Heterogeneity

Parts of speech in traditional interpretation are heterogeneous. Nouns can be distinguished into those with a developed paradigm (the plural, the genitive case, articles, any function in a sentence), but still there are nouns used only in the singular or only in the plural, nouns singular in form but plural in combinability( Police are; The New York police is one of the best polices in the world). We find notionals with a developed paradigm, auxiliaries and modals with a defective paradigm, substitutes (do), link verbs, verbs with a double syntactic capacity ( Flying can be dangerous; The chicken eats well). Pronouns are heterogeneous: there are pronouns with nounal and adjectival properties, etc. Pronouns do not name anything, they only represent. Some pronouns are declinable, but some of them are indeclinable. They possess properties of both notional and functional words. According to N. Chomsky, adverbs are most heterogeneous.

Though a greater homogeneity was achieved by Ch. Fries’s classification as compared with traditional classifications, his classes of words are still very heterogeneous. Nouns and pronouns are analysed together as they often function in the same way. Substitution is a mechanistic procedure, it can’t be relied upon. There’s much illogical and paradoxical in each class, but each class is communicatively unique and specific. It’s quite natural as a natural language is not a rigid inflexible system. There should be hybrid formations, syncretical phenomena, transitions from class to class.