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parts of speech has been developed and applied to practice with the 
utmost consistency. The three celebrated names are especially no-
table for the elaboration of these criteria, namely, V. V. Vinogra-
dov in connection with his study of Russian grammar, A. I. 
Smirnitsky and B. A. Ilyish in connection with their study of Eng-
lish grammar. 
§ 5. Alongside of the three-criteria principle of dividing the words 
into grammatical (lexico-grammatical) classes modern linguistics 
has developed another, narrower principle of word-class identifica-
tion based on syntactic featuring of words only. 
The fact is, that the three-criteria principle faces a special difficulty 
in determining the part of speech status of such lexemes as have 
morphological characteristics of notional words, but are essentially 
distinguished from notional words by their playing the role of 
grammatical mediators in phrases and sentences. Here belong, for 
instance, modal verbs together with their equivalents — suppletive 
fillers, auxiliary verbs, aspective verbs, intensifying adverbs, de-
terminer pronouns. This difficulty, consisting in the intersection of 
heterogeneous properties in the established word-classes, can evi-
dently be overcome by recognising only one criterion of the three 
as decisive. 
Worthy of note is that in the original Ancient Greek 

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grammatical teaching which put forward the first outline of the part 
of speech theory, the division of words into grammatical classes 
was also based on one determining criterion only, namely, on the 
formal-morphological featuring. It means that any given word un-
der analysis was turned into a classified lexeme on the principle of 
its relation to grammatical change. In conditions of the primary ac-
quisition of linguistic knowledge, and in connection with the study 
of a highly inflexional language this characteristic proved quite ef-
ficient. 
Still, at the present stage of the development of linguistic science, 
syntactic characterisation of words that has been made possible af-
ter the exposition of their fundamental morphological properties, is 
far more important and universal from the point of view of the 
general classificational requirements. 
This characterisation is more important, because it shows the dis-
tribution of words between different sets in accord with their func-
tional destination. The role of morphology by this presentation is 
not underrated, rather it is further clarified from the point of view 
of exposing connections between the categorial composition of the 
word and its sentence-forming relevance. 
This characterisation is more universal, because it is not specially 
destined for the inflexional aspect of language and hence is equally 
applicable to languages of various morphological types. 
On the material of Russian, the principles of syntactic approach to 
the classification of word stock were outlined in the works of A. 
M. Peshkovsky. The principles of syntactic (syntactico-
distributional) classification of English words were worked out by 
L. Bloomfield and his followers Z. Harris and especially Ch. Fries.