ustify">, "Ivanov is a teacher"; derevo gorit, "the wood burns"). However, for the verb the predicate function is primary and the subject function is secondary, but for the noun the subject function is primary and the predicate function is secondary. For example, a verb can only be the subject with a nominal predicate, but a noun can be the subject with any predicate. A sentence with a verb subject can be transformed into a sentence with a noun subject (kurenie vredno dlia zdorov ia, "smoking is harmful to one s health "), but the reverse is not true. A noun predicate requires a copulative verb in order to express tense and mood (Ivanov byll-byl by uchitelem, "Ivanov was/would. Have been a teacher"), which is not true of a verb predicate. In Chinese both verb and adjective can function as an attributive, but in doing so the verb, unlike the adjective, requires the special adjectival suffix-t é . scholars question the validity of considering pronouns and numerals separate parts of speech in most languages, since words of these classes ordinarily vary in their syntactic functions and from this point of view belong to different word classes. For this reason they are often considered subclasses of other parts of speech. (In Russian, for example, compare the noun numerals tri, "three," and chetyre, "four," with the adjectival numerals pervyi, "first," and vtoroi, "second.") part of speech has its own set of characteristic grammatical categories; trie set of categories embraces an absolute majority of the words of the particular part of speech. This serves as a morphological criterion for distinguishing parts of speech in inflected languages. In Russian, for example, number, case, and gender (as a word-classifying category) are characteristic of the noun, and degrees of comparison, number, case, and gender (as an inflectional category) are characteristic of the adjective. In Burmese, however, the adjective and verb are not contrasted in this way, since words corresponding to both adjectives and verbs in other languages ​​have degrees of comparison.distribution of words by parts of speech is governed in all languages ​​by certain semantic regularities that serve to differentiate the parts of speech semantically. In Russian the class of nouns includes words denoting objects (stol, "table"), qualities (krasnota, "redness"), and actions (khozhdenie, "walking"); however, the majority of nouns not denoting objects are derived, and the majority of nonderived nouns denote objects. This regularity imparts, to the class of nouns the general meaning of objectness. In the same way, the general meaning of action or state is established for the verb, of quality for the adjective, and of action or quality attribute for the adverb.system of parts of speech taught in modern school grammars stems from the works of the ...
