Lexical category

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In grammar, a lexical category (also word class, lexical class, or in traditional grammar part of speech) is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items) that are usually defined by their particular syntactic or morphological behaviours. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others. There are open word classes, which constantly acquire new members, and closed word classes, which acquire new members infrequently if at all.

Not all languages have the same lexical categories, and lexical categories generally considered equivalent between two languages may have different properties. For example, Spanish uses adjectives almost interchangeably as nouns while English cannot; Japanese has two classes of adjectives where English has one; Chinese and Japanese have measure words while European languages strictly speaking don't; many languages do not have a distinction between adjectives and adverbs, or adjectives and nouns, etc. Many linguists argue that the formal distinctions between parts of speech must be made within the framework of a specific language or language family, and should not be carried over to other languages or language families.

Common ways of delimiting words by function include:

Open word classes:
- adjectives
- adverbs
- interjections
- nouns
- verbs (except auxiliary verbs)

Closed word classes:
- auxiliary verbs
- clitics
- coverbs
- conjunctions
- determiners (articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
- particles
- measure words
- adpositions (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
- preverbs
- pronouns
- contractions
- cardinal numbers

1 Traditional "parts of speech"
2 English
3 Japanese
4 See also
5 External links

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Traditional "parts of speech"

In traditional English grammar, which is patterned after Latin grammar, and still taught in schools and used in dictionaries, there are eight parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. Modern grammarians however believe that this list is simplified and artificial. Many traditional parts of speech are defined by semantic criteria instead of morpho-syntactic criteria. For example, "adverb" is to some extent a catch-all class that includes words with many different functions. Numbering eight parts of speech is traditional; it stems from the Greek grammarians. When Romans decided on writing a grammar for their language, they felt compelled to have eight parts of speech, though these were different from the Greek ones, and the same is the case for the English set.

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English

English is an analytic language and frequently does not mark words as belonging to one part of speech or another. Words like neigh, break, outlaw, laser, microwave and telephone might all be either verb forms or nouns. Although -ly is an adverb marker, not all adverbs end in -ly and not all words ending in -ly are adverbs. For instance, tomorrow, slow, fast, crosswise can all be adverbs, while leisurely, friendly, ugly are all adjectives.

In certain circumstances, even words with primarily grammatical functions can be used as verbs or nouns, as in "We must look to the hows and not just the whys" or "Miranda was to-ing and fro-ing and not paying attention".

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Japanese

In Japanese, several parts of speech are explicitly marked. For example, basic verbs in the plain form always end in -u, and basic verbs in the polite form always end in -masu; i-adjectives (see above) always end -i, and the adverbs derived of those adjectives always end in -ku. However, the mark is not enough to distinguish a part of speech from another (not everything that ends in -u is a verb, etc.).

Japanese parts of speech do not correspond well with the traditional Latin-based ones outlined above. There are two classes of words that may function as adjectives, each with a different morphosyntax. One of them encodes temporal information (as verbs do), while the other patterns with nouns in most respects. Some conjugated forms of verbs, in turn, pattern closely with adjectives.

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