History of the understanding of the categories in the German grammar

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The aim of this research was to investigate the change of understanding about the grammatical categories in German grammars and to formulate the background views on these categories.The traditional German grammar had the ten-parts-of-speech-system that was adopted from the Latin grammar. This system was used until the middle of the 20^<th> century. But we found that already in the first half of the century some of the linguistic structuralits tried to make the criteria of these parts of speech clear and proposed various systems for the description of the German language.The generative grammar makes use of the distinctive features to define the parts of speech and tries to define the relations between various parts of speech. And the linguistic typology picks up various categories in different languages and is trying to make up a universal definition of the parts of speech.The prototype theory is one of the characteristic ways of thinking of the cognitive linguistics. But it is not yet clear how this theory contributes to the description of the German grammar and especially to the definition of the parts of speech.In the description of the history of the German language one often finds the influences from the Latin grammar. But there are attempts to define the descriptive categories appropriate to the historical data of German, and these attempts are promising.