Parts of speech as psycholinguistic classes

Abstract

Parts of speech are called the most important, from a particular point of view, word classes. In the European tradition parts of speech have been recovered by ancient grammarians, their classification reflect the essential properties of the Greek and Latin languages and, presumably, were based on psycholinguistic representations of the speakers of these languages, in which the parts of speech have maximum expressiveness in morphology, syntax and lexis. Parts of speech were distinguished primarily on morphological characteristics, sometimes based on syntactic and semantic features. This classification has been preserved with some modifications to the present day, but since the beginning of the XX century there has been attempts to clarify the conventional approach, which could also be different. In other traditions, as well, there were comparable with European basic parts of speech units of classes, but there could be certain differences. The traditional notion of parts of speech may have a different value depending on the structure of the language. Modern typology explores the boundaries of this importance. Apparently, the traditional division of parts of speech hide some intuitive ideas. The human memory words as you can assume, are stored in the form of some groups that have common properties. Stored in the memory word groups can not be completely common in their properties, but for various languages typical is the use of some obvious properties, allowing them to be identified. These identities for many languages are the morphological and/or syntactic properties of groups of words. All these features may act in different ways depending on the structure of the language.

Keywords

• word
• part of speech
• classification
• linguistic traditions
• identifiers
• word properties
• storing in memory