D. V. Demidov

Questions for Reflection: 
1. What is the grammatical meaning? Is there any 
difference between grammatical and lexical meanings?
2. What is a grammatical form? What types of form-
building in English do you know? 
3. What is the grammatical category? Why is opposition 
the basis of the grammatical category? 
4. What kinds of oppositions are there in morphology? 
5. What is the purpose of the distributional analysis? What 
terms appeared due to the distributional analysis?
6. What is the classification of morphemes according to 
the functional features? 

---

42 
Topic 3. The Theory of Grammatical Classes of Words. 
Questions for Discussion:  
1. The study of grammatical classes of words. 
2. Contemporary criteria for classifying words into parts of 
speech. 
3. A comprehensive approach to the discrimination of 
parts of speech. 
4. The notional and functional parts of speech.
5. Parts of speech subcategorisation. 
1. The study of grammatical classes of words. 
The words of language, depending on various formal and 
semantic features, are divided into gra mmatically relevant sets or 
classes. The traditional grammatical classes of words are called 
―parts of speech‖. Since the word is distinguished not only by 
grammatical, but also by semantico- lexemic properties, some 
scholars (V. Smirnitsky) refer to parts of speech as ―lexico-
grammatical‖ series of words, or as “lexico-grammatical 
categories” [12, p. 100]. Prof. M. Blokh introduced the term 
“grammatical classes‖. He starts from the assumption that what 
is traditionally called a part of speech is a type of word, which 
grammatically differs from other types of words. [2, p. 68] 
It should be noted that the traditional term ―parts of 
speech‖ was developed in Ancient Greek linguistics and reflects 
the fact that at that time there was no distinction between langua ge 
as a system and speech, between the word as a part of an utterance 
and the word as a part of lexis. The term ―parts of speech‖ is 
accepted by modern linguistics as a conventional, or ―non-
explanatory‖ term (―name-term‖) to denote the lexico-
grammatical classes of words correlating with each other in the 

---

43 
general system of language on the basis of their grammatically 
relevant properties. 
The system of parts of speech is historically changeable, 
e.g. articles, modal verbs, statives were not recognized as separate