| 词组 | parts of speech |
| 释义 | parts of speech By the time most of us have finished elementary school and high school, we have the notion that the parts of speech are immutable components of the language. But the truth is that the parts of speech are categories erected by grammarians for their convenient use in analyzing a language. The set used in teaching English grammar in schools—Roberts 1954 lists noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection—is actually the culmination of a long tradition going back at least to Dionysius Thrax (1st century B.C.), an Alexandrian grammarian. His grammar—of Greek—had eight parts of speech: noun, pronoun, verb, participle, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and article. The Latin grammarian Pris-cian (around 500 A.D.) took over Dionysius Thrax's categories, but he replaced the article—there is none in Latin—with the interjection. Ben Jonson (before 1640) took Priscian's list right over for English and added the article as a ninth part of speech. Joseph Priestley (1761) seems to have been the first to come up with the modern list (the same as that of Roberts 1954); he ignored the article and substituted the adjective for the participle. Bishop Lowth 1762 used Priestley's list with Jonson's article added, and so did Lindley Murray 1795. The Dionysius Thrax-Priscian-Jonson-Priestley connection represents what we may call the mainstream of part-of-speech theory. But it is instructive to remember that it took many years before the magic number of eight was reached. Greek grammatical theory as known from Plato had but two categories, corresponding approximately to subject and predicate or noun phrase and verb phrase. Aristotle added a third category for such odds and ends as the conjunction, article, and pronoun. A Roman grammarian named Varro, who was roughly contemporary with Dionysius Thrax, settled on a system of four categories for Latin: nouns—words with case inflections; verbs—words with tense forms; participles—words with both case inflections and tense forms; and the rest—conjunctions, adverbs—words with neither case inflections nor tense forms. Varro's analysis shows that grammarians then used inflectional endings as a major factor in deciding what categories were needed. The dependence on endings also explains the absence of the adjective from most of these early classifications. Latin adjectives had the same endings as nouns and were thus included in the noun category. This, in turn, explains the terms noun substantive and noun adjective that you may find in some older grammars and dictionaries. Varro apparently was not imitated by later grammarians, but four-part systems of grammatical classification do appear from time to time. McKnight 1928 mentions a number of English thinkers of the late 17th century who rejected Latin as the basis for English grammar and who thought to develop a purely English grammar. One of these, a schoolmaster named A. Lane, published a book in 1700 which contained a four-part classification: substantive, adjective, verb, and particle (the last a handy category for everything else). The same categories were used by an 18th-century grammarian named Brightland, although he used different labels: names, qualities, affirmations, and (of course) particles. These grammarians seem not to have been very influential; the Latinists have held sway. A. Lane, incidentally, took credit for introducing the logical terms subject, object, and predicate into English grammar. The parts of speech, then, are categories that grammarians over a considerable period of time have developed to help them in their analysis and description of a language. Since the 18th century, however, they have been commonly viewed as something rather more definite and fixed. If a more enlightened view of the subject had obtained all along, this book would be considerably thinner than it is. Many problems of usage result from grammarians trying to cram unruly English words into absolute Latin categories. The famous eight parts of speech are simply holdovers from Latin used for convenience—few grammarians want to be faced with the task of devising an adequate set of descriptors for English. And for English, the parts of speech are not categories of words, but of functions. Many of our English words—out, fan, hit, back, like, for instance—can function as more than one part of speech. In Latin a word functions as only one part of speech (at least when you lump prepositions and conjunctions together as particles). If you remember that, in English, words function as parts of speech but are not themselves parts of speech, you will not be misled by people who insist that like is not a conjunction or that nouns cannot be used as verbs. |
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