Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the prerequisites for classifying parts of speech, including word parsing, word identity and the internal hierarchies of modern Chinese. It explains the theoretical issues for classifying parts of speech. The book provides the possibility and purpose of classifying parts of speech and points out that words are combined not randomly but in a certain order. It analyses the nature of parts of speech. Since US descriptive linguistics came into being, it has been generally believed that a part of speech is of the distribution type. The book describes criteria for classifying parts of speech, which must satisfy the three conditions: reflecting the properties of a part of speech, being observable and being comprehensive. A word’s morphological change, expressional function, grammatical meaning or intrinsic expressional function all can be used as criteria for classifying parts of speech.