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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 26
to some extent the distinction between these and ‘noun’ and ‘verb’ was not
secure. His student Aristotle (d. 322 bce) added a third class made up of conjunctions
(and possibly some other grammatical word types; Robins 1967: 26).
The Stoics distinguished five parts of speech: the proper noun, the common
noun, the verb, the conjunction and the article (Matthews 1994 [1990]: 33–4).
This developed until in the later Greek grammars, such as that attributed to
Dionysius Thrax, we find noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition,
adverb and conjunction (Robins 1967: 33–4; Matthews 1994: 38). This is the
system that was carried forward into Latin grammatical study, although by the
time we get to Priscian (sixth century ce) interjection has been added to the list
(Law 2003: 89). Note that adjective is missing from the list. Since the adjective
in Greek and Latin took the same endings as the noun, and could, indeed, be
used nominally, there was no need to separate it from the noun. The participle,
on the other hand, needed to be treated separately from the verb since it was
marked for categories like past, present or future like the verb but also for categories
such as possessive like the noun: it thus participated in both nominal
and verbal qualities (hence the label).
Nouns and verbs were distinguished from the earliest times by being marked
for these categories, called case on the noun and tense on the verb, so that there
was in origin a formal distinction here. By the period of Priscian, the notional
definitions had made an appearance, nouns being said to indicate substances,
verbs to indicate actions, etc. (Robins 1967: 57).
It took until the early Middle Ages for adjectives to get added to the list of
parts of speech, probably in the light of languages in which they were more formally
distinct from nouns than they were in Latin and Greek.
What is basically the Greek tradition lasted into the twentieth century, at
least in school grammar. Among most linguists, however, it was overtaken by
the structuralist tradition. Mixed up with this is the tradition characterised by
Joos (1957: 96) as the Boas tradition, which implies that ‘languages [can] differ
from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways’. If that is the case, we
should not expect every language to fit neatly into a Greek model or to show
the same parts of speech as European languages.
The structuralist backlash
There are innumerable reasons why the notional definitions of the parts of
speech run into problems. Verbs are termed ‘doing words’ but verbs which
denote states (stative verbs) do not denote action. The sentences in (1) are very
odd at best.
(1) a. What the vase did was cost ten dollars.
b. What John did was resemble his father.