parts of speech

The notion of dividing words into discrete parts of speech is generally credited to the ancient Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax.

John Stuart Mill felt they represented universal categories of human thought.

Some more rococo anthimerian endeavors have clear meanings, but are more or less im-parse-able.

Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum's magisterial 2002 "Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" counts pronouns as a subset of nouns, replaces articles with a new category called "determinatives" (which also includes words like this, some and every) and divides conjunctions into "coordinators" (and, but and or) and "subordinators" (like whether).

Early formulations of English grammar adopted the Latin list.

There was a lot of shuffling around, until Joseph Priestley's 1761 "Rudiments of English Grammar" finally established the baseball-size lineup that included adjectives and booted out participles.