English grammar - Roger Berry 2012

B1.1 Classifying words
B1 Word classes
Section B Development

When we begin to study something unknown, one of the ways that we try to make sense of it is by grouping, or classifying the different phenomena that we encounter. The same was true when people first started thinking about and describing languages: they looked at the basic units - the words - and tried to find ways of putting them into groups. Indeed, in the past this approach was almost the only one used in describing grammar, and it is still important, though we need to supplement it with other approaches.

The eight original classes were derived from the study of Latin and Greek and were traditionally called ’parts of speech’. They were:

□ noun, adjective, verb, adverb, pronoun, conjunction, preposition, interjection

This list has been adjusted slightly for English (see below) and nowadays a more accurate cover term, ’word classes’, is used.