a preposition. It thus seems difficult (if not impossible) to rigorously define the parts of speech based solely on semantic criteria. This is made even clearer when we see that a word can change its part of speech depending upon where it appears in a sentence:
7)
| a) | Gabrielle’s mother is an axe-murderer. | (N) |
| b) | Anteaters mother attractive offspring. | (V) |
| c) | Wendy’s mother country is Iceland. | (Adj) |
The situation gets even muddier when we consider languages other than English. Consider the following data from Warlpiri:
8) Wita-ngku ka maliki wajilipinyi.
small-SUBJ AUX dog chase.PRES
“The small (one) is chasing the dog.”
In this sentence, we have a thing we’d normally call an adjective (the word wita “small”) functioning like a noun (e.g., taking subject marking). Is this a noun or an adjective?
It’s worth noting that some parts of speech don’t lend themselves to semantic definitions at all. Consider the sentence in (9). What is the meaning of the word that?
9) Mikaela said that parts of speech intrigued her.
If parts of speech are based on the meaning of the word, how can we assign a part of speech to a word for which the meaning isn’t clear?2
Perhaps the most striking evidence that we can’t use semantic definitions for parts of speech comes from the fact that you can know the part of speech of a word without even knowing what it means:
10) The yinkish dripner blorked quastofically into the nindin with the pidibs.
Every native speaker of English will tell you that yinkish is an adjective, dripner a noun, blorked a verb, quastofically an adverb, and nindin and pidibs both nouns, but they’d be very hard pressed to tell you what these words actually mean. How then can you know the part of speech of a word without knowing its meaning? The answer is simple: The various parts of speech are not semantically defined. Instead they depend on where the words appear in the sentence and what kinds of affixes they take. Nouns are things that appear in “noun positions” and take “noun suffixes” (endings). The same is true for verbs, adjectives, etc. Here are the criteria that we used to determine the parts of speech in sentence (10):
| 11) a) | yinkish | between the and a noun |
| takes -ish adjective ending | ||
| b) | dripner | after an adjective (and the) |
| takes -er noun ending | ||
| subject of the sentence | ||
| c) | blorked | after subject noun |
| takes -ed verb ending | ||
| d) | quastofically | after a verb |
| takes -ly adverb ending | ||
| e) | nindin | after the and after a preposition |
| f) | pidibs | after the and after a preposition |
| takes -s noun plural ending |
The part of speech of a word is determined by its place in the sentence and by its morphology, not by its meaning. In the next section, there is a list of rules and distributional criteria that you can use to determine the part of speech of a word.
1.2 Distributional Criteria
The criteria we use for determining part of speech then aren’t based on the meanings of the word, but on its distribution. We will use two kinds of distributional tests for determining part of speech: morphological distribution and syntactic distribution.
First we look at morphological distribution; this refers to the kinds of affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and other morphology that appear on a word. Let’s consider two different types of affixes. First, we have affixes that make words out of other words. We call these affixes derivational morphemes. These suffixes usually result in a different part of speech from the word they attach to. For example, if we take the word distribute we can add the derivational suffix -(t)ion and we get the noun distribution. The -(t)ion affix thus creates nouns. Any word ending in -(t)ion is a noun. This is an example of a morphological distribution. A similar example is found with the affix -al, which creates adjectives. If we take distribution, and add -al to it, we get the adjective distributional. The -al ending is a test for being an adjective. Derivational affixes make a word a particular category; by contrast inflectional morphemes don’t make a word into a particular category, but instead only attach to certain categories. Take for example the superlative suffix -est. This affix only attaches to words that are already adjectives: big, biggest (cf. dog, *doggest). Because they are sensitive to what category they attach to, inflectional suffixes can also serve as a test for determining part of speech category.
The other kind of test we use for determining part of speech uses syntactic distribution. Syntactic distribution refers to what other words appear near the word. For example, nouns typically appear after determiners (articles) such as the, although they need not do so to be nouns. We can thus take appearance after the to be a test for noun- hood.
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