Can anyone please recommend a better treatment of English parts of speech / word classes than that offered by most traditional grammars?
Many of the latter stick with the sacrosanct 8 of antiquity, or perhaps allow for one or two more, while POS Tagsets may contain many hundreds of tags (catering for subsets such as plural nouns, verb forms etc). Demanding that we stick with eight for sentimental reasons seems like saying 'Let's just have four (chemical) elements, like they used to do, because that's easier.' Some parts of speech — 'function words' — are distinguished according to function — or called adverbs if they show a vague resemblance in some respect and we don't like having more than 8 (or 12 or 24) classes. However, having 750 classes as a working model does seem to be erring the other way.
Does anyone please know of a sensible (Goldilocks!) treatment?
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