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§ 4. We have drawn a general outline of the division of the lexicon 
into part of speech classes developed by modern linguists on the 
lines of traditional morphology. 
It is known that the distribution of words between different parts of 
speech may to a certain extent differ with different authors. This 
fact gives cause to some linguists for calling in question the ra-
tional character of the part of speech classification as a whole, 
gives them cause for accusing it of being subjective or "prescien-
tific" in essence. Such nihilistic criticism, however, should be re-
jected as utterly ungrounded. 
Indeed, considering the part of speech classification on its merits, 
one must clearly realise that what is above all important about it is 
the fundamental principles of word-class identification, and not oc-
casional enlargements or diminutions of the established groups, or 
re-distributions of individual words due to re-considerations of 
their subcategorial features. The very idea of subcategorisation as 
the obligatory second stage of the undertaken classification testifies 
to the objective nature of this kind of analysis. 
For instance, prepositions and conjunctions can be combined into 
one united series of "connectives", since the function of both is just 
to connect notional components of the sentence. In this case, on the 
second stage of classification, the enlarged word-class of connec-
tives will be 

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subdivided into two main subclasses, namely, prepositional con-
nectives and conjunctional connectives. Likewise, the articles can 
be included as a subset into the more general set of particles-
specifiers. As is known, nouns and adjectives, as well as numerals, 
are treated in due contexts of description under one common class-
term "names": originally, in the Ancient Greek grammatical teach-
ing they were not differentiated because they had the same forms 
of morphological change (declension). On the other hand, in vari-
ous descriptions of English grammar such narrow lexemic sets as 
the two words yes and no, the pronominal determiners of nouns, 
even the one anticipating pronoun it are given a separate class-item 
status — though in no way challenging or distorting the functional 
character of the treated units. 
It should be remembered that modern principles of part of speech 
identification have been formulated as a result of painstaking re-
search conducted on the vast materials of numerous languages; and 
it is in Soviet linguistics that the three-criteria characterisation of