Take, for example, the above definition of a noun, and consider words like sand. You can call the classification of words on the basis of their meaning a semantic criterion.Īpproaching the classification of words by their semantics is fine, but doing so exclusively has certain shortcomings. Correspondingly, we can say that a noun denotes an entity, adverbs modify events and so on. In other words, a verb's meaning has to do with events. In every sentence, every syntactic word has a part of speech.īut how can we tell whether, say, a verb is a verb? As a first approximation we can say that verbs refer to events. The classes that we use are called Parts of Speech (or lexical categories, or word classes). In a very similar vein, linguists classify words on the basis of certain features these words have in common. So what biologists do in this case is put animals in one class because they share certain characteristics. Mammals, for example, are vertebrates that lactate and have fur. Let us begin with some simple observations: Biologists tend to classify living beings on the basis of certain features.
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