Editing Part of speech (section)

{{Short description|Category of words based on shared grammatical properties in a clause}}
{{about||the album by Dessa|Parts of Speech (album)}}
In [[grammar]], a '''part of speech''' or '''part-of-speech''' ([[Abbreviation|abbreviated]] as '''POS''' or '''PoS''', also known as '''word class'''<ref name=rijkhoff2007>{{cite journal | last=Rijkhoff | first=Jan | title=Word Classes | journal=Language and Linguistics Compass | publisher=Wiley | volume=1 | issue=6 | year=2007 | issn=1749-818X | doi=10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00030.x | pages=709–726| s2cid=5404720 }}</ref> or '''grammatical category'''<ref>{{cite book |last=Payne |first=Thomas E. |title=Describing morphosyntax: a guide for field linguists |publisher=Cambridge University Press |date=1997 |location=Cambridge |isbn=9780511805066}}</ref>{{efn|name=grammatical category no|1=Not to be confused with [[Grammatical category]].}}) is a category of words (or, more generally, of [[lexical item]]s) that have similar [[grammar|grammatical]] properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar [[syntax|syntactic]] behavior (they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences), sometimes similar [[morphology (linguistics)|morphological]] behavior in that they undergo [[inflection]] for similar properties and even similar [[semantic]] behavior. Commonly listed [[English language|English]] parts of speech are [[noun]], [[verb]], [[adjective]], [[adverb]], [[pronoun]], [[preposition]], [[conjunction (grammar)|conjunction]], [[interjection]], [[Numeral (linguistics)|numeral]], [[article (grammar)|article]], and [[determiner]].

Other terms than ''part of speech''—particularly in modern [[linguistics|linguistic]] classifications, which often make more precise distinctions than the traditional scheme does—include '''word class''', '''lexical class''', and '''lexical category'''. Some authors restrict the term ''lexical category'' to refer only to a particular type of [[syntactic category]]; for them the term excludes those parts of speech that are considered to be [[function word]]s, such as pronouns. The term '''form class''' is also used, although this has various conflicting definitions.<ref>John Lyons, ''Semantics'', CUP 1977, p. 424.</ref> Word classes may be classified as [[#Open and closed classes|open or closed]]: ''open classes'' (typically including nouns, verbs and adjectives) acquire new members constantly, while ''closed classes'' (such as pronouns and conjunctions) acquire new members infrequently, if at all.

Almost all languages have the word classes noun and verb, but beyond these two there are significant variations among different languages.<ref name="Krueger 2005 35">{{cite book|last=Krueger|first=Paul|title=Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction|year=2005|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|isbn=978-0-521-01653-7|pages=35}}</ref> For example:
* [[Japanese language|Japanese]] has as many as [[Japanese adjectives|three classes of adjective]]s, where [[English language|English]] has one.
* [[Chinese language|Chinese]], [[Korean language|Korean]], [[Japanese language|Japanese]] and [[Vietnamese language|Vietnamese]] have a class of [[classifier (linguistics)|nominal classifier]]s.
* Many languages do not distinguish between adjectives and adverbs, or between adjectives and verbs (see [[stative verb]]).

Because of such variation in the number of categories and their identifying properties, analysis of parts of speech must be done for each individual language. Nevertheless, the labels for each category are assigned on the basis of universal criteria.<ref name="Krueger 2005 35"/>