="justify"> syntacticalmorphological features different categories are meant. The morphological categories of noun are the categories of number and case. By morphological categories of adjectives we mean the category of quality (degrees of comparison). By syntactical features of the part of speech the syntactical functions of it are meant. The syntactical function is the most reliable criterion. Thus, the modern conception and amended definition of part of speech should take into account all the above mentioned criteria in complex. [4] notion of dividing words into discrete parts of speech is generally credited to the ancient Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax. For a long time, the idea was pretty much universally accepted. Eventually, grand claims were made for it. The anonymous author of the 1733 book "The English Accidence" called the parts of speech "the foundation upon which the beautiful fabrick of the language stands." John Stuart Mill felt they represented universal categories of human thought.problem with such reverence is that different languages ​​are set up differently. For example, Latin, Russian and Japanese all lack articles. Even in our own tradition, the roster keeps shifting. Thrax counted eight parts: adverbs, articles, conjunctions, nouns, participles, prepositions, pronouns and verbs. The Latin-speaking Romans obviously had to drop articles. Perhaps to keep the eight-part scheme, they added - golly! - Interjections. Early formulations of English grammar adopted the Latin list. This presented problems, since English does have articles. There was a lot of shuffling around, until Joseph Priestley's 1761 "Rudiments of English Grammar" finally established the baseball-size lineup that included adjectives and booted out participles. This slate has been generally accepted for the last quarter-millennium and is familiar to the population at large from "Schoolhouse Rock" and the italicized abbreviations (adj., etc.) After words in the dictionary. But for some time there have been rumblings of discontent in the higher reaches of the linguistics community. In the 1920's, Edward Sapir wrote that "no logical scheme of the parts of speech - their number, nature and necessary confines - is of the slightest interest to the linguist." The fact is, any parts-of-speech scheme leaves gaping holes. In the term baseball player, is the word baseball a noun or an adjective? Reasonable people differ on this point. What about the word to in an infinitive like to see? What about the there in there are? Day grammarians don't even like to use "parts of speech," preferring "word classes" or "lexical categories." A recent trend has been to accept some fuzziness. Nouns, for example, are often defined by having some or all of a list of capabilities, including being the subject of a sentence or clause, having a plural form or displaying a suffix like "-tion" or "-hood." ; A word like mother, which does all three, is ...