The Minor Parts of Speech

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7 The Minor Parts of Speech key concepts Minor parts of speech Pronouns Articles Auxiliary verbs Negation Prepositions Intensifiers Conjunctions i n t ro d u c t i o n In addition to the major parts of speech—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs—there are many minor classes of words. Their number varies according to the level of detail in a particular analysis; more important is the clarity with which classes are distinguished. Our approach in the previous chapter used formal criteria to try to arrive at consistent assignments of words to parts of speech. Our approach in this chapter will be similar. The minor word classes are often referred to as closed classes. This is because they have relatively few members, which are added to only occasionally. As a result, some of the minor form classes can be defined simply by listing their members. We will distinguish about a dozen of these classes, but the largest of them, the prepositions, has only about 50 members. Native English-speaking students do not need to memorize the members of these classes; they can become as consciously familiar as they need to be with them through presentation and practice. Some memorization may help some non-native English speaking students, but, again, proper presentation and lots of practice should enable them to develop control over these words. Minor word classes have several properties in common. First, they tend not to alter the basic content of a sentence. For this reason, they have sometimes been called function or grammatical words, in contrast to the major parts of speech, called content words. Content words bear the main semantic burden in communication. They are the words that you would use to send a text message: Broke. Send money. Minor words, in contrast, signal modificational, relational, and interactional aspects of meaning; contextual information; or redundant
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