ABSTRACT
Scholars have reached the consensus that Chinese part-of-speech classification should be based on the distribution of words and proposed their specific classification criteria. The most fundamental issue is that the identification of classification criteria from grammatical characteristics may actually fall into a circular argument: only after parts of speech have already been classified can it is decided what grammatical characteristics exist; however, the classification itself depends on grammatical characteristics. At first, the determination of parts of speech based on major functions meant that the determination should be based on the major functions of a word, but later the determination was changed to the determination of part-of-speech classification criteria based on major functions of a part of speech. The reason why part-of-speech classification should be based on distributional characteristics is that the difference among some grammatical functions indicates the difference in parts of speech.
