English grammar - Roger Berry 2012
B1.5 Conclusion
B1 Word classes
Section B Development
For centuries a word class approach was the principal tool for analysing the grammar of European languages, including English (there are, of course, other traditions). In conjunction with the identification of sentence roles (subject, object, etc. - see A8) it was grammar. And it still forms the backbone of modern grammatical analysis. However, we have seen it is not a foolproof method for classifying words, and in order to understand how words function in sentences we need to supplement it with further approaches.
Comment
Activity B1.1:
Here is a list of the word classes:
pronouns: I, it, we
conjunction: when
auxiliaries: should, have
verbs: think, done, melt, abound
determiners: the, a
adjectives: separate, double
adverb: better
prepositions: about, in, on
nouns: butter, pan, standards, discussion, climate, change
You may have wanted to call climate an adjective (see A3), but apart from that most of the words are fairly easy to assign. This is not always the case (for example, to in the previous sentence), as we will see later. As regards open and closed classes, there are 13 instances of each (including some in closed classes - in and the - which are repeated).