The Principles of Classification as Used by Prescriptive Grammarians
Prescriptive grammarians, who treated Latin as an ideal language, described
English in terms of Latin forms and Latin grammatical constraints. Similar to
Latin, words in English were divided into declinables (nouns, adjectives, pronouns,
verbs, participles) and indeclinables (adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions,
interjections, articles). The number of parts of speech varied from author to author:
in early grammars nouns and adjectives formed one part of speech; later they came
to be treated as two different parts of speech. The same applies to participles,
which were either a separate part of speech or part of the verb. The article was first
classed with the adjective. Later it was given the status of a part of speech and
toward the end of the 19th century the article was integrated into the adjective. The
underlying principle of classification was
form
, which, as can be seen from their
treatment of the English noun, was not only morphologic but also syntactic, i.e. if
it was form in Latin, it had to be form in English.
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