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Capel R M 1992 El Sufragio femenino en la Segunda Repu U blica. Comunidad de Madrid, Madrid Cohen Y, The! baud F (eds.) 1998 Fe U minismes et identite U s nationales: Les Processus d’inte U gration des femmes au politique. Centre Jacques Cartier, Lyon, France Corbin A, Lalouette J, Riot-Sarcey M (eds.) 1997 Les Femmes dans la cite U. Cre! aphis, Gra#ne, France Daley C, Nolan M (eds.) 1994 Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspecti ä es. Auckland University Press, Auckland; New York University Press, New York; Pluto Press, London DuBois E C 1997 Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT DuBois E C 1998 Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights. New York University Press, New York Fagoaga C 1985 La Voz y el ä oto de las mujeres: El sufragismo en Espan h a, 1877–1931. Icaria, Barcelona, Spain Faure! C 1997 Encyclope U die politique et historique des femmes: Europe, Amerique de Nord. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris Grimshaw P 1987 [orig. 1972] Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand. Auckland University Press, Auckland; Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Hardemeier S 1997 Fru X he Frauenstimmrechtsbewegung in der Schweiz (1890–1930): Argumente, Strategien, Netzwerk und Gegenbewegung. Chronos, Zurich, Switzerland Hause S C, Kenney A R 1984 Women’s Suffrage and Social Politics in the French Third Republic. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ Holton S S 1986 Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900–1918. Cambridge Uni- versity Press, Cambridge, UK Holton S S 1996 Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Mo ä ement. Routledge, London Joannou M, Purvis J (eds.) 1999 The Women’s Suffrage Mo ä ement: New Feminist Perspecti ä es. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK Lavrin A 1995 Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NB MacKenzie M 1988 Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary. The Stirring History of the Militant Suffragettes. Vintage Books, New York [Accompanies the documentary film] Miller F 1991 Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice. University Press of New England, Hanover and London Murphy C 1989 The Women’s Suffrage Mo ä ement and Irish Society in the Early Twentieth Century. Temple University Press, Philadelphia Offen K M 2000 European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Oldfield A 1992 Woman Suffrage in Australia: a Gift or a Struggle. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Prentice A, Bourne P, Brandt G C, Light B, Mitchinson W, Black N 1988 Canadian Women: A History. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Toronto Rupp L J 1997 Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Mo ä ement. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ Sepe C, Izzi Di Paolo P (eds.) 1997 Il ä oto alle donne cinquant’anni dopo. Ufficio Progretti Donna, Commune di Roma Smith P 1996 Feminism and the Third Republic: Women’s Political and Ci ä il Rights in France, 1918–1945. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK
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K. Offen
Word Classes and Parts of Speech
There is a long tradition of classifying words, for the purpose of grammatical description, into the ten word classes (or parts of speech) noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, numeral, article, interjection. While each of these terms is useful, and they are indispensable for practical purposes, their status in a fully explicit description of a language or in general grammatical theory remains disputed. Al- though most of the traditional word class distinctions can be made in most languages, the cross-linguistic applicability of these notions is often problematic. Here I focus primarily on the major word classes noun, verb, and adjective, and on ways of dealing with the cross-linguistic variability in their patterning.
1. The Classification of Words Words can be classified by various criteria, such as phonological properties (e.g., monosyllabic vs. poly- syllabic words), social factors (e.g., general vs. technical vocabulary), and language history (e.g., loanwords vs. native words). All of these are classes of words, but as a technical term, word class refers to the ten traditional categories below (plus perhaps a few others), most of which go back to the Greek and Roman grammarians. In addition to the terms, a few examples are given of each word class.
Noun book , storm , arri ä al Verb push , sit , know Adjective good , blue , Polish Adverb quickly , ä ery , fortunately Pronoun you , this , nobody Preposition}adposition on , for , because of Conjunction and , if , while Numeral one , twice , third Article the , a Interjection ouch , tsk
Women’s Suffrage
(In this article, the more general term ‘adposition’ will be used rather than preposition, because many lan- guages have postpositions rather than prepositions, and word order is irrelevant in this context.) The special status of the classification above derives from the fact that these are the most important classes of words for the purpose of grammatical description, equally relevant for morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics. This makes the classification more interest- ing, but also more complex and more problematic than other classifications of words. Besides the term word class, the older term part of speech (Latin pars orationis ) is still often used, although it is now quite opaque (originally it referred to sentence constituents). The term word class was introduced in the first half of the twentieth century by structuralist linguistics. An- other roughly equivalent term, common especially in Chomskyan linguistics is ‘syntactic category’ (al- though technically this refers not only to lexical categories such as nouns and verbs, but also to phrasal categories such as noun phrases and verb phrases). The main two problems with the maximal word- class above are (a) that some of the classes intersect (e.g., the English word ‘there’ is both a pronoun and an adverb), and (b) that the different classes do not have equal weight; while most languages have hun- dreds of verbs and thousands of nouns, there are far fewer pronouns and conjunctions, and often only a handful of adpositions and articles. The solution that is often adopted explicitly for the second problem is to make a further subdivision into major word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and minor word classes (all others). (Alternative terms for major and minor classes are content words}function words and, especially in Chomskyan linguistics, lexical cate- gories}functional categories.) This distinction is dis- cussed further in Sect. 2. The solution to the first problem that is implicit in much contemporary work is that pronouns and numerals are not regarded as word classes on a par with nouns, verbs, prepositions, and so on. Instead, they are regarded as semantically highly specific subclasses of the other classes. For instance, there are nominal pronouns (e.g., he, who ), adjectival pronouns (e.g., this, which, such ) and ad- verbial pronouns (e.g., here, thus ). Similarly, there are adjectival numerals ( fi ä e, fifth ), adverbial numerals ( twice ), and nominal numerals ( a fifth, a fi ä e ). Some languages also have verbal pronouns and verbal numerals. Accordingly, this article will not deal with pronouns (see Pronouns ) and numerals (see Numeral Systems ).
2. Content Words and Function Words
In all languages, words (and entire word classes) can be divided into the two broad classes of content words and function words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs are content words, and adpositions, conjunc- tions, and articles, as well as auxiliaries and words classified as ‘particles’ are function words. While there is sometimes disagreement over the assignment of words and even entire word classes to these two broad categories, their usefulness and importance is not in doubt. Content word classes are generally open (i.e., they accept new members in principle) and large (comprising hundreds or thousands of words), and content words tend to have a specific, concrete meaning. They tend to be fairly long (often disyllabic or longer), and their text frequency is fairly low. By contrast, function word classes are generally closed and small, and function words tend to have abstract, general meaning (or no meaning at all, but only a grammatical function in specific constructions). They tend to be quite short (rarely longer than a syllable), and their text frequency is high. This is summarized in Table 1. The reason why auxiliaries are not included in the traditional list of word classes is probably merely that they are not prominent in Greek and Latin grammar, but in many languages these ‘function verbs’ are very important (English examples are be, ha ä e, can, must, will, should ). The class ‘particle’ is really only a waste- basket category: function words that do not fit into any of the other classes are usually called particles (e.g., ‘focus particles,’ such as only and also , ‘question particles,’ such as Polish czy in Czy mo U wisz po polsku? ‘Do you speak Polish?,’ or ‘discourse particles’ such as German ja in Das ist ja scho X n! ‘That’s nice! (expressing surprise).’ The precise delimitation of function words and content words is often difficult. For instance, while the conjunctions if, when, as, and because are unequivo- cally function words, this is less clear for words like suppose, pro ä ided that, granted that, assuming that. And while the adpositions in, on, of, at are clearly function words, this is less clear for concerning, considering, in ä iew of. In the case of adpositions, linguists sometimes say that there are two subclasses, ‘function adpositions’ and ‘content adpositions,’ anal- ogous to the distinction between content verbs and function verbs (Ø auxiliaries). Another widespread view is that word-class boundaries are not always sharp, and that there can be intermediate cases between full verbs and auxiliaries, between nouns and adpositions, and between nouns}verbs and conjunc- tions. Quite generally, function words arise from content words by the diachronic process of gram- maticalization (see Grammaticalization ), and since grammaticalization is generally regarded as a gradual diachronic process, it is expected that the resulting function words form a gradient from full content words to clear function words. When grammatic- alization proceeds further, function words may become clitics and finally affixes, and again we often find intermediate cases which cannot easily be classi- fied as words or word-parts.
4. Characterizing Nouns, Verbs, and Adjecti ä es
Despite the theoretical problems in defining word classes in general, in practice it is often not difficult to agree on the use of these terms in a particular language. This is because nouns, verbs, and adjectives show great similarities in their behavior across languages. Their most common characteristics are briefly summarized in this section.
4.1 Nouns
In many languages, nouns have affixes indicating number (singular, plural, dual, see Grammatical Number ), case (e.g., nominative, accusative, ergative, dative), possessor person}number (‘my,’ ‘your,’ ‘his,’ etc.), and definiteness. Some examples follow.
(a) Number. Khanty (Western Siberia) xot ‘house,’
xot - yyn ‘two houses’ (dual), xot - yt ‘houses’ ( plural).
(b) Case. Classical Arabic al - kitaab - u
‘the book’ (nominative), al - kitaab - i ‘the book’s’ (genitive), al - kitaab - a ‘the book (accusative).’
(c) Possessor person}number. Somali xoolah - ayga
‘my herd,’ xoolah - aaga ‘your herd,’ xoleh - eeda ‘her herd,’ xooli - hiisa ‘his herd,’ etc.
Syntactically, nouns can always be combined with demonstratives (e.g., that house ) and often with defin- iteness markers ( the house ), and they can occur in the syntactic function of argument (subject, object, etc.) without additional coding. Thus, in a simple two- argument clause we can have the child N caused the accident N , but not * smoke V causes ill A
. (Here and in the following, the subscripts N , V and A indicate nouns, verbs and adjectives.) Verbs like smoke and adjectives like ill need additional function-indicating coding to occur in argument function ( smok - ing causes ill - ness ). Because reference is primarily achieved with nouns, it is nouns that can serve as antecedents for pronouns (compare Albania ’ s destruction of itself vs. * the Albanian destruction of itself (impossible)). Finally, nouns are often divided into a number of gender classes which are manifested in grammatical agree- ment (see Grammatical Gender ).
4.2 Verbs
In many languages, verbs have affixes indicating tense (present, past, future), aspect (imperfective, perfective,
progressive), mood (indicative, imperative, optative, subjunctive, etc.), polarity (affirmative, negative), va- lence-changing operations (passive causative, see Valency and Argument Structure in Syntax ), and the person}number of subject and object(s) (see Gram - matical Agreement ). Semantic notions that are more rarely expressed morphologically are spatial orienta- tion and instrument. Some examples follow.
(a) Tense. Panyjima (Australia) wiya - lku
‘sees,’ wiya - larta ‘will see,’ wiya - rna ‘saw.’
(b) Subject person}number. Hungarian la U t - ok
‘I see,’ la U t - sz ‘you see,’ la U t ‘s}he sees.’
(c) Valence-changing. Turkish unut - ‘forget,’
unut - ul - ‘be forgotten’ ( passive), unut - tur -
‘make forget’ (causative).
(d) Spatial orientation. Russian ä y - letat ’ ‘fly out,’
ä- letat ’ ‘fly in,’ pere - letat ’ ‘fly over ,’ ä z - letat ’
‘fly up.’
Syntactically, verbs generally take between one and three nominal arguments, e.g., fall (1: patient), dance (1: agent), kill (2: agent, patient), see (2: experiencer, stimulus), gi ä e (3: agent, patient, recipient). Nouns and adjectives may also take arguments, but they are not nearly as rich as verbs, and nouns that correspond to verbs often cannot take arguments in the most direct way (compare Plato defined beauty vs. * Plato definition beauty (impossible); additional coding is required: Plato ’ s definition of beauty. Verbs always occur as predicates without additional coding, whereas nouns and adjectives often need additional function- indicating coding when they occur as predicates, namely a copular verb (cf. Halim worksV vs. * Halim a workerN (impossible), * Halim hard - workingA (impos- sible); here the copula is is required).
4.3 Adjecti ä es In a fair number of languages, adjectives have affixes indicating comparison (comparative degree, superla- tive degree, equative degree), and in a few languages, adjectives are inflected for agreement with the noun they modify. Some examples follow.
(a) Comparison. Latin audax ‘brave,’ audac - ior
‘braver’ (comparative), audac - issimus
‘bravest’ (superlative).
(b) Comparison. Tagalog (Philippines) mahal
expensive;’ sing - mahal ‘as expensive as.’
(c) Agreement. Hindi acchaa ‘good’ (masculine
singular), acchee (masculine plural), acchii (feminine singular}plural).
In many languages, adjectives show no inflectional properties of their own. Syntactically, a peculiarity of adjectives is that they can typically occur in com- parative constructions (whether they show affixes marking comparison or not), and they can be com- bined with degree modifiers of various kinds that do not co-occur with verbs and nouns (e.g., ä ery hotA , too difficultA , cf. * workV ä ery , * too mistakeN (impossible)). Adjectives generally occur as nominal modifiers with- out additional coding (cf. a baldA man ), whereas nouns and verbs mostly need additional function-indicating coding when they occur as modifiers (* a beardN man } a man with a beard , * a sha ä eN man } a man who sha ä es ).
5. Difficulties of Classification
The general properties of nouns, verbs, and adjectives that were sketched in Sect. 5 are sufficient to establish these classes without much doubt in a great many languages. However, again and again linguists report on languages where such a threefold subdivision does not seem appropriate. Particularly problematic are adjectives (Sect. 5.1) but languages lacking a noun- –verb distinction are also claimed to exist (Sect. 5.2), and Sect. 5.3 discusses adverbs, which present dif- ficulties in all languages.
5.1 The Uni ä ersality of Adjecti ä es
In contrast to nouns and verbs, adjectives are some- times like function words in that they form a rather small, closed class. For instance, Tamil (southern India) and Hausa (northern Nigeria) have only about a dozen adjectives. Interestingly, in such languages the concepts that are denoted by adjectives in the small class coincide to a large extent (Dixon 1977): di- mension (‘large,’ ‘small,’ ‘long,’ ‘short,’ etc.), age (‘new,’ ‘young,’ ‘old,’ etc.), value (‘good,’ ‘bad’), color (‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘red,’ etc.). Other concepts for which English has adjectives (e.g., human propensity con- cepts such as ‘happy,’ ‘clever,’ ‘proud,’ ‘jealous,’ and physical property concepts such as ‘soft,’ ‘heavy,’ ‘hot’) are then expressed by verbs or by nouns. For instance, in Tamil, ‘heavy man’ is ganam - ul d
l d
a manus d
an , literally ‘weight-having man,’ and in Hausa, ‘intel- ligent person’ is mutum mai hankali , literally ‘person having intelligence.’
But even more strikingly, many languages appear to lack adjectives entirely, expressing all property con- cepts by words that look like verbs or like nouns. For instance, in Korean, property concepts inflect for tense and mood like verbs in predication structures, and they require a relative suffix (see Relati ä e Clauses ) when they modify a noun, again like verbs (cf. (b) (i), (ii)) below.
(a) Predication (i) Event salam - i mek - ess - ta person- eat-- ‘the person ate’ (ii) Property san - i noph - ess - ta hill- high-- ‘the hill was high’
(b) Modification (i) Event mek - un salam eat- person ‘a person who ate’ (ii) Property noph - un san high- hill ‘a high hill’
While languages where all property words can be classified as verbs are very common, languages where all property concepts are nouns are less widely attested. A language for which such a claim has been made is Ecuadorian Quechua: in this language, prop- erty concept words can occur in argument position and take the same inflection as nouns (cf. (a)(i), (ii) below), and nouns can occur as modifiers without additional coding, like property words (cf. (b) (i), (ii) below).
(a) argument position (i) Thing wambra - ta - mi child-- wajta - rka hit-.3. ‘he hit the child’
concept of adverb should not be taken too seriously, because there are very few properties that adverbs of different kinds share. Five broad subclasses of adverbs are often distinguished: setting adverbs (locative: here, there, below, abroad ; temporal: now, then, yesterday, always ), manner adverbs ( quickly, carefully, beauti- fully ), degree adverbs (ä ery, too, extremely ), linking adverbs ( therefore, howe ä er, consequently ), and sen- tence adverbs ( perhaps, fortunately, frankly ) (see Quirk et al. 1985 for the most comprehensive semantic classification of adverbs). Setting adverbs, degree adverbs, and linking ad- verbs are relatively small, closed classes, and they often share properties with function words. Sentence adverbs are rare in most languages, and their great elaboration is probably a peculiarity of the written languages of Europe (Ramat and Ricca 1998). The only sizable subclass of adverbs that has equivalents in many languages is the class of manner adverbs. Many languages have a productive way of forming manner adverbs from adjectives (e.g., English warm } warmly , French lent ‘slow,’ lentement ‘slowly’). But this also makes manner adverbs problematic as a major word class, because one could argue that adjective-derived manner adverbs are just adjectives which occur with a special inflectional marker to indicate that they are not used in their canonical noun-modifying function. This point of view is non-traditional, but it seems quite reasonable, and it is strengthened by the fact that in quite a few languages, adjectives can be used as manner adverbs without any special marking. One of the main features that unifies the various subclasses of adverbs in languages like English and French is that four of the five classes contain adjective- derived words ending in - ly }- ment (only setting ad- verbs are almost never of this type). This is certainly no accident, but it should also be noted that this is probably a feature typical of European languages that is hardly found elsewhere.
6. Theoretical Approaches
While the identification and definition of word classes was regarded as an important task of descriptive and theoretical linguistics by classical structuralists (e.g., Bloomfield 1933), Chomskyan generative grammar simply assumed (contrary to fact) that the word classes of English (in particular the major or ‘lexical’ cate- gories noun, verb, adjective, and adposition) can be carried over to other languages. Without much ar- gument, it has generally been held that they belong to the presumably innate substantive universals of lan- guage, and not much was said about them (other than that they can be decomposed into the two binary features [≥N] and [≥V]: [≠N, ÆV] Ø noun, [ÆN, ≠V] Ø verb, [≠N, ≠V] Ø adjective, [ÆN, ÆN] Ø adposition) (see Linguistics: Theory of Prin- ciples and Parameters ).
Toward the end of the twentieth century, linguists (especially functionalists) became interested in word classes again. Wierzbicka (1986) proposed a more sophisticated semantic characterization of the differ- ence between nouns and adjectives (nouns categorize referents as belonging to a kind, adjectives describe them by naming a property), and Langacker (1987) proposed semantic definitions of noun (‘a region in some domain’) and verb (‘a sequentially scanned process’) in his framework of Cognitive Grammar. Hopper and Thompson (1984) proposed that the grammatical properties of word classes emerge from their discourse functions: ‘discourse-manipulable par- ticipants’ are coded as nouns, and ‘reported events’ are coded as verbs. There is also a lot of interest in the cross-linguistic regularities of word classes, cf. Dixon (1977), Bhat (1994) and Wetzer (1996) for adjectives, Walter (1981) and Sasse (1993a) for the noun–verb distinction, Hengeveld (1992b) and Stassen (1997) for non-verbal predication. Hengeveld (1992a) proposed that major word classes can either be lacking in a language (then it is called rigid) or a language may not differentiate between two word classes (then it is called flexible). Thus, ‘languages without adjectives’ (cf. Sect. 6) are either flexible in that they combine nouns and adjec- tives in one class (N}Adj), or rigid in that they lack adjectives completely. Hengeveld claims that besides the English type, where all four classes (VÆNÆ AdjÆAdv) are differentiated and exist, there are only three types of rigid languages (VÆNÆAdj, e.g., Wambon; VÆN, e.g., Hausa; and V, e.g., Tuscarora), and three types of flexible languages (VÆNÆAdj} Adv, e.g., German; VÆN}Adj}Adv, e.g., Quechua; V}N}Adj}Adv, e.g., Samoan). The most comprehensive theory of word classes and their properties is presented in Croft (1991). Croft notes that in all the cross-linguistic diversity, one can find universals in the form of markedness patterns; universally, object words are unmarked when func- tioning as referring arguments, property words are unmarked when functioning as nominal modifiers, and action words are unmarked when functioning as predicates. While it is not possible to define cross- linguistically applicable notions of noun, adjective, and verb on the basis of semantic and}or formal criteria alone, it is possible, according to Croft, to define nouns, adjectives, and verbs as cross-linguistic prototypes on the basis of the universal markedness patterns. For a sample of recent work on word classes in a cross-linguistic perspective, see Vogel and Comrie (2000), and the bibliography in Plank (1997). Other overviews are Sasse (1993b), Schachter (1985), and further collections of articles are Tersis-Surugue (1984) and Alpatov (1990).
See also : Lexical Processes (Word Knowledge): Psy- chological and Neural Aspects; Speech Production,
Neural Basis of; Speech Production, Psychology of; Word, Linguistics of; Word Meaning: Psychological Aspects; Word Recognition, Cognitive Psychology of
Bibliography
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M. Haspelmath
Word, Linguistics of
In thinking about words, the first question is how to divide an utterance up into them. The simple answer is that words are demarcated by spaces, just as they are on this page. But this simple answer depends on the existence of writing. In speech, we do not normally leave a space or pause between words. Most languages throughout history have not been written down. Surely we do not want to say that only written languages have words, and, even with written lan- guages, spacing does not provide an entirely satisfying answer. For example, English compounds can be spelled in three ways: open, closed, or hyphenated, and some items can be spelled in any of these three ways without being affected in any detectable way: birdhouse , bird - house , bird house. We do not want to say that the first spelling is one word, the last spelling two words, and the middle one neither one word nor two, which we would have to do if we accepted spaces as criterial. The better conclusion is that spelling con- ventions are not a completely reliable clue to whether something is a word or not. Some linguists avoid the problem by claiming that the whole notion ‘word’ is theoretically invalid, just an artifact of spelling. In their favor is the fact, which people are always surprised to learn, that not all languages have a word for ‘word.’ The classical languages, biblical Hebrew, classical Greek, and clas- sical Latin, for example, all have terms that are systematically ambiguous among ‘speech,’ ‘word,’ and ‘utterance’ but none has terms that distinguish clearly among these notions and certainly none has a special term that means just ‘word.’ Even in the opening verse of the Gospel of John, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ it is still not clear just what is the meaning of the Greek word λοUγο| [ logos ] that we conventionally translate as ‘word.’ Many scholars believe that the best translation is ‘thought’ or ‘reason.’ The classical languages are not alone. The anthro- pologist Bronislaw Malinowski declared that the distinction between word and utterance was not an obvious one to most peoples, that ‘isolated words are in fact only linguistic figments, the products of an advanced linguistic analysis’ (Malinowski 1935, p. 11), suggesting that there was no reason for most languages to distinguish between words and utterances. None- theless, most modern linguists believe that all lan- guages do have words, whether their speakers are aware of the units or not. The question then becomes how to figure out what a word is and how to identify words in a way that is valid for all languages, written or spoken, and, since language is first and foremost spoken, our answer must not depend on writing. The earliest explicit discussion that we have of the notion ‘word’ and of words in the speech stream is in the work of Aristotle. Aristotle made a distinction between an utterance or sentence, for which he used the term λοUγο| [ logos ] (confusingly, the term that we
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