Aristotle's Classification of Words

Parts of Speech

• Verbs describe specific actions.
• Adverbs describe how frequently something happens.
• Prepositions tell you the relationships between other words in a sentence.
• Adjectives are used to describe one specific noun.
• Interrogative pronouns, such as who and what, are used to ask questions.
• Which can be used as both an interrogative pronoun and an interrogative adjective.
• Adjectives describe nouns.
• Personal pronouns, such as he and she, are used to refer to people.

Nouns

• Nouns are categorized into two main types: common and proper nouns.

Pronouns

• Conjunctions are used to link one phrase or clause to another.
• Pronouns are used to substitute for specific nouns.

Purpose of Parts of Speech

• The purpose of the 8 parts of speech is to define and categorize words based on their grammatical properties and functions.

History of Parts of Speech

• Aristotle's classification scheme included only nouns, verbs, and conjunctions.
• The Greek philosopher Dionysius Thrax added 'interjection' to Aristotle's classification scheme.
• The part of speech that is often conflated with other parts of speech, such as nouns and adverbs, is adjectives.

Word Conversion

• The process called when a word comes to be used as a different part of speech is conversion.

Word Classes

• Open word classes, such as nouns and verbs, are categories that can accept new words.
• Personal pronouns are a type of pronoun that refers to a specific person or thing and changes its form to indicate person, number, gender, and case.
• Substitutive pronouns can replace a noun or another pronoun, making sentences less cumbersome and repetitive.
• Deictic pronouns are used to point to and identify a noun or a pronoun, and can also be used as a relative pronoun.

Grammar and Classification

• Polysemy refers to words that can have more than one job or be more than one part of speech.
• Functional categories are categories of words based on shared grammatical properties in a clause.
• The two larger classes of words in the Sanskrit grammarian Yāska's classification are substantives and adjuncts.
• Syntactic categories classify groups of words that form units having specific grammatical functions.
• Phrases, such as noun phrases, verb phrases, and so on, are collectively called phrase classes.
• Verbs are often classified according to their valency, which is the process of specifying verbs according to the number and type of objects or other complements they take.
• Closed word classes, such as prepositions and conjunctions, are categories that rarely accept the addition of new items.