Word Classes

What are word classes?
In the preceding chapters, we have used terms such as ‘noun’, ‘adjective’, ‘adverb’, ‘verb’ and ‘preposition’ without defining them. The terms are in everyday use and everyday definitions are available, such as nouns being the names of persons, places and things and verbs being the names of actions or states. These definitions contain a grain of truth but are inadequate for serious investigation of English or any other language.

One weakness is that they appeal in a superficial way to only one part of meaning, the kind of things that a given word denotes. As we will see in ‘Semantic criteria’, it is important to take account of what speakers and writers actually do with verbs, nouns and so on. (The term ‘denote’ is used for the relationship between a given word and the set of entities, in the broadest sense, to which it can be applied. Traditional dictionary explanations of the meaning of individual words can be thought of as embryo descriptions of denotations. In the last section. We see that, for example, nouns are the centre of noun phrases, by means of which speakers and writers refer to entities.)

https://www.academia.edu/30656383/Jim_Miller_An_Introduction_to_English_Syntax