ges. For example, Japanese has as many as three classes of adjectives where English has one; Chinese, Korean and Japanese have nominal classifiers whereas European languages ​​do not; many languages ​​do not have a distinction between adjectives and adverbs, adjectives and verbs (see stative verbs ) or adjectives and nouns [citation needed], etc. This variation in the number of categories and their identifying properties entails that analysis is done for each individual language. Nevertheless the labels for each category are assigned on the basis of universal criteria. [1]
.1 Historical overview of the parts of speech problem and controversies
The classification of words into lexical categories is found from the earliest moments in the history of linguistics. In the Nirukta, written in the 5th or 6th century BCE, the Sanskrit grammarian Y? Ska defined four main categories of words:
В· n? ma - nouns or substantives
В· ? khy? ta - verbs
В· upasarga - pre-verbs or prefixes
В· nip? ta - particles, invariant words (perhaps prepositions)
These four were grouped into two large classes: inflected (nouns and verbs) and uninflected (pre-verbs and particles). ancient work on the grammar of the Tamil language, Tolkappiyam, dated variously between 1st and 10th centuries CE, classifies wordsnin Tamil as
В· peyar (noun),
В· vinai (verb),
В· idai (part of speech which modifies the relationships between verbs and nouns) and
· uri (word that further qualifies a noun or verb) century or two after the work of Nirukta, the Greek scholar Plato wrote in the Cratylus dialog that ". .. sentences are, I conceive, a combination of verbs [rh? ma] and nouns [ónoma] ". Another class, "conjunctions" (covering conjunctions, pronouns, and the article), was later added by Aristotle. By the end of the 2nd century BCE, the classification scheme had been expanded in to eight categories, seen in the Art of Grammar (??????????? ????): : a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a concrete or abstract entity: a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person and number , signifying an activity or process performed or undergone: a part of speech sharing the features of the verb and the noun: a part of speech expressing emotion alone: ​​a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for person: a part of speech placed ...
