part of speech

Definition

A linguistic category of words sharing syntactic or morphological behaviour and semantic properties, such as noun or verb.

Etymology

From Middle English parte of spech, a calque of Latin pars ōrātiōnis.

Example Sentences

• "PARTS OF SPEECH. There are ten parts of speech, viz. Article, Substantive or Noun, Adjective, Numeral, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction, and Interjection."
• "322. The parts of speech which are neither declined nor conjugated, are called by the general name of particles. 323. They are adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections."
• "One group of substantives, the gerunds (scolding), belongs to a form-class with infinitives and with other verb-forms, in serving as head for certain types of modifiers, such as a goal (scolding the boys). For this reason a system of parts of speech in a language like English cannot be set up in any fully satisfactory way: our list of parts of speech will depend upon which functions we take to be the most important."