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Word Classes: Lexical categories - Coggle Diagram
Word Classes: Lexical categories
Open vs Closed
Open: New words constantly created and added, relatively concrete (content-ful) meanings
Noun, verb, adjective, adverb
Closed: Rarely get new words, help to express and understand the grammatical relationships between content words
Determiner, preposition, pronoun, conjunction (and, or, but)
Identifying word class
Share same morphological properties
Nouns: Can be pluralised, can take possessive marker
Verbs:
Can be marked for tense
Can exhibit agreement with subject (verbs in the present tense depend on whether the subject is 3rd person singular or not (e.g. 3SG subject --> This worker/he/she/it protest
s
vs non-3SG subject --> I/we/you/they/these workers protest
Adjectives (modify nouns):
Can be inflected to form comparative or superlative (e.g. early, earlier, earliest)
Adverbs: Everything else
Modify things other than nouns
Determiner:
No morphological possibilities
Prepositions: No morphological possibilities
Similar distribution/function
Can occupy the same positions (e.g. come after/before the same words)
Nouns:
a ( ) of ( ) (e.g. a
carton
of
milk
Preceded by determiners and adjectives in a noun phrase
Verbs:
Typically appears after subject
Can be negated with do not
Can appear after auxiliary verbs (e.g. has, have, had, do , does, did , shall, etc.)
Adjectives:
Can occur between a determiner and a pronoun
Can follow copula/linking verb (e.g. am, are, is, was, were, being, been, be)
Can follow more/most
Can co-occur with other adjectives
Adverbs: Everything else
Freedom of positioning
Determiner:
Precedes a noun (and sometimes adjectives) in a noun phrase
Forms an NP with the following noun
Possessive determiners vs pronouns
Possessive determiners: Precede nouns in a NP
Pronouns: Replace NP
Other determiners
Quantificational determiners: a, the, some, very, all, etc.
Demonstrative determiners: this, that, these, those
Prepositions:
Precede a noun
Precede an NP (but
does not
form an NP with the following noun)
Similar meanings (not reliable)