Question:
Probably a dumb question but here goes. When I was in high school
we were taught that English has 8 POS: n, ad, av, v, cj, pr, pn
and interjection. Now it seems to me this is an over-simplification.
The adverb "not" isn't interchangeable with all other adverbs, for
example, it behaves differently with regard to syntax. And surely
the demonstratives (this, these, that, those) are different from
other adjectives. So how many POS do we really have?
Answer:
From what I know, it is 8 in *written* Standard American English. You can't
say that there is a definite number of parts of speech in colloquial spoken
American English. The number of parts of speech gets sort of indefinite in
written Standard American English depending on how you treat contractions. A
good example that shows that the parts of speech in colloquial spoken American
English is indefinite is the word "couldja". "couldja" acts as both an adverb
and a pronoun, as well as indicating that the main verb is interrogative.
"couldja" should probably be treated as a special non-standard inflected form
of the word "could". The same is true with words such as "wouldja", "couldya"
(same as "couldja" but different pronounciation), "cancha", "canya", etc. Note
that these are all non-standard colloquial spoken forms.
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