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grammar - Do all words have a part of speech?


Do all words have a part of speech? The closest counterexample I can think of is yes. The dictionary says its supposed to be an adverb but it doesn't really strike me as something that modifies a verb. Are there any words in common use that simply don't have a part of speech? Or, alternatively, are there any parts of speech that they just don't teach in school because they're too abstract to the children learning their parts of speech?



Answer



It is intended that all words have a part of speech.


As for your second question - "are there parts of speech they don't just teach in school?" Traditionally, The eight parts of speech are: nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Students learn all of these.


However, depending on what we're doing, we can use a lot more different types of speech. For example, for my natural language processing project, I used 44 different types of speech (including some like "numbers" and "periods")


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