Words & Word Classes

Open Classes:
Nouns
Verbs (lexical verbs)
Adjectives
Adverbs
Closed classes
Auxiliaries
Prepositions
Pronouns
Determiners
Numerals
Conjunctions
Interjections
Word classes are established on the basis of three types of criteria:
1

semantic criteria generalizations about the meaning of words in a class

nouns are names of persons, things and places

morphological criteria inflectional and/or derivational characteristics that are

typical of a class
-s, -ed, -ing are inflectional endings of verbs:
smoke smokes
smoke smoked
smoke smoking
words formed by the suffixes -able, -ish, -less are adjectives
read readable
fool foolish
care careless

syntactic criteria involve the functions of the word in the structure of phrases
and clauses
nouns head of a NP Subject, Direct Object, Indirect Object,
nouns are introduced by determiners,
are (pre)modified by adjectives and nouns
are (post)modified by PPs, Relative Clauses

Word class

Inflection

Derivation

Nouns

boy-s
boys

employ-ment
rapid-ity
sweet-ness

Adjectives

bigg-er
bigg-est

accept-able
child-ish
care-less

Adverbs

hard-er
hard-est

slow-ly
clock-wise

Verbs

walk-s
walk-ed
walk-ing

wid-en
simpl-ify
popular-ise

Here are some examples of word forms that can belong to more than one word
class. State the class of the words in bold in the following sentences. Give reasons
for your answers:
1

We had a good laugh over Johns mistake

Mary is laughing.

I have my doubts about his honesty

I cannot doubt his honesty

She was drying her hair

The paint is already dry

We decided to brave the storm

It was very brave of you to go

He was knocked out in the first round

The police car rounded the corner on two wheels
We have a round table in our dining-room

The Guardian is a daily

A daily newspaper is printed daily

This is a very hard exercise

Mary is working hard for the exams

The inside of the cottage was whitewashed

There is mould inside most cabinets

The early train arrived early

10 He left her alone on the left bank of the river