Part of speech
A grammatical category grouping words by how they function and behave in sentences. Common categories include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
Morphology: The study of how words are formed and how their forms vary. Inflectional endings can mark a word’s part of speech or grammatical role.
Noun: A word class whose members commonly name people, places, things, or abstract entities. Nouns typically head noun phrases and can show number or case.
Open class: A word class that readily gains new members, especially through borrowing and word formation. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are often treated as open classes.
Part-of-speech tagging: The computational task of assigning grammatical category labels to words in text. Taggers must infer categories from context when word forms are ambiguous.
Syntax: The system of rules governing how words combine into phrases and sentences. Syntactic position and behavior help distinguish grammatical categories.
Verb: A word class whose members commonly express actions, events, or states. Verbs typically head predicates and may inflect for tense or agreement.
Closed class: A word class with a relatively fixed membership that rarely gains new words. Pronouns, determiners, and conjunctions are commonly classified as closed classes.
Corpus linguistics: The study of language through large collections of systematically gathered texts or speech. Corpus counts reveal how word classes behave across real language use.
Word class: A grouping of words that share grammatical properties and distribution. This is the linguistic term commonly used for a part of speech.
Adjective: A word class whose members commonly modify nouns or describe their properties. Adjectives often modify nouns and may show degree.