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Contents › Section 2: Morphology, Syntax, Lexicon › answer 29 of 37

A list of parts of speech

Answered 19 July 2015

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The problem with this question is that parts of speech are just a construct used for the description of language - not necessarily a real thing in a language. You can see that across languages only nouns and verbs are fairly uncontroversially universal with adjectives being another good but still disputed candidate (See Dixon's Basic Linguistic Theory).

So if you were starting with a different language you might be surprised by things like determiners in the languages you list or prepositions. Other languages may have various classifiers that may seem a bit strange. There are other things that represent a distinct category but do not make it as a part of speech like quantifiers. Even in English, you will find lists ranging between 8 and 11 different parts of speech depending on the authors' perspective and need.

You will also find a lot of variations in the internal typology of parts of speech across languages. So Czech pronouns and English pronouns or adjectives will come out looking quite different (e.g. Czech possessive adjectives).

© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).