Which Word Classes Can The Word “Off” Belong To and Why?
Resumen
Linguistic descriptions of all languages presuppose the division of words into distinct classes or lexical categories (Zyzik and Azevedo, 2009). The discovery of these distinctions - of words being nouns, adjective, verbs, etc. - is a key aspect of learning any given language (Celce-Murcia and Larsen Freeman, 1999); this distinction becomes of paramount importance if one considers too, that one word may in fact undertake more than one form, which causes complications for language learners; hence the importance for better understanding how this phenomenon takes place. The purpose of this essay is to explain and illustrate how one word can belong to different word classes. The first section introduces the concept of word class and the different word classes there are. The following sections illustrate how one word– in this case the word “off” – can in fact take different forms and in doing so have different meanings.