PARTS OF SPEECH (word classes)

What evidence is there that the words of the language belong to different classes? Consider
the following examples:

1- John likes amusing girls

2- Mary looks hard.

3- They can fish.

All the above sentences are ambiguous and their ambiguity can’t be explained if we do not
assume that the words they consist of belong to different categories.

The first sentence is ambiguous. It displays categorial ambiguity because its interpretation
depends on whether we consider “amusing” as belonging to the verb category or to the
adjective category. In other words, are we talking about girls that are funny “amusing” ,(in
which case “amusing “is an adjective or are we talking about John amusing the girls? (thus
“amusing“is a verb).

Sentence( 2 )is also ambiguous : “hard” can be an adjective , in which case the sentence
means that Mary is a hard person and the verb“look” in this case is a copulative verb
(replaceable by the verb “be” )or else the word “hard” can be an adverb meaning
“intensively ‘’.Under this interpretation the verb “look” is a lexical verb.

Sentence 3 has two meanings: (a) they are able to fish .Under such interpretation “can” is a
modal auxiliary verb and “fish” is a lexical intransitive verb .(b) They put fish in a can.
According to this interpretation, “can” is a lexical transitive verb and “fish” is a noun.

It should be noted that the above examples provide strong evidence that the words of the
language belong to various categories. The ambiguity of these sentences couldn’t be
explained otherwise.