Teacher Discussion Forums

Is it true that every word must be one of the seven parts of speech? (noun, verb, adjective, etc.)?

Oh yes, if I have the wrong group for asking a question like this, please direct me to the correct group.

Seven here (according to the intro!)

http://www2.wmin.ac.uk/eic/learning-ski ... parts.html

but usually eight.

http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/wri ... artsp.html

No, there's nine.

http://grammar.about.com/od/partsofspee ... speech.htm

Do I hear 10? Someone here argues for that.

http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=navigati ... ats/tradit

As woodcutter has said there is no agreement on the terminology. I don't know how many the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language lists but I would think around twenty.

The traditonal terminology is fine for nouns, adjectives, interjections, verbs (to some extent), and to some extent for prepostions. It is the mess around conjunctions and adverbs where it becomes useless.

So to classify that we have determiners, intensifiers, conjuncts, disjuncts and a whole lot more I can't remember unless I'm looking at a book.

Thank you for your replies. I come from the old school of grammar (specifically Warriner's grammar textbooks, which used to dominate), and in my day, it was a mantra to say that all words had to be one of the seven parts of speech. I guess that things have changed since then. Stephen, when you talk about conjunctions/adverbs, I guess a good example of this hazy distinction would be conjuntive adverbs, which, as I recall are those like "however", "nevertheless" and so forth. Discourse markers must be another example where the seven parts of speech don't apply, or perhaps discourse markers are adverbs?

Descriptivists usually turn purple at the mention of particular traditional grammar textbooks.

However, it appears the answer is to be descriptive, prescriptive, but most of all fashionable.

http://www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoda ... each.phtml

That's education-think for you.

Actually the 7/8/9 thing isn't that big a deal, since it is usually only a question of mentioning articles and interjections. Nearly everyone has articles in the list and thus 8, so why not at least permit that?

The link you quoted says, "English teachers of later generations, on the other hand, joined the profession embracing ideas of descriptive (also called transformational) grammar. These teachers believed that grammar instruction should be matched to the purpose of the user. Teachers found descriptive grammar theories to be more flexible, reflecting actual usage and self-expression over "correct" structures."

Hmm. I thought the "descriptive" idea was to teach English as it exists, and not necessarily as it "should" be. (Depending on a pile of different things, including register, dialect, etc.) However, I never equated that with transformational grammar. Maybe it's because I studied Linguistics when transformation grammar was the "new" thing. Heh Oh well, curious about what you think about it.

Yes, I just posted the link so you could laugh at the wrongheaded/meaningless verbiage, which I think is all too common in educational writing.

(and which by the way is fairly likely to occur in the psychological textbooks Fluff is asking about in another thread).

Oh dear, I seem to be back in F grade mode again.