The parts of speech are classes of words, all' the members of these classes having certain characteristics in common which distinguish them from the members of other problem of word classification into parts of speech still remains one of the most controversial problems in modern linguistics. The artitude of grammarians with regard to parts of speech and the basis of their classification varied a good deal at different times. Only in English grammarians have been vacillating between 3 and. 13 parts of speech. There are four approaches to the problem:
Classical (logical-inflectional)
Functional
Distributional
Complex,
The classical of speech theory is.based on Latin grammar. According, to the Latin classification of the parts of speech all words were divided dichotomically into declinable and indeclinable parts of speech. declinable words, included nouns, pronouns, verbs and participles, indeclinable words - adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. Based on the the principle of declinability/indeclmability is not relevant for analytical languages. Functional - To/nominative parts of speech belonged noun-words (noun, noun-pronoun, noun-numeral, infinitive, gerund), adjective-words (adjective, adjective-pronoun, adjective-numeral, participles), verb (finite verb, verbals - gerund, infinitive, participles), while adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection belonged to the group of articles. A Distributional approach to the parts to the parts of speech classification can be illustrated bythe classification introduced by Charles Fries. He wanted to avoid the traditional terminology and establish a classification of words based on the ability of words to combine with other words of different types. At the same time, the lexical meaning of words was not taken into account.
9. General characteristics of nouns as a part of speech (semantic, morphological, syntactical).
A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) which can co-occur with (in) definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase.
The word "noun" derives from the Latin nomen meaning "name", and a traditional definition of nouns is that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality or idea. They serve as the subject or object of a verb, and the object of a preposition. That definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being quite uninformative. For example, it appears that verbs like kill or die refer to events, and so they fall under the definition. Similarly, adjectives like yellow or difficult might be thought to refer to qualities, and adverbs like outside or upstairs seem to refer to places. But verbs, adjectives and adverbs are not nouns, so the definition is not particularly helpful in distinguishing nouns from other parts of speech.
Case, number, and gender
In sentences, noun phrases may function in a variety of different ways, the most obvious being as subjects or objects. For example, in the sentence "John wrote me a letter", "John" is the subject, and "me" and "letter" are objects (of which "letter" is a noun and "me" a pronoun). These different roles are known as noun cases. Variant forms of the same noun—such as "he" (subject) and "him" (object)—are called declensions.
The number of a noun indicates how many objects the noun refers to. In the simplest case, number distinguishes between singular ("man") and plural ("men"). Some languages, like Arabic (and also Saami and Aleut ) also distinguish dual from plural.
Many languages (though not English) have a concept of noun gender, also known as noun class, whereby every noun is designated as, for example, masculine or feminine.
