Editing Part of speech (section)

==Functional classification==
[[Linguists]] recognize that the above list of eight or nine word classes is drastically simplified.<ref>{{cite web | last=Zwicky | first=Arnold | date=30 March 2006 | title=What part of speech is "the" | work=[[Language Log]] | url=http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002974.html | access-date=26 December 2009 | quote=...the school tradition about parts of speech is so desperately impoverished | archive-date=27 December 2009 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091227122103/http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002974.html | url-status=live }}</ref> For example, "adverb" is to some extent a catch-all class that includes words with many different functions. Some have even argued that the most basic of category distinctions, that of nouns and verbs, is unfounded,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Hopper |first1=P |last2=Thompson |first2=S |year=1985 |chapter=The Iconicity of the Universal Categories 'Noun' and 'Verbs' |title=Typological Studies in Language: Iconicity and Syntax |editor=John Haiman |volume=6 |pages=151–183 |location=Amsterdam |publisher=John Benjamins Publishing Company}}</ref> or not applicable to certain languages.<ref>{{cite book |last=Launey |first=Michel |year=1994 |title=Une grammaire omniprédicative: essai sur la morphosyntaxe du nahuatl classique |location=Paris |publisher=CNRS Editions}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Broschart |first=Jürgen |year=1997 |title=Why Tongan does it differently: Categorial Distinctions in a Language without Nouns and Verbs |journal=Linguistic Typology |volume=1 |issue=2 |pages=123–165 |doi=10.1515/lity.1997.1.2.123|s2cid=121039930 }}</ref> Modern linguists have proposed many different schemes whereby the words of English or other languages are placed into more specific categories and subcategories based on a more precise understanding of their grammatical functions.

Common lexical category set defined by function may include the following (not all of them will necessarily be applicable in a given language):
* Categories that will usually be [[#Open and closed classes|open classes]]:
** [[adjective]]s
** [[adverb]]s
** [[noun]]s
** [[verb]]s (except auxiliary verbs)
** [[interjection]]s
* Categories that will usually be closed classes:
** [[auxiliary verb]]s
** [[coverb]]s
** [[Grammatical conjunction|conjunction]]s
** [[determiner (class)|determiners]] ([[article (grammar)|articles]], [[Quantifier (linguistics)|quantifiers]], [[demonstrative]]s, and [[possessive determiners|possessives]])
** [[measure word]]s or [[classifier (linguistics)|classifier]]s
** [[adposition]]s (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
** [[preverb]]s
** [[pronoun]]s
** [[Cardinal number (linguistics)|cardinal numerals]]
** [[grammatical particle|particle]]s

Within a given category, subgroups of words may be identified based on more precise grammatical properties. For example, verbs may be specified according to the number and type of [[object (grammar)|object]]s or other [[complement (grammar)|complement]]s which they take. This is called [[subcategorization]].

Many modern descriptions of grammar include not only lexical categories or word classes, but also ''phrasal categories'', used to classify [[phrase]]s, in the sense of groups of words that form units having specific grammatical functions. Phrasal categories may include [[noun phrase]]s (NP), [[verb phrase]]s (VP) and so on. Lexical and phrasal categories together are called [[syntactic categories]].

[[File:EnglishGrammarCategories.png|thumb|center|600px|A diagram showing some of the posited English [[syntactic categories]]]]
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