Parts is Parts

by | Jan 23, 2024 | blog post, Purpose

The Wendy’s hamburger chain added a chicken sandwich to its menu in the ’80s and this memorable ad was created, never to be forgotten
The part of speech indicates how the word functions in meaning as well as grammatically within the sentence. An individual word can function as more than one part of speech when used in different circumstances.

A century or two after the work of Yāska, the Plato wrote in his Cratylus dialogue, “sentences are, I conceive, a combination of verbs [rhêma] and nouns [ónoma]”.[9] Aristotle added another class, “conjunction” [sýndesmos], which included not only the words known today as conjunctions, but also other parts (the interpretations differ; in one interpretation it is pronouns, prepositions, and the article).[10]

As you recall, Plato gave us the three-act story structure.

By the end of the 2nd century BCE, grammarians had expanded this classification scheme into eight categories, seen in the Art of Grammar, attributed to Dionysius Thrax:[11]

  1. ‘Name’ (ónoma) translated as “Noun“: a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a concrete or abstract entity. It includes various species like nouns, adjectives, proper nouns, appellatives, collectives, ordinals, numerals and more.[12]
  2. Verb (rhêma): a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone
  3. Participle (metokhḗ): a part of speech sharing features of the verb and the noun
  4. Article (árthron): a declinable part of speech, taken to include the definite article, but also the basic relative pronoun
  5. Pronoun (antōnymíā): a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for a person
  6. Preposition (próthesis): a part of speech placed before other words in composition and in syntax
  7. Adverb (epírrhēma): a part of speech without inflection, in modification of or in addition to a verb, adjective, clause, sentence, or other adverb
  8. Conjunction (sýndesmos): a part of speech binding together the discourse and filling gaps in its interpretation