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In-Reply-To: <C0IEnu.Ew4@inews.Intel.COM> bongalon@tcad05.intel.com (Ben Bongalon)

> 
> Where can I find references for the names of part-of-speech
> subclasses.  For example,
> 
> for Nouns,
>    (subject,object)     ???
>    (common,proper)      ???
>    (singular,plural)    case(?)
> 
>    Verbs,
>    (past,present,future)        tense(?)
>    (singular,plural)            case(?)
> 
>    ...etc.

If this is a not a language-specific question, I'm not sure there is
an answer (well, there might be some really abstract stuff in the
literature on linguistic universals).

If it's a question about English, you might look at Geoffrey Leach,
S. Greenbaum & Jan Svartik (I think that's right) _A Grammar of
Contemporary English_ (*very* detailed, lots of tables for
clarification) or something similar.

But there are really three different things implied by your examples:
1.  common/proper noun divides nouns into two *categories* on the basis of
    their syntactic behaviour, whereas
2.  singular/plural distinguishes between different *forms* of the
    same word, while
3.  subject/object distinguishes between different syntactical
    *functions*.
I think most linguists would understand `sub-classes' to refer to
only the first of these, since only in that case are the sub-classes
mutually exclusive. You'll need to look at a reasonably anlytical
grammar for that sort of thing (see above!), and it should also have
all the other stuff, too.

Perhaps if you could explain what you need the terms for, it would be
possible to be more helpful.

Peter






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Peter Christian                         
  Dept of European Languages              peter@gold.ac.uk
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
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