ABSTRACT
The real classification of Chinese parts of speech began with Ma’s Grammar by Ma Jianzhong. Drawing on the Western grammars, he classified the ancient Chinese parts of speech into nine parts of speech as follows: nouns, pronouns, motional words, still words, descriptive words, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary words, interjections. In addition to the morphological evidence, a syntactic marker also serves as evidence that Chinese has parts of speech because it signifies the capability of a word to occupy a certain syntactic position in a sentence. Chinese words can be classified into various parts of speech and contain all the concepts needed by a language. When somebody believes that Chinese has parts of speech, their belief is based on the evidence that Chinese has morphology. Some scholars like Wang Li held that meaning, morphology and syntax should be jointly used to classify parts of speech. The purpose for classifying parts of speech is actually concerned with the attitude toward language.
