D. V. Demidov

particles. However, though the criterion for classification was 
functional, Henry Sweet failed to break the tradition and classified 
words into those having morphological forms and lacking 
morphological forms, in other words, declinable and indeclinab le.
A distributional approach to the parts of speech 
classification can be illustrated by the classification introduced by 
Charles Fries. He wanted to avoid the traditional terminology and 
establish a classification of words based on distributive analysis, 
that is, the ability of words to combine with other words of 
different types. Within this approach, the part of speech is a 
functioning pattern and a word belonging to the same class should 
be the same only in one aspect – occupy the same position and 
perform the same syntactic function in speech utterances. Charles 

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Fries introduced this classification. He used the method of 
frames (подстановки) e.g.: 
Frame A 
The concert was good. 
Frame B 
The clerk remembered the tax. 
Frame C 
The team went there. 
Words that can substitute the word ―concert‖, ―clerk‖, 
―team‖, ―the tax‖ (e.g. woman, food, coffee, etc.) are Class 1 
words. Class 2 words are ―was‖, ―remembered‖ and ―went‖. 
Words that can take the position of ―good‖ are Class 3 words. 
Words that can fill the position of ―there‖ are called Class 4 
words. [19, p. 108] 
It turned out that his four classes of words were practically 
the same as traditional nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. What 
is really valuable in Charles Fries‘ classification is his 
investigation of 15 groups of function words (form-classes) 
because he was the first linguist to pay attention to some of their 
peculiarities. 
The drawback of this classification is that morphological 
and semantic properties are completely neglected, because words 
of different nature are treated as items of the same class and vice a 
versa. 
In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated on 
the basis of the three criteria: ―semantic‖, ―formal‖, and 
―functional‖.
The semantic criterion presupposes the evaluatio n of the 
generalized meaning, which is characteristic of all the subset of 
words constituting a given part of speech. This meaning is 
understood as the ―categorial meaning of the part of speech‖. The 
formal criterion provides for the exposition of the spec ific 

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inflexional and derivational (word-building) features of all the 
lexemic subsets of a part of speech. The functional criterion 
concerns the syntactic role of words in the sentence typical of a