Every word in a sentence can be distinguished according to the kind of idea it denotes and the function performes. In English there are nine parts of speech - nine classes of words.
Questions:
1: I think 'speech' is used in sense of 'language' - parts of language. Am I correct?
2: How to differentiate between 'idea' and 'function'? If a word is a noun, then it denotes the idea that it's something which can be an object, quality, person, etc. What does function have to do here?
3: Is this sentence correct? "How to differentiate between 'idea' and 'function'?"
Questions:
1: I think 'speech' is used in sense of 'language' - parts of language. Am I correct?
2: How to differentiate between 'idea' and 'function'? If a word is a noun, then it denotes the idea that it's something which can be an object, quality, person, etc. What does function have to do here?
3: Is this sentence correct? "How to differentiate between 'idea' and 'function'?"
Comments
2) I think they meant to say that there is some kind of "semantic" classification, and some kind of "syntactic" classification. For example, words like cat, house, banana can be distinguished from words like love, sleep, birth control, and the "idea" could be that the words in the first group are "concrete", while the ones in the second group are "abstract". As for the function, the verb "to win" has a different function from the adjective "happy", for example (the are used in different ways in different structures). This is what I think they were saying there, out of context.
3) Yes, I was told it is ok to ask questions with infinitives, although I prefer to avoid them and use more common structures. Example: How do you differentiate between idea and function? or: How is it possible to differentiate between idea and function?
Best wishes
Jack
"Parts of speech" is such an old collocation, it makes no sense at all to try to analyze the "meanings" of the individual words which make it up.
I take function to mean grammatical function.
eg The man bought a chair.
man idea = human being, function = subject
bought idea = past action of 'buy', function = verb in Simple Past
chair idea = a thing to sit on, function = object
Clive
I don't know if these are your sentences, but I think they're misleading. They may be taken as suggesting that "idea" and "function" play equal roles in the "parts of speech" concept.
Perhaps if you were to embolden "kind," the sense would be more accurate.
I agree it's fair to ask, "What is the idea of a preposition?" "What is the idea of a conjunction?"
You could say that these words denote the idea of their functions, as well as the semantic ideas of their meanings (up vs. around / and vs. but), but it seems risky and misleading to go down that path.
Taken from M-W Col. Dic.
I just ate an apple.
I just ate an anniversary.X
There's a cat in the box.
There's a cat in the table. X ( --> on the table)
They're all nouns, yet for some reason those sentences sound weird, unusual, or wrong, even though only the noun is replaced. Why? It seems clear that there's something more than just "syntax", and saying that something is a "noun" might not be enough. In the first pair, a concrete noun (apple) was replaced with an abstract noun (anniversary). In the second pair, a concrete noun with a hollow shape
That's why the "idea" is also important, not just the "function".
Even in most programming languages, it's possible to separate the syntax from the specific meaning of an instruction.