Parts of speech: a critical path towards a didactic relevance

Abstract

The unity of the language known as 'word' has always been at the center of grammatical analysis in the West, since the studies of Greek philologists in the 2nd century BC. The association between the concept of word and the structuring of thought has gone down through the centuries: the act of thinking involves beings, named by nouns, and the actions they perform, named by verbs. We learned in school benches an official classificatory grid, in force in Brazil since 1959 (the Brazilian Grammatical Nomenclature), which comprises ten classes. School tradition has taught us to identify them by what they mean: nouns name beings and objects, verbs denote actions and processes, adverbs express circumstances etc. etc. This is, in fact, the profile of many nouns ( fish, pencils), verbs (to swim, grow) and adverbs (now, so). However, the existence of many other semantic species of nouns, verbs and adverbs prevents the formulation of concise and comprehensive definitions for these classes based on what the forms gathered in each mean. The classification criteria must be objective and comprehensive. In the case of words, these criteria must be based on their grammatical properties, present in their form (morphological characteristics) and revealed in the positions they occupy and in the relationships they contract within the sentence (combinatory or syntactic characteristics). This article addresses the status of the different classes of words in the light of the history of grammatical thought, its theoretical problematization and its pedagogical relevance.