Re: Parts of Speech - how many?

At 21:43 18/07/03, Markus Miekk-oja <fam.miekk-oja@...> rote:
>Swedish parts of speech:
>
> >nouns
> >verbs
> >adjectives
> >adverbs
> >prepositions
> >conjunctions
> >articles
> >interjections
> >infinitival marker
> >participles
> >
>I've never seen participles counted separately - I take it you mean the
>one's with auxiliry verbs. Wouldn't those rather be a class in clause
>analyzis? (grouped with such concepts as subject, object, etc.)?
>I guess you could have a class of postpositions separately from prepositions
>in Swedish too, but they're extremely rare (the only one I'd ever use
>postpositionally is "förutan").
Well, I don't know what Swedish is like, but I was present once at a
reading of a paper about English participles.  It seems that they vary
greatly in their degree of "adjectiveness": some are full adjectives, some
have only pure participial uses, and some fell somewhere in between.  I
forget the details, but there were certainly at least 4 degrees of
adjectiveness  (and it may well be more complicated).

What I would like to know myself is whether these different types of
participles form subclasses, or whether the behaviour is entirely
idiosyncratic.

Ian