ABSTRACT
Whether Chinese has the same range of parts of speech (or categories) as the Indo-European languages has been of much discussion in the literature. In particular, while it is generally recognized that Chinese makes a distinction between nouns and verbs, scholars hold different opinions regarding the rest of the categories (see Chao 1968; C. N. Li and Thompson 1981; D. Zhu 1982; and Xing and Ma 1992, inter alia). The differences in opinions are partly due to the different theoretical backgrounds adopted by linguists, and partly due to the use of different terminological conventions. As a result, different criteria are employed for classifying words, and different terminological conventions are used to label the categories. In order to address the question of whether Chinese possesses the same range of categories as the Indo-European languages, I shall make use of the familiar categories of the IndoEuropean languages whenever possible.
