Word classes (cílèi 詞類 in Modern Chinese) are usually understood as categories of words with similar morphosyntactic and/or semantic characteristics. The widely used concept of word classes or “parts of speech” is based on the Greco-Latin grammarian tradition, which has survived until present in most textbooks of particular languages and in many domains of applied linguistics. It is so well entrenched that a need is rarely felt to explicitly reflect on the nature of the categories and to clearly a…