The principles of a monodifferential syntactico-distributional classification of

words in English were developed by the representatives of American Descriptive

Linguistics, L. Bloomfield, Z. Harris and Ch. Fries.
Fries'syntactico-distributional classification of words
All the instances of one part of speech are the �same� only in the sense that in
the structural patterns of English each has the same functional significance. Ch.
Fries selected the most widely used grammatical constructions and used them as
substitution frames:
� Frame A � The concert was good (always).
� Frame B � The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly).
� Frame C � The team went there.
All the words that can be used in place of the article made one group, the ones
that could be used instead of the word �clerk� another, etc. The results of his
experiments were surprisingly similar to the traditional classification of parts of
speech: four main positions were distinguished in the sentences; the words which
can be used in these positions without affecting the meaning of the structures were
united in four big classes of words, and generally speaking coincide with the four
major notional parts of speech in the traditional classification: nouns(+pronouns),
verbs(except auxiliary), adjectives("good" position) and adverbs. Besides these
�positional words� (�form-words�), Ch. Fries distinguished 15 limited groups of
words, which cannot fill in the positions in the frames. These �function words� are
practically the same as the functional words in the traditional classification.
They can be distributed among the three main sets:
1) specifiers of notional words (determiners of nouns, modal verbs, functional
modifiers and intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs)
2) interpositional elements, determining the relation of notional words to one
another (prepositions and conjunctions)
3) those which refer to the sentence as a whole (question words, attention-getting
words, words of affirmation and negation, sentence introducers (it, there)
Fries distributed them into 15 groups.

Main drawbacks:
� morphological characteristics are ignored completely;
� syntactical characteristics are not always taken into consideration (e.g.
modal verbs are isolated from Class 2);
� the classes are heterogeneous (one and the same word may happen to be in
different classes and groups).
Thus, the syntactico-distributional classification cannot replace the traditional
classification of parts of speech, but the major features of different classes of
words revealed in syntactico-distributional classification can be used as an
important supplement to traditional classification.
Strong points:
� special accent is laid on distribution of words and their syntactic valency
(another name for the classification is syntactico-distributional);
� his materials comprise 250 000 word entries which provide information on
frequency of occurrence.