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Re: Parts of Speech - how many?

From:Ian Spackman <ianspackman@...>
Date:Friday, July 18, 2003, 21:38
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