Part of speech

A part of speech is a grammatical word category identified by patterns of distribution, combination and, where relevant, inflection. Categories such as noun, verb and adjective help describe what an expression can do in a construction. Meaning is evidence, but a rule equating a category with one broad kind of meaning is insufficient.

For example, record is a noun in the record and a verb in record the result. The same spelling can therefore require different labels when its context changes. A computational annotation scheme must state whether it assigns categories to lexical entries, individual occurrences or both.^[ref]

Universal Dependencies separates a broad part of speech label from additional grammatical features. Two forms can share the label NOUN while differing in grammatical number. Keeping category and features distinct makes an analysis of a text corpus reproducible without multiplying category labels for every possible form.