The question of what a part of speech is in modern language textbooks is raised in elementary school. Children receive primary information about morphology from the first year of study.
Further, this information is replenished. The study of word groups according to their grammatical features is completed, as a rule, in the seventh grade.
So what is a part of speech? This term refers to a certain category of lexical units that have a common semantic and morphological features. For a noun, such indicators for association will be objectivity, the distinction between common and proper words, the presence of number and gender, etc. And for the verb - the designation of an action or process, belonging to a perfect or imperfect form, the presence of a special form of inflection - conjugation. Academic information about what a part of speech is is enough in the specialized literature. Therefore, let's focus only on difficult cases of morphology.
Differenceindependent words from service words
There are only ten morphological groups in Russian. They are divided into 3 categories: independent, service and interjections. These categories of lexical units have grammatical differences. Often students do not recognize them. Significant words always have a visible image and interpretation. Whether it is an object, an action, a sign or a number, we can always imagine them or refer to an explanatory dictionary. Functional words are meaningless from the point of view of vocabulary, their task is to perform certain roles: connecting simple sentences as part of a complex one, determining the dependence of one significant word on another, etc. And interjections are necessary to express feelings or emotions: oh, oh, wow, and so on.
Homonymy in morphology
Many schoolchildren are perplexed by the following question: what is the morphological characteristic of the word "thanks"? "What" is what part of speech? Or "cold"? And the word "sleep"? And there are many similar, at first glance, difficult cases of determining the morphological belonging of a word. In fact, the problem can arise only in case of inability to ask a question to a word. But without context, it is impossible to determine which part of speech is in front of us in the case of homonymy.
But in a sentence it is very easy to understand: you just need to ask a question.
Generic participle/preposition:
Thanks to (doing what?) her parents, Anna hugged them tightly. Thanks to (what?) their care, she recovered
Pronoun/conjunction:
Ivanasked: "What (what?) Is a part of speech?" Andrei replied that (you can't ask a question) he doesn't know
Short adjective/status category:
Her greeting was (what?) cold. It made me very (how?) cold
Verb/short adjective:
He sang a song to me in the evening (what did he do?) that the tomato had already sung (what?)
That is why the morphological analysis of the word is always proposed to be done in a specific sentence, so that students can ask a question from a different lexical unit. As you have now seen, the definition of the part of speech does not rest only on the mechanical memorization of grammatical features, but is a creative and interesting process.
