Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Result of the classification of the words of a given language according to form and meaning criteria. Such classifications reach back into antiquity. Because of the different classificatory approaches, the number of parts of speech in the various grammars varies between two and fifteen. The two classes of ‘ónoma’ (=names; nouns) and 
(=statements; verbs) of Plato are the result of a logical syntactic analysis (
argument, predicate) and represent both noun and subject as well as verb and predicate, respectively. Aristotle added a third group to these two parts of speech, the group of ‘indeclinables.’
Our current classification is based primarily on the teachings of the grammarian Dionsyios Thrax (first century BC), who proposed eight parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb, and conjunction. In principle, all such divisions have as their basis the following three considerations, whose emphasis or lack thereof is the cause for the diverging analyses of many grammarians: (a) morphology: the distinction between inflected (noun, adjective, verb, pronoun) and non-inflected (adverb, conjunction, preposition) words; (b) syntax: for example, the ability to modify nominal or verbal elements (adjective vs adverb), to take an article (noun vs pronoun), to require a certain case of nouns or pronouns through government (preposition vs conjunction); (c) semantics: conceptualcategorial aspects—the three basic parts of speech, noun, adjective and verb, are based on the logical categories ‘substance,’ ‘property,’ and ‘process,’ while conjunctions and prepositions are based on the category ‘relation.’
Most of the criticism of parts of speech is directed at the unevenness of the classificatory criteria, which are partially contradictory or overlapping, for example, the numerals, which on the basis of common lexical features (= terms for numbers and quantities) form an independent group, while the individual representatives behave syntactically as nouns (thousands of people), adjectives (one book), indefinite pronouns (many), or adverbs (He called twice). In addition, words can change historically from one category to another through conversion.
It must be remembered that words which sound the same due to homophony must often be assigned to different parts of speech according to usage, e.g. sound, which can occur as a noun (a loud sound), a verb (to sound like…), and an adjective (a sound reason). In generative transformational grammar, the classification follows distributional criteria: all linguistic units which are interchangeable in the deep structure for the same lexical constituent belong to the same category. In categorial grammar, however, only the nouns form an independent category, all other categories being defined according to the way and manner they, combined with nouns, form sentences.
References
Magnusson, R. 1954. Studies in the theory of the parts of speech. Lund.
Shopen, T. (ed.) 1985. Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 3: Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge.
part-whole relation (also partonymy relation)
Semantic relation between linguistic expressions that designates the relation of a part to the whole or possessive relations: A possesses B. The part-whole relation is very similar to inclusion.
Like true inclusion, it is asymmetric; but unlike inclusion, it is not transitive, e.g. An arm has a hand and A hand has five fingers, but not *An arm has five fingers ( symmetrical relation, transitive relation). Selection restrictions between certain verbs (have, possess) and different noun classes (A cat has a long tail, but not *A long tail has a cat) cannot be described in componential analysis with binary features, but rather only with relational features.
References
Bendix, E.H. 1966. Componential analysis of general vocabulary: the semantic structure of a set of verbs in English, Hindi, and Japanese. The Hague.
Bierwisch, M. 1965. Eine Hierarchie syntaktischsemantischer Merkmale. Stgr 5.29–86.
Cruse, D.A. 1979. On the transitivity of the part-whole relation. JL 15. 29–38.
Kiefer, F. 1966. Some semantic relations in natural language. FL 2. 228–40.
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