FUNCTIONS AND CATEGORIES

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                                               FUNCTIONS AND CATEGORIES 

    Ever since any serious studies in language were made, linguists,right from Plato and Aristotle, have been trying to divide words into several categories, popularly known as parts of speech. This, in fact,is the case with any scientific description that has its own set of technical terms. English grammar is also a scientific study and has,therefore, its own terms. Important categories or categorical labels in English,for example,are nouns,verbs,adjectives,adverbs,pronouns,prepositions,articles,conjunctions ordinals,and quantifiers. Different linguists including Plato,Aristotle,Dionysius Thyrax,an  several later linguists have been giving their own lists of these categories, but everybody agrees that words can be divided into certain separate groups. 

    Some linguists group the words into two broad divisions: full words and empty words. Full words are also named by some as form classes*while empty words are named by some as structure classes. According to these linguists, full words are those words which have a high meaning value(nouns,verbs,adjectives,adverbs), e.g. chair, brandy, affection, play, nice, and quickly. Such words form the main body or the skeleton of the language. The list of such words is quite large and is open-ended as more and more words continue to be added to very day. Form classes area so termed by some as content words or lexical items. Empty words, on the other hand, have a low meaning value or have no meaning at all.The role in the language is that of grammatical linkers or markers of grammatical relationships.

     Such word include prepositions,conjunctions,articles,auxiliaries,etc.Their membership is small and closed. While the form of words belonging to the full words category changes so often in different sentences,theformofwordsbelongingtothestructureclassescategoryremainsthesame. Some linguists divide words into two classes: Open class Closed class Words belonging to open class are those generally classified as nouns(e.g.pen, book,boy,brandy),verbs(e.g.cry,believe,become,appear),adjectives (e.g.good,painful,charming,tall)or adverbs(e.g.here,now,yesterday, calmly, soundly). These words are said to belong to the open class because more and more words continue to be added to this class. 

One can always coin new words to add to the existing stock of words in this group. Thus the membership of this group isopenended.Englishvocabularyiscontinuallybeingextendedbynewwordsbelongingtothisgroup . The closed class, on the other hand, has a fixed number of words in it. No new words are added to it. The closed class includes words generally classified as Determiners (e.g. a, an, the, some, any, this),Pronouns (e.g. I, me, you), Prepositions (e.g. in, at, on, upon, near),Conjunctions(e.g.and,or,but,when,because)and Modals(e.g.will,shall,can).

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