Understanding Parts Of Speech V: Fill & Download for Free

Generally I agree in part with what Vadim Berman and Judith Meyer said, but want to add some of my own thoughts to it. My opinion as a linguist and sinologist on this issue is the following:We can establish parts of speech for Chinese, although they're not always the same as in English. Some of the parts of speech can be argued about, as they can be analyzed as being a subcategory of another part of speech. There is a lot of conversion between parts of speech going on, just like in English. But Chinese does have parts of speech and it makes sense to assume them.Let me explain:First, linguists are always looking for patterns in and across languages, so you need a common ground. In many languages there are indeed parts of speech similar at least in part to European languages. In many languages you have something overlapping to a great part with our European nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs etc. It often does make sense to speak of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adverbs in remote languages like Sumerian, Quechua, Turkish, Japanese, Swahili, which all don't have anything to do with Latin, Greek or English (which are somehow the base of our grammatical terminology and understanding). There are however many cases where it's not so easy: many languages do not have a distinct category of adjectives, they use static verbs instead ("the book greens"), sometimes even nouns ("the book is of greenness"). In some languages like Vietnamese, it doesn't make much sense to speak of pronouns, because they use mainly kinship terms or similar full nouns instead.How do we define a grammatical category? Usually not by meaning, but by function. When a word (lexeme) works differently from another lexeme in a sentence, when it requires other positions or structures or words that have to be put before or after it, then they belong to different grammatical categories. In this way you get many classes of words, for which it makes sense to conflate some into larger categories → parts of speech.In English, many words can belong to several categories. The word soldier can work as a subject in a sentence, you can put the or a before it, you can count it and put it into the plural, you can refer back to it with a pronoun, it describes an entity, etc., so it makes sense to classify it as a "noun". But it can also sometimes work as a predicate ("He soldiered down the road."), be conjugated and put into different tenses, it can be negated and one can apply truth values to it, you can use auxiliary verby before it, it describes an action. So it's also a "verb". If you don't need a suffix or anything to change the part of speech of a word, like here: soldier (n) → soldier (v), it is called conversion in English.Now to the language mentioned already, for which POS might not make sense: Chinese. The same method is applied here, although with slightly different questions, since neither nouns nor verbs are inflected in Chinese and there are no articles, etc.In Chinese (be it Mandarin or Cantonese or any Chinese language), conversion is almost ubiquitous. Just like you can turn every verb into a noun by adding -ing in English, you often don't have to do anything in Chinese, you just use a word as a noun, and it works. Often, not always. 研究 (yánjiū) can act as a prototypical verb to research in Chinese, but it can also be a noun the research. It's hard to tell what the original category is, is it a noun that is transformed into a verb by conversion? Or is it a verb that can act as noun? But this doesn't always work with all verbs. Have a look:1a) 我研究语言 (wǒ yánjiū yǔyán) = I research languages [verb!]1b) 我的研究 (wǒ de yánjiū) = my research [noun!]2a) 我吃饭 (wǒ chī fàn) = I eat rice [verb!]2b) *我的吃 (*wǒ de chī) = *my eat(?) [not a noun!]The last sentence is ungrammatical in Chinese, as far as I know. You cannot use 吃 (chī) as a noun. Yet both 研究 (yánjiū, to research) and 吃 (chī, to eat) are transitive verbs and otherwise act the same. Just like in English you can say "I research" and "my research", and "I eat", but not *my eat, in Chinese some words can undergo conversion, while others cannot.Pronouns in Chinese are a more rigid part of speech, they can never do the things verbs can do. You can never have them in a predicate function without also using a real verb or the copula 是 (shì, to be). If you spot a 我 (wǒ, I/me) in a Chinese sentence, you can be absolutely sure that it's not a verb or adverb or particle or anything else than a pronoun. It can be unambiguously classified as a pronoun. Pronouns are a very stable category in Chinese with not much conversion going on. In other languages, such as Thai, which (although being unrelated to Chinese) works in quite a similar way, POS-wise, regular nouns and proper nouns can be used like pronouns (i.e. refer to the speaker or listener), so there the POS are more blurry.But back to Chinese: It's true that "prepositions" in Chinese are usually also full verbs, like 在 (zài, in ~ to be in), 给 (gěi, for ~ to give), 从 (cóng, from ~ to follow), 跟 (gēn, with ~ to follow), so it is indeed debatable if there is a stand-alone category of prepositions in Chinese. This is often true also for conjunctions and other grammatical particles. The experiential aspect marker 过 (guò), which usually comes after verbs, is also used as a verb "to go beyond". So 我过过马路 (wǒ guò guò mǎlù) can mean "I once crossed the road."But there are also some prepositions or particles that do not have a verbal meaning anymore: 了 (le) is a perfective/new-situation aspect marker that derives from the verb 了 (liǎo, to finish), but they became two different words now, written the same, but spoken differently. The attributive marker 的 (de) also used to mean "target" or "to be true" in Classical Chinese, but now it is only a grammatical marker.And last but not least, adjectives are just a subclass of verbs in Chinese. There are some slight differences, but for the most part, you couldn't readily claim a distinctive grammatical difference between, say, 聪明 (cóngmíng, [to be] clever) and 睡觉 (shuìjiào, to sleep).This is why the conclusion for Chinese is, and I repeat it again: We can establish parts of speech for Chinese, although they're not always the same as in English. Some of the parts of speech can be argued about, as they can be analyzed as being a subcategory of another part of speech. There is a lot of conversion between parts of speech going on, just like in English. But Chinese does have parts of speech and it makes sense to assume them.

Knowing the part of speech of a word (noun, adjective, verb, preposition, etc.) is not always easy for people studying English. Some languages are very different from English, and the students have to learn what "noun" and "adjective" means.In my opinion, you must know the meaning of the word before you can know the part of speech of the word. If you understand the word, you may know the part of speech easily.Word order also gives information about part of speech. English sentences usually use S-V-O word order.Sometimes students become confused when they read words like "wind", which can be verbs or nouns. Also, there are words that derivations (related forms) of other words. Operate is a verb, and operation is a noun. The ending -tion tells you that operation is a noun.In my experience, the big problems with knowing parts of speech of words happen when speakers of Asian languages study English. They read complex sentences and they become very confused about what words mean. I can tell the student that a word is a noun, and sometimes this does not help them understand.These complex sentences are really two or three sentences joined together. English writers really like brevity-- saying a lot, but using few words. We can have brevity because we can connect two or three sentences into one sentence in many, many different ways. When we do this, the text becomes shorter. Unfortunately, the text is hard for English learners to read.

This is a controversial position of mine but I support it regardless:Absolutely, the sooner the better.Freedom of speech is the notion that we can say whatever we please without fear of government repression and on paper this sounds like a great idea, don’t get me wrong. One can make the argument that freedom is something we all strive for as it’s part of our nature.However this doesn’t change the f!act that humans are not able to handle such a thing. At least in my view.I feel these two incidents will best illustrate my viewpoint:PizzagateDuring the 2016 US Presidential Elections, a conspiracy theory was spread online and became known as Pizzagate.The theory was quite simple, American politician Hilary Clinton along with other high ranking members of her party, the Democrats, were engaging in sex with kidnapped children in restaurants owned by Comet Ping Pong.To many this may sound strange and outlandish but to large sectors of the American population, it came to be accepted as fact this even resulted in a shooting at Comet Ping Pong.'Pizzagate' conspiracy theorist gets four years in prisonEdgar Welch being arrested after he opened fire in Comet Ping Pong demanding he search the restaurant for the child sex slaves.This is my point.Freedom of Speech allowed people to come up with this drivel, it then permitted popular news outlets to report this drivel as if it was fact.Infowars' Alex Jones apologizes for pushing 'Pizzagate' conspiracy theoryWhich led to people believing it was fact and nearly cost people their lives, it’s a stroke of good fortune that Welch did not decide to massacre everybody on sight.Nor is it just conspiracy theories that Freedom of Speech permits, it also permits false statistics inciting hatred and racial strife. Take this:Here’s a fun tidbit, there is no FBI bureau in San Francisco! Yet some American decided to make up those statistics to promote the belief that Black Americans are violent and are an inferior race.The worst part is that a large number of Americans endorsed this, including prominent ones:Trump's Pants on Fire tweet that blacks killed 81% of white homicide victimsThis is Freedom of Speech in action and why I consider it dangerous.Freedom of Speech removes all restraints on the innate desire of humans to be intolerant and violent towards those they perceive to be is different.I can start promoting racial supremacy and be protected by Freedom of Speech.I can start promoting genocide and be protected by Freedom of Speech.A bedrock principle of U.S. jurisprudence is that the First Amendment allows for hate speech, including that which denigrates people on the basis of their race, gender or sexual orientation.The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that the Westboro Baptist Church, known for its vitriolic “God Hates Fags” anti-gay campaign, could not be prevented from picketing at military funerals. In the landmark 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio, the high court upheld the free speech rights of a Ku Klux Klan member.“The vast majority of speech that could be deemed hateful is protected by the First Amendment,” said Will Creeley, a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech watchdog group.Factbox: When can free speech be restricted in the United States?This is why I believe that abolishing such a thing is good and beneficial, there should be restraints on speech.Take Jason Richwhine, an American scholar who wrote that non-Whites are inherently inferior due to their lesser intellect.Why Did Harvard Give a PhD for a Discredited Approach to Race and IQ?American freedom of speech allows him to roam around the country preaching White Superiority and acquiring a following.Jason Richwine being interviewed on national television despite his racist viewsAnd I understand why many people feel this way, yes Richwine is a racist but does this mean he deserves to be in a prison cell for his views?This I cannot answer, but I still find it abhorrent that he gets to peddle his nonsense and profit off racism while giving it an “intellectual” face.This is why I think Freedom of Speech is wrong.