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Definition 2024


part_of_speech

part of speech

See also: part-of-speech

English

Noun

part of speech (plural parts of speech)

  1. (grammar) A linguistic category of words sharing syntactic or morphological behaviour and semantic properties, such as noun or verb.
    • 1828, Charles Follen, A Practical Grammar of the German Language, Boston, p.9:
      PARTS OF SPEECH. There are ten parts of speech, viz. Article, Substantive or Noun, Adjective, Numeral, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction, and Interjection.
    • 1844, E. A. Andrews, First Lessions in Latin; or Introduction to Andrews and Stoddard's Latin Grammar, 6th edition, Boston, p.91:
      322. The parts of speech which are neither declined nor conjugated, are called by the general name of particles. 323. They are adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.
    • 1933, Leonard Bloomfield, Language, page 269:
      One group of substantives, the gerunds (scolding), belongs to a form-class with infinitives and with other verb-forms, in serving as head for certain types of modifiers, such as a goal (scolding the boys). For this reason a system of parts of speech in a language like English cannot be set up in any fully satisfactory way: our list of parts of speech will depend upon which functions we take to be the most important.
    • 2008 (1894), B. L. Gildersleeve & G. Lodge, Gildersleeve's Latin Grammar, third edition, reprint by Dover, p.9:
      The Parts of Speech are the Noun (Substantive and Adjective), the Pronoun, the Verb, and the Particles (Adverb, Preposition, and Conjunction)[.]

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