Alexandrian philologists, such as Dionysius Thrax and Apollonius Dyscolus, who distinguished nomin á is, verbs, participles, adverbs, articles, pronouns , prepositions, and conjunctions according to mixed morphological, semantic, and syntactic criteria. In this system nomin á is included nouns, adjectives, and numerals. (In contrast, Plato combined the adjective and verb on the basis of logical syntactic relations.) The system of the Alexandrian philologists also influenced the Arab grammatical tradition. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance, during which logical-semantic criteria were stressed as the basis for the existence of parts of speech, introduced no significant changes into the system. The development of comparative-historical linguistics placed morphological characteristics in the forefront and was responsible for a purely morphological approach to the problem of parts of speech (with the additional influence of the Indian grammatical tradition). The new approach, as reflected in the works of F. F. Fortunatov, denied the existence of parts of speech in isolating languages. In the 20th century linguistics refused, to recognize that word classes analogous to the parts of speech of inflected languages ​​can be distinguished in isolating languages, a fact previously demonstrated by H. C. von der Gabelentz (the syntactic criterion establishes word classes in inflected languages ​​that essentially coincide with morphological parts of speech). With the syntactic approach all languages ​​have parts of speech, and difficulties arising from the morphological approach are avoided (such as the lack of morphological marking in the classification of indeclinable Russian nouns, such as pal to, "overcoat"). of speech differ from language to language. The differences concern not only which parts of speech a language has, but also what words are subsumed under each part of speech. Thus, Russian, French, and Latin distinguish nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Several North American and African languages ​​do not differentiate adverbs from adjectives. Chinese distinguishes nomin á is, predicatives (verbs and adjectives), and adverbs. In some languages, such as the American Indian language Yuma, only nomin á is and verbs are distinguished. Differences as to what words are subsumed under particular parts of speech can be observed by comparing Hausa, in which words corresponding to the adjectives of other languages ​​are in the same class as nouns, with Burmese, in which this type of word is in the same class as verbs. The most consistent contrast in different languages ​​is between the nominal and the verb, although such a contra...
