Parts of speech

As we saw, much of our terminology for the different elements in a sentence, or what have traditionally been called the parts of speech, comes from the Latin model of Priscian, which was itself adapted from ancient Greek accounts. The definitions of these terms in traditional grammar were unsatisfactory in a number of ways. Nouns, for example, were – and often still are – seen as ‘naming’ words, which seems to work fine for ‘Paul’, ‘house’ or ‘dog’ but runs into difficulties with ‘naming words’ like name in ‘I name this ship …’ or christen, both of which are verbs. Verbs themselves were similarly seen as ‘doing words’, but action, busy, or task are not verbs, and conversely there are a number of verbs which don’t appear to involve much ‘doing’ at all (at least in an active sense): exist, suffer, know, understand, dream.

A better basis for our definitions is needed, and following Saussure, linguists have preferred to define parts of speech in terms of the system of relations, syntagmatic and paradigmatic, into which they enter, i.e. their distribution. To determine whether a word like cat is a noun, we might subject it to a number of tests:

Nouns, but not verbs, for example, can be modified by an article (a cat but not *a prevaricate/preoccupy/be/realize), or by an adjective (beautiful, big, clever, muddy cat).

Nouns may be the subject of a verb (the cat purrs), and may be marked for plural (cats).

Nouns cannot, on the other hand, have pronoun subjects (*he cats/they cat).

On the basis of properties like these, we can determine that cat passes all the tests for noun status and thus behaves in a similar way to a class of words including house, dog, computer, table, sugar, sincerity. A word need not pass all the tests we set up: in the above list, for example, sugar and sincerity do not have plural forms, but behave in most other respects like nouns. In such cases it may be fruitful to seek other items with similar properties and establish a sub-class. Sugar, for example, behaves like jam, tea, water, and so on in not normally having a plural form, in requiring the quantifier much rather than many and so on. These nouns are accordingly labelled mass or non-count nouns; sincerity, like honesty, faith, respect, or depth, belongs to the class of abstract nouns with similar properties.

The pronouns of traditional grammar were so called because they were seen as items that ‘stand for’ nouns. For example, ‘He’ can stand for ‘John’, or ‘They’ for ‘elephants’ in the following sentences:

1 John loves reading Chekhov.

2 He loves reading Chekhov.

3 Elephants are scared of mice.

4 They are scared of mice.

So far so good, but closer inspection of English syntax reveals that the term ‘pro-noun’ is in fact something of a misnomer. If we replace a noun by a pronoun in any of the following sentences, the result is ungrammatical:

1 The tap turns the water on.

2 *The it turns the it on.

3 Little John saved the day.

4 *Little he saved the it.

5 The man on the Clapham omnibus thinks the Conservatives will win the next election.

6 *The he on the it it thinks the they will win the next it.

To make these sentences grammatical, we need to replace not just the noun but all associated qualifiers as well, that is, the full noun phrase which forms a constituent of the sentence, and not just part of it:

It (The tap) turns it (the water) on.

He (Little John) saved the day.

He (The man on the Clapham omnibus) thinks they (the Conservatives) will win it (the next election).

On distributional criteria, then, our ‘pro-noun’ is more accurately a ‘pro-noun-phrase’. While no one is proposing to change a term which is settled in people’s minds, it is an important property of English pronouns that they fulfil the role of a noun phrase constituent of a sentence and not that of a noun.