The study on identification and definition of parts of speech or word classes began from Greek/Latin tradition in early days. Most approaches on parts of speech were based on semantic criteria. As time passes, it has changed into the study on the relation between words in a sentence, and on function and form. The approaches, however, have not fully gained appreciation among scholars. Even though many attempts have been made to set up proper parts of speech systems, the clear classification of them has been known to be far from perfection. This paper provides an overview of parts of speech or word classes and diverse parts of speech systems of some languages, and suggests that typological approaches to parts of speech classification depending on the syntactic properties of languages are the ideal way.

• 노종균(대구가톨릭대학교)