Defining the preposition, linguists usually point out three main proper­ties: 1) the preposition is a functional part of speech, i.e. a preposition cannot perform an independent syntactic function; 2) the preposition is a word ex­pressing subordinate relations between lexical parts of speech; 3) the preposition is a word with an obligatory pre-nounal position: it may […]

While the noun, the adjective, and the verb are characterized by all the three properties of a part of speech – morphological, syntactic and semantic, the numeral, like the pronoun, is distinguished only due to its lexical mean­ing. Numerals indicate exact number or the order of persons and things in a series. Accordingly, numerals are […]

Morphologically, pronouns represent quite a diverse group. Thus, the category of case is a property of the personal pronouns, in which one may observe the distinct opposition “nominative case – objective case”. The in­definite-personal pronoun one and derivatives with the components -body and -one are also marked for the case category, since they demonstrate the […]

Almost any part of speech may undergo further differentiation into sub­groups. One of the traditional categorizations of the noun consists of the two large classes – proper nouns and common nouns. It should be noted that proper nouns have been usually overlooked by linguists, since their lexical meaning is difficult to investigate. Both philosophers and […]

As we have seen, all the attempts to work out a vocabulary classification based on one criterion only have failed. The main principles of ancient as well as modern wordstock classifica­tions were explicitly formulated by Russian academician Lev Shcherba. These are 1) semantic criterion; 2) morphological criterion, and 3) syntactic criterion. As it has been […]