16
The Principles of Classification as Used by Structural Descriptive
Grammarians
The traditional classification of words into parts of speech was rejected by
structural grammarians who bitterly criticized it from two points. First, in their
opinion, traditional grammar relies heavily on the most subjective element in
language, meaning. The other is that it uses different criteria of classification: it
distinguishes
the noun, the verb and the interjection on the basis of meaning; the
adjective, the adverb, the pronoun,
and the conjunction, on the basis of function,
and the preposition, partly on function and partly on form.
One of the noted representatives of
American structuralism,
Charles Fries
(1956), rejected the traditional principle of classification of words into parts of
speech replacing it with the methods of distributional analysis and substitution.
Words that exhibit the same distribution (which is the set of contexts, i.e.
immediate linguistic environments, in which a word can appear) belong to the
same class.
Roughly speaking, the distribution of a word is the position of a word
in the sentence. To classify the words of English, Charles Fries used three
sentences
called
Достарыңызбен бөлісу: 
