SYNTAX : PART OF SPEECH

SYNTAX

PART OF SPEECH

The part of speech (also called syntactic categories).  The  most  important  of  those  are  the  noun,  verb ,  preposition ,   and  adverb/adjective. All of them have a special way how to use it.

We can substitute various words that are of the type noun for the second word in the sentence:

The man likes playing football.

In that sentence we can substitute the noun “man” with the other noun.

 For example:

The king likes playing football	} correct
The student likes playing football

But we cannot substitute noun “man” words with the words that aren’t nouns.

For example:

The blue likes playing football	} false
The at likes playing football
The sing likes playing football

The same holds true for larger groups of words (the square brackets [ … ] mark off the relevant groups of words)

[Antun] went to the market	May
[The man] went to the market
[Quickly walks] went to the market	May not

We can make generalizations (scientific ones) about the behavior of different word types. This is why we need parts of speech. There are categories of words that can appear in certain position and may not be substituted by the other categories.

A noun is a “person, place, or thing”, and a verb is “an action, state or state of being.”

Consider now the following:

 The destruction of Jakarta bothered Indonesia

The meaning of destruction is not a “person, place, or thing.” It is an action! By semantic criteria, this word should be a verb. But in fact, it is clearly a noun. It is the subject of the sentence and it follows the word  “the”.

 Genuinely is an important quality

The assassination of the president

Labuan haji is a great place for recreation

Genuinely  is an attribute, a property normally associated with adjectives. But in this case Genuinely  is a noun. Similarly with assassination ,  an  action,  is  functioning  as  a noun. The semantic property of identifying a location is usually attributed to a preposition but the noun Labuan haji refers to a location, but isn’t itself a preposition.

A word can change its part of speech depending upon where it appears in a sentence. The  part  of  speech  of  a  word  is  determined  by  its  place  in  the  sentence  and  NOT by its  meaning.