Word Class in English Grammar:
In English grammar, a word class is a set of words that display the same formal properties, especially their inflections and distribution. The term "word class" is similar to the more traditional term, part of speech. It is also variously called grammatical category, lexical category, and syntactic category (although these terms are not wholly or universally synonymous.
"When linguists began to look closely at English grammatical structure in the 1940s and 1950s, they encountered so many problems of identification and definition that the term part of speech soon fell out of favor, word-class being introduced instead. Word classes are equivalent to parts of speech, but defined according to strict linguistic criteria." (David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003) "There is no single correct way of analyzing words into word classes...Grammarians disagree about the boundaries between the word classes (see gradience), and it is not always clear whether to lump subcategories together or to split them. For example, in some grammar...pronouns are classed as nouns, whereas in other frameworks...they are treated as a separate word class."
subscribe to our channel Here
No comments