Criteria
- Form: whether a word inflects. In Korean, verbs and adjectives (and the copula) conjugate.
- Function: the word's role in a sentence, such as subject or object, predicate, modifier or relational marker.
- Meaning: the general meaning shared by a class, such as names of things, actions or states, not individual lexical meaning.
The nine Korean classes
- Substantives: nouns, pronouns, numerals
- Predicates: verbs, adjectives
- Modifiers: determiners (gwanhyeongsa), adverbs
- Relationals: particles
- Independents: interjections
After Choe Hyeon-bae's Urimalbon several systems competed until the 1963 unified school grammar fixed nine classes.
Dual membership and debates
Some words belong to two classes depending on context: balkda is a verb in "day breaks" but an adjective in "the room is bright"; daseot is a numeral standing alone but a determiner before a noun. Scholars still disagree on whether particles and the copula are words and whether verbs and adjectives should be one class.
Compared with English
English usually counts eight parts of speech (noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection), sometimes adding determiners. Korean has postpositional particles instead of prepositions, adjectives that conjugate like verbs and serve as predicates, and a separate determiner class.
References
- 남기심, 고영근. (2014). 『표준 국어문법론』(제4판). 박이정.
- 최현배. (1937). 『우리말본』. 연희전문학교 출판부.
- Sohn, H.-M. (1999). The Korean Language. Cambridge University Press.
- Schachter, P., & Shopen, T. (2007). Parts-of-speech systems. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description (2nd ed., Vol. 1, pp. 1-60). Cambridge University Press.