Re: CHAT: New Member With Questions

Brandon Denny wrote:

> 1)  Word Classes.  What the heck is this?  Obviously I am familiar with the
> basics, i.e. Noun, Verb, Adverb, Adjective.  When searching on-line I found
> repeated references to classes that exist in other languages that do not fit
> into those categories; unfortunatly those sites gave no explanations.  Does
> anyone know anything about those other classes?
This is just a place to start, but you might have a look at the article
"Parts-of-Speech Systems" by Paul Schachter, published in the book "Language
Typology and Syntactic Description" vol. 1, edited by Timothy Shopen and
published by Cambridge University Press (1985), ISBN 0-521-27659-4.  This book
should be available at any reasonably well-stocked university library.

Although it's a linguistics article, it's actully pretty non-technical, and
should be a reasonably easy read for the well-motivated layperson (I read it in
my introductory linguistics class, without difficulty).  It provides an
excellent introductory survey of word classes--what kinds there are, how common
they are, which ones are universal, etc.  Lots of useful information and
examples.

Welcome to the list!

Matt.