Minor Parts of Speech

Introduction to Minor Parts of Speech

• Minor word classes, also known as closed classes, include pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, negations, prepositions, intensifiers, and conjunctions.
• The number of minor word classes depends on the level of detail in the analysis, but clarity in distinguishing classes is crucial.
• Minor word classes have relatively few members, with infrequent additions, and some can be defined by listing all members.
• Native English speakers don't typically memorize these classes.
• Minor word classes are called "function" or "grammatical words" as they signal modifications, relations, and contextual information, contrasting with "content words" (major parts of speech) that carry the main semantic load.
• Minor word classes occur more frequently than major classes.
• The 50 most common words are function words, accounting for about 60% of spoken and 45% of written English.
• Minor class words integrate content words into the sentence structure and are referred to as structure words.
• With the exception of pronouns, these items generally lack inflectional or derivational marking and their properties emerge from combining with other elements.

Pronouns

• Pronouns are traditionally defined as words that replace nouns.
• Pronouns always replace entire noun phrases.
• Pronouns and their antecedents co-refer and share the same entity in the discourse.
• An antecedent is a noun phrase that determines the referent of a pronoun and usually precedes it.
• Sentences with pronouns can be ambiguous, due to multiple possible co-references.
• Pronouns are shorter and communicate less information than their antecedents.
• Pronouns should only be used when their referents are easily determined because they provide so little information.
• English pronouns must agree in person, number, and gender with their antecedents.
• A more general definition of a pronoun is "a minimal linguistic form which refers to speaker(s), addressee(s), and other(s), and provides such grammatical information as person, number, gender, case, and humanness."

Personal Pronouns

• Personal pronouns are categorized by person, number, case, and gender.
• Number distinguishes singular from plural.
• Person differentiates speakers (first person: I, we), addressees (second person: you), and others (third person: she, he, it, they).
• German, Spanish, and French have different forms for second-person singular and plural.
• English pronouns have three cases: nominative, objective and genitive.
• English marks gender in the third person singular pronouns: masculine (he), feminine (she), and neuter (it).
• The natural gender system determines gender based on the referent's characteristics, while other languages use grammatical gender assigned by linguistic criteria, like word endings.

Demonstrative Pronouns

• Demonstrative pronouns point out entities and include this, that, these, and those.
• Speakers may use pointing gestures with these pronouns, called deictics.

Reflexive and Intensive Pronouns

• Reflexive and intensive pronouns share the same forms ending in -self (singular) or -selves (plural), which consists of a personal pronoun in the genitive case plus said suffix.
• Reflexive pronouns are objects of verbs or prepositions.
• Intensive pronouns are used as modifiers, which can occur within a noun phrase or be moved away from it.

Indefinite Pronouns

• Indefinite pronouns do not refer to specific persons, places, things, or ideas and there are multiple kinds.
• They have limited functions and often act as heads or modifiers.

Wh-Words

• Wh-words, such as who and what, are interrogative or relative pronouns.
• Wh-pronouns introduce information questions, relative clauses, and noun clauses.
• English uses who for humans, what for non-humans, and which for both.

Articles

• Articles are minor word classes associated with nouns and are modifiers in noun phrases.
• English has indefinite articles a/an and the definite article the.
• A is used before consonant sounds, an before vowel sounds.
• In English, a/an and the are articles.
• Indefinite articles signal the entry of a new entity; definite articles, demonstratives, personal pronouns, and proper nouns all signal definiteness.
• Definiteness indicates that the speaker/writer assumes the hearer/reader can readily identify the referent.
• Indefinite NPs denote a category member, while definite NPs refer to entities or an entire class.

Auxiliary Verbs

• Auxiliary verbs always accompany a main verb, and include be, have, and modal verbs.
• Following order: modal, have, progressive be, and passive be
• Be indicates progressive aspect (verb-ing form).
• Be is also used with a past participle verb form to create passive voice.
• The first auxiliary verb denotes tense, is moved to the subject's left to form questions, and is generally followed by 'not' in negated sentences.

Modal Verbs

• Modal verbs (e.g., can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, must) indicate necessity, possibility, ability, or intention.

Negation

• Negation is achieved by inserting not, typically after the first auxiliary verb, or by adding the dummy auxiliary do.

Prepositions

• Prepositions (P) combine with noun phrases to form prepositional phrases (PPs) and express semantic relations in a sentence.
• Prepositions function as the head in a PP and signal the role of the PP in its clause.
• PPs serve various roles, including modifying nouns (e.g., "the trunk of the car") and complementing verbs (e.g., "give it to her").
• Prepositions can be stranded when a noun phrase is moved away in wh-clauses.
• Multi-word prepositions follow patterns of preposition+noun+preposition or miscellaneous word + preposition.

Intensifiers

• Intensifiers (e.g., more, most, very, quite, rather) modify adjectives and adverbs and indicate the extent to which a meaning holds.
• Intensifiers do not share adverb formal or functional characteristics.

Conjunctions

• Conjunctions join two or more grammatical elements called conjuncts.
• Coordinating conjunctions join elements of equal status, while subordinating conjunctions connect structures with unequal grammatical status.
• Single-word coordinating conjunctions include and, but, or, while multi-word ones (correlative conjunctions) include both...and and either...or.
• Coordinators may connect words, phrases, clauses, or sentences of the same type.

Subordinating Conjunctions

• Subordinating conjunctions have a restricted range; they can connect clauses only
• The three important types of subordinate clause are adverbial, nominal, and relative.
• Adverbial clauses are function as modifiers of verbs or sentences.
• Nominal clauses function just like noun phrases typically function—i.e., as subjects, objects, and complements. Nominal clauses are introduced by a set of subordinating conjunctions that includes most of the wh-words listed in Table 6 along with the word that.
• Relative clauses function as modifiers of the nouns they follow. Typically, they are introduced by a wh-word called relative pronouns, or by that.

Other Minor Parts of Speech

• Postpositions follow noun phrases in languages like Japanese.
• Interjections (e.g., shucks, darn) express emotions and are usually separated by commas and it is grammatically not connected to anything else in the sentence.
• New parts of speech may emerge to be distinguished from normal members of the existing classes.