Parts of speech

[schmetterling]

Hoping the brains on here can tell me which parts of speech 'yes' and 'no' are categorised as.

I think I learnt them as adverbial particles but can't actually justify that.

Ditto things like er and mmmm.

Tis driving me slightly crazy.

I had to look this up in the dictionary, but 'yes' and 'no' are adverbs. 'Mm' and 'er' are interjections.

adverbs? Really?

Hmmmm, as I remember, adverbs were things that described verbs, like 'broadly' or 'slyly'. I don't see how yes or no could do that.

I've seen a couple of definitions that say it ("yes") IS an adverb, but I just don't think that agrees with what I understand "adverb" to be.

You might as well call them 'widgets' and then define widget to be something random.....but then I'm probably just being a bit argumentative!

Wikipedia backs you up on the grammatical particles thing "Watts[6] classifies yes and no as grammatical particles, in particular response particles." tho it wasn't anything I'd heard before. Not that Wikipedia is always right tho

'Can he do it? Yes he can!'

Replace 'yes' with 'certainly', which is obviously an adverb, and it makes more sense.

On the other hand, if you shout 'Yes!' in triumph, then presumably that's an interjection,and if you cast a 'yes' vote, that's an adjective.

But they are derived from that adverb/widget.