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Adjectives are subcategorised into qualitative and relative, of constant feature and temporary feature (the latter are referred to as "statives" and identified by some scholars as a separate part of speech under the heading of " category of state "), factive and evaluative, etc. Cf.: p align="justify"> long, red, lovely, noble, comfortable - wooden, rural, daily, subterranean, orthographical;
healthy, sickly, joyful, grievous, wry, blazing - well, ill, glad, sorry, awry, ablaze;
tall, heavy, smooth, mental, native - kind, brave, wonderful, wise, stupid.
The adverb, the numeral, the pronoun are also subject to the corresponding subcategorisations.
§ 4. We have drawn a general outline of the division of the lexicon into part of speech classes developed by modern linguists on the lines of traditional morphology. p align="justify"> It is known that the distribution of words between different parts of speech may to a certain extent differ with different authors. This fact gives cause to some linguists for calling in question the rational character of the part of speech classification as a whole, gives them cause for accusing it of being subjective or "prescientific" in essence. Such nihilistic criticism, however, should be rejected as utterly ungrounded. p align="justify"> Indeed, considering the part of speech classification on its merits, one must clearly realise that what is above all important about it is the fundamental principles of word-class identification, and not occasional enlargements or diminutions of the established groups, or re-distributions of individual words due to re-considerations of their subcategorial features. The very idea of ​​subcategorisation as the obligatory second stage of the undertaken classification testifies to the objective nature of this kind of analysis. p align="justify"> For instance, prepositions and conjunctions can be combined into one united series of "connectives", since the function of both is just to connect notional components of the sentence. In this case, on the second stage of classification, the enlarged word-class of connectives will be subdivided into two main subclasses, namely, prepositional connectives and conjunctional connectives. Likewise, the articles can be included as a subset into the more general set of particles-specifiers. As is known, nouns and adjectives, as well as numerals, are treated in due contexts of description under one common class-term "names": originally, in the Ancient Greek grammatical teaching they were not differentiated because they had the same forms of morphological change (declension). On the other hand, in various descriptions of English grammar such narrow lexemic sets as the two words yes and no, the pronominal determiners of nouns, even the one anticipating pronoun it are given a separate class-item status - though in no way challenging or distorting the functional character of the treated units.
It should be remembered that modern principles of part of speech identification have been formulated as a result of painstaking research conducted on the vast materials of numerous languages; and it is in Soviet linguistics that the three-criteria characterisation of parts of speech has been developed and applied to practice with the utmost consistency. The three celebrated names are especially notable for the elaboration of these criteria, namely, V. V. Vinogradov in connection with his study of Russian grammar, A. I. Smirnitsky and B. A. Ilyish in connection with their study of English grammar. p align="justify"> Alongside of the three-criteria principle of dividing the words into grammatical (lexico-grammatical) classes modern linguistics has developed another, narrower principle of word-class identification based on syntactic featuring of words only.
The fact is, that the three-criteria principle faces a special difficulty in determining the part of speech status of such lexemes as have morphological characteristics of notional words, but are essentially distinguished from notional words by their playing the role of grammatical mediators in phrases and sentences. Here belong, for instance, modal verbs together with their equivalents - suppletive fillers, auxiliary verbs, aspective verbs, intensifying adverbs, determiner pronouns. This difficulty, consisting in the intersection of heterogeneous properties in the established word-classes, can evidently be overcome by recognising only one criterion of the three as decisive. p align="justify"> Worthy of note is that in the original Ancient Greek grammatical teaching which put forward the first outline of the part of speech theory, the division of words into grammatical classes was also based on one determining criterion only, namely , on the formal-morphological featuring. It mea...
