The problem of Parts of speech

1.5 The problem of Parts of speech

A word is known as the smallest naming unit of the language. According to L. Bloomfield, word is a minimum free form. Close observation and comparison of words clearly shows that a great number of words have a composite nature and are made up of smaller units, each possessing sound-form and meaning. In other words, the term word denotes the basic unit of a given language resulting from the association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a grammatical employment is a word is therefore simultaneously a semantic, grammatical and phonological unit.

The words of every language fall into classes which are called parts of speech. The problem of parts of speech is one of the controversial problems of modern linguistics. The theoretical side of this problem is the subject matter of the theoretical grammar. therefore we should base our comparison of system of parts of speech on the generally recognized (acknowledged) opinions of grammarians.

In order to make easier to learn the language the grammarians usually divide the word-stock of the language into some subclasses called in linguists the parts of speech.

The main principles of classifying words into parts of speech are: their meaning, form and function, that is to say the words of any language differ from each other in meaning in form and in function. different parts of speech have different lexical meanings.

e.g. verbs denote process or state; nouns express the names of objects, adjectives their properties…

Some parts of speech have different grammatical categories. Verbs have the category of mood, tense, aspect, voice, person, number etc., noun – case, number, adjective – comparison, etc. The parts of speech also differ from each other in their syntactic function; e.g. verbs are used in the sentence structure as predicates, nouns-as subjects, adjectives-as attributes etc.

All words of the comparing languages may be divided into three main groups:

1. Notional words

2. Structural words

3. Independent elements

Notional words have distinct lexical meanings and perform independent syntactic functions in the sentence structure, they serve as primary or secondary parts of the sentence. To this group belong the following parts of speech: Noun, verb, adjective, pronouns, numerals, statives and adverbs. It should be kept in mind that statives in Uzbek are otter interchanged with adjectives and not treated as an independent part of speech.

Structural words differ from the notional words semantically their lexical meaning is of a more general character than that of the notional words. Moreover they sometimes altogether avid it that they are independent syntactic function in the sentence structure but serve either to express various relations between the words in a sentence (e.g. trees in the garden, Tom and Joe, etc.) or to specify the meaning of the words (e.g. there is a book on the table, the book on the table is mine, etc.)

The following parts of speech are to be treated as structural words: articles, particles (only, solely, exclusively mainly) prepositions and conjunctions. Articles and prepositions are individual character of English differentiating it from Uzbek as the functions of these parts of speech in Uzbek are performed by other elements of the language.

Independent elements are words which are characterized by their peculiar meanings of various kind. They usually have no grammatical connections with the sentence in which they occur, i.e. they do not perform any syntactic function in the sentence. e.g. They certainly will come to the party.

Sometimes independent elements can even serve as sentences themselves; e.g. Yes, No, Alas.

Independent class of words include modal words, interjections, words of affirmation and negation.

It is noteworthy that the decision of words into parts of speech can be accepted only with certain reservation there are words which cannot be classed among any of the above motioned parts of speech such as a please, anyway ҳар қалай.

Typological categories of English and Uzbek words

The words of any language are characterized by their ability to express definite notions existing in this society, thus changing their forms. Most of the notions existing in the society have common peculiarities, i.e. they have universal character.

Among the linguistic categories which can be traced in most of the languages of the world we can see the categories which display typologically general character but can be expressed in different languages in different ways. Studying these linguistic facts figuring out their similarities and differences is much of importance for the man of letters, especially for the graduates of the language faculties of universities who are going to become English teachers and interpreters in near future.

For instance, such linguistic notions as case, gender person, tense, voice, possession, etc. are of general character for the comparing languages, but they may be expressed by typological different means of the language. In this chapter we try to generalize the main means of expressing the notions which are of peculiar type of the comparing languages.