What is part of speech? What is the difference between official and independent words from each other?

The question of what is a part of speech in modern language textbooks is raised in primary school. Primary data on morphology children receive from the first year of training. Further this information is replenished. The study of groups of words according to their grammatical features is completed, as a rule, in the seventh grade.

So, what is part of speech? By this term we mean a certain category of lexical units that share a common semantic and morphological features. For a noun, such indices for unification will be objectivity, the delimitation of common and proper words, the presence of number and gender, and so on. And for a verb - the designation of an action or process, belonging to a perfect or imperfect form, the presence of a special form of inflection - conjugation. Academic information about what is a part of speech is enough in the special literature. Therefore, let us dwell only on difficult cases of morphology.

The difference between independent words and official

Morphological groups in the Russian language are only ten. They are divided into 3 categories: independent, official and interjections. These categories of lexical units have grammatical differences. Often students do not recognize them. Notable words always have a visible image and interpretation. Whether it is an object, an action, a sign or a number, we can always imagine them or turn to an explanatory dictionary. Official words are meaningless from the point of view of vocabulary, their task is the performance of certain roles: the combination of simple sentences as part of a complex one, the definition of the dependence of one significant word on another, and so on. And interjections are necessary for expression of feelings or emotions: oh, oh, uh, you and so on.

Homonymy in morphology

Many schoolboys pose such a question: what is the morphological characteristic of the word "thanks"? "What" is that part of the speech? Or is it "cold"? And the word "sang"? And similar, at first glance, difficult cases of determining the morphological affiliation of the word, it is typed a lot. In fact, the problem can arise only in case of inability to ask a question to the word. But without context, it is impossible to determine what part of the speech is before us, in the case of homonymy it is impossible. But in the sentence it is very easy to understand: just put the question.

The gerundive / preposition:

• Thanks to (what?) Of the parents, Anna hugged them tightly. Thanks to (what?) Their care, she recovered.

Pronoun / union:

• Ivan asked: "What (what?) Is that part of the speech?" Andrei answered that (he can not ask a question) he does not know.

Short adjective / status category :

• Her greeting was (what?) It's cold. From this I became very (how?) Cold.

Verb / short adjective:

• In the evening he sang a song to me (what did he do?) About the fact that he had already sung the tomato (what?).

That is why the morphological analysis of the word is always suggested in a specific sentence so that students can ask a question from another lexical unit. As you have now seen, the definition of a part of speech does not rest solely on the mechanical memorization of grammatical features, but is a creative and interesting process.