What are the percentages of the parts of speech in English?
For instance, what percent of English is comprised of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.?
I have done an extensive web search using a variety of formulations of the question but cannot find this information.
This is a complex question requiring a complex answer, because it all depends on what kind of language you examine. Corpus evidence used in the ‘Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English’ shows the following approximate frequencies of thousands of words per million:
LEXICAL WORDS
CONVERSATION
Adverbs 50
Adjectives 25
Verbs 125
Nouns 150
ACADEMIC PROSE
Adverbs 30
Adjectives 100
Verbs 100
Nouns 300
FUNCTION WORDS
CONVERSATION
Pronouns 165
Primary auxiliary verbs 85
Prepositions 55
Determiners 45
Coordinators 30
Modals 20
Subordinators 15
Adverbial particles 10
ACADEMIC PROSE
Pronouns 40
Primary auxiliary verbs 65
Prepositions 150
Determiners 100
Coordinators 40
Modals 15
Subordinators 10
Adverbial particles 5
These figures can give only a crude picture and show only the figures for one kind of written English. In general, though, nouns and verbs are the most common words, and conversation seems to use a higher proportion of verbs, adverbs and pronouns, while written English uses a higher proportion of nouns and adjectives.
Please check Wordnet to see number of nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs used in their database. Though there may not be exact numbers it will give you an idea.
Noun: 117798
Verb: 11529
Adjective: 21479
Adverb:4481
The first problem is that there is no consensus on how many words the English language comprises. It depends in a very banal sense on the way you define the word "word". For example: Are "eat" and "eats" one word or two?
The other problem is that very many words function as different parts of speech. For example, present can be a noun, verb or adjective.
A better approach is to look at a body of text (a corpus) and analyse that by a process called POS (part of speech) tagging . The proportions of the different word classes will likely vary according to whether the corpus is of written or spoken language, in the academic field or popular media, and so on.
Here is an article that estimated the percentage of nouns in the LOB and Brown corpora at 37%.
Eric Lease Morgan has created Perl scripts to analyse a number of English texts and written about his findings in a fascinating essay called Foray’s into parts-of-speech, summarising:
The result was very surprising to me. Despite the wide range of document sizes, and despite the wide range of genres, the relative percentages of POS [parts-of-speech] are very similar across all of the documents. The last column in the table represents the average percentage of each POS use. Notice how the each individual POS value differs very little from the average.
...
The similarity across all the documents can be further illustrated with a line graph:
Visit the blog for much more information, charts and conclusions.
As a contemporary poet who writes in English I have been thinking a lot about this. While we use different parts of speech with similar frequency the number of options available to us to use of one kind or other varies drastically.
It possibly says something about how we see the world that we are more exact in our ability to label something, rather than to describe what it does. Not to be tedious or jump off the bus here, but it could also pose problems as we shift to a paradigm where identity is primarily performative. (We are what we do, not what we appear to be.)
I recently went on an interview where I was asked to describe various scenes from an action movie to create a script that would be read between dialogues for the visually impaired. When faced with such a limited number of ways of defining a mode of attack, I realized that we frequently turn an action (with a high degree of physical specificity) into a noun.
Consider a word like haymaker. We throw a haymaker. This is a big muscle movement with tons of power and commitment behind it. We could force it to act as a verb through syntax... "I haymaker you," but we will more than likely meet resistance from readers and critics.
Transferring a word from noun to verb energizes it and sets it closer to the heat of a kinetic exchange. Reversing this process pulls us back from the primary experience into a more reserved/language/observational state. We suck energy out of the word (the only way to put it back in is to then create a value statement about the word/subject... but I don't want to jump that thread here).
My argument would not be to create new verbs, but to be more open minded about using nouns as verbs. Prescriptivists are probably cringing right now, but creative writers are already jumping this direction instinctively-it will probably spread into common use.
Thank you for your time, I hope you find a more solid answer to your question.
As far as a dictionary is concerned, which may also be related to 'what to learn'), parts of speech fall roughly into two kinds, open and closed.
is one that is pretty much unchanging. For example, the set of pronouns in English has I, you, we and only a few more, and a new one is rare ("y'all" is one of those rare exceptions. Pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions are closed sets; these all have small numbers in the dictionary (under 20 each).
however, tends to allow growing in many ways. New nouns and verbs are created all the time, either in technical vocabularies or everyday slang. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are open sets in English.
There tends to be a lot of growth of nouns. Combining words in a phrase into a single word is more accepted than for verbs (at least in English). For example "hand warmer" has moved on to "handwarmer" but if you want an action, you still just warm your hands instead of "handwarming". Informally, I think the reason for this is that there are more ways of describing objects than there are of actions.
I would rank the order in percentage as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, determiners. With nouns winning by far, but the last three disputed.
But the percentage of occurrences in speech is a different matter. 'the' is the most frequently occurring word in speech and writing. The frequency of appearance and the count in dictionaries is inversely proportional. There are more closed set terms in a text than open set terms. Also, the closed set is the glue that holds sentences together; without them, you just have a bag of words, you know that something did something to something else but not exactly which direction.
So if you're learning a English (and most languages), the vocabulary component is the hardest part, memorizing an unending list of new nouns and verbs for things like "windshield wiper" or "mitigate". You really must learn the closed sets first just to get the basics of communication, but the long road to (educated) proficiency is in the open sets, the nouns and verbs.
As to your exact question, what are the percentages, I'm basically saying that, for a growing language like English, the percentages are changing, the nouns and verbs always growing, which means they will take up a larger and larger percentage of the dictionary.
All words not used in discourse -- even as they listed in a lexicon (without meanings) are nouns. They don't become Parts of Speech (or writing, which is recorded speech) until they are used as one of the Eight (nine in England) parts of speech.
