Chapter 3. Parts of speech

Parts of speech refer to the different grammatical categories in which the lexical items of a language may be classified based on its syntactic and morphological behaviour. In every language there is a distinction between functional elements and lexical or content elements. Functional elements, like pronouns, adpositions, conjunctions, numerals, quantifiers, and interjections, belong to a closed class of words and do not have a concrete meaning on their own. Lexical or content elements, like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbials, belong to an open class of words and have a specific conceptual meaning. This section presents different categories of functional and lexical elements that have been identified for LSC.