Re: Parts of Speech - how many?

In a message dated 7/18/2003 2:30:14 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
stoiberh@INODE.AT writes:


>Yes, and about simplifying an existing system much has been said.
>But: What if somebody wants to create an artlang just for himself,
>saying: I want more parts of speech! Many ways of minimizing and
>combining parts of speech have been pointed out. What, on the
>contrary, is the known, thought or perceived maximum for their
>number and diversity? Sounds like a stupid question? Maybe. But
>since its about artistic freedom of conlanging, this list
>should be the right place to discuss it. ;-)


You could subdivide a number of the traditional parts of speech
Someone already mentioned that subordinating conjunctions and coordinating
conjunctions could be considered different POS.  Similarly, numerals,
demonstratives and quantifiers (all, each, every  . . .) are sometimes lumped in with
adjectives, but could be separate POS.

The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg notes somewhere that dictionaries generally
class all the following as adverbs: "ago", "quickly", "very", "nonetheless", and
"aboard" (when it's not used with an object).  Those words seem to have little
in common & could easily be subdivided into different POS.

It occurred to me a while back as I was pondering my principal conlang that
English teachers will tell you that adjectives and adverbs (as in quick vs.
quickly) are different POS, even though the only obvious difference is in what
word they modify (a noun vs. a verb).  Meanwhile, all prepositions are
considered one POS even though they can be used either adjectivally or adverbially.
This seems arbitrary.  One could merge the adjectives & adverbs, or else split
the preps into 2 POS: adnominal/adjectival  preps and adverbial preps.

(Or, since in a sense a prep is just a adjective/adverb that takes an object
-- i.e., it's a transitive adjective/adverb -- one could merge these all into
one class.)

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