The question of what part of speech is in modern language textbooks is raised in elementary school. Children receive primary information about morphology from the first year of schooling.
Further this information is replenished. The study of groups of words by their
grammatical characteristics is completed, as a rule, in the seventh grade.
So what is a part of speech? This term refers to a certain category of lexical units that have a commonality of semantic and morphological characters. For a noun, such indicators for association will be objectivity, the distinction of common and proper words, the presence of a number and gender, etc. And for a verb - a 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 part of speech is enough in the specialized literature. Therefore, let us dwell only on difficult cases of morphology.
The difference between independent words and official
There are only ten morphological groups in Russian. They are divided into 3 categories: independent, service and interjection. These categories of lexical units have grammatical differences. Often, students do not recognize them. Significant words always have a visible image and interpretation. Whether it is an object, action, sign or number, we can always imagine them or turn to an explanatory dictionary. Service words are meaningless from the point of view of vocabulary, their task is to fulfill certain roles: combining simple sentences as part of a complex one, determining the dependence of one significant word on another, etc. And interjections are necessary to express feelings or emotions: oh, oh, wow and so on.
Homonymy in morphology
Many students are perplexed by the following question: what is the morphological characteristic of the word “thanks”? “What” is what part of speech? Or is it cold? And the word "sang"? And there are a lot of similar, at first glance, difficult cases of determining the morphological affiliation of a word. In fact, a problem can arise only in case of inability to ask a question by the way. But without context, it is impossible to determine what part of speech is before us, in the case of homonymy.
But in the proposal it is very easy to understand: you just need to pose a question.
Communion / preposition:
- Thanks (what?) To her parents, Anna hugged them tightly. Thanks to (what?) Their concern, she recovered.
Pronoun / Union:
- Ivan asked: "What (what?) Is that part of speech?" Andrei replied that (no question can be asked) he did not know.
Short adjective / status category :
- Her greeting was (what?) Cold. It made me very (how?) Cold.
Verb / short adjective:
- In the evening he sang a song to me (what did he do?) About the fact that the tomato had sung (what?).
That is why morphological analysis of the word is always proposed to be done 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 only on the mechanical memorization of grammatical signs, but is a creative and interesting process.