Lexical verbs form an open class We know that lexical words are the main carriers of meaning in a spoken utterance or written sentence. They are the most numerous type of word and they are all members of open classes, i.e. more lexical words can be invented…
Noun as ‘head’ As with verb phrases, noun phrases (NP) must consist minimally of a head word. This may be either a noun or a pronoun, e.g. The head in noun phrases may also receive pre-modification. There are five main…
Nouns belong to an open class Nouns compose by far the largest class of words. This is because they are generally used to name things. As there is an almost infinite number of things to be named the class is expansive. In addition, as humankind progresses, discovers and…
Numerals form a closed class Recall that a word class is said to be closed if no more words can be added to the class. Whilst in theory it is possible to keep counting to infinity, in practice there are a limited number of numerals that are used…
What is a grammatical phrase? Consider the following utterance: the lady from Powburn village was looking along the main road because she had been expecting the delivery yesterday This utterance cannot helpfully be viewed as just a string of single…
We have noted how verb phrases have a verb as the head, noun phrases have a noun (or pronoun), and adverb phrases and adjective phrases have an adverb and an adjective as the head respectively. Prepositional phrases (PrepP) do…
Prepositions form a closed class There is a restricted number of prepositions and it is difficult to add new members. Accordingly, like auxiliary verbs, numerals, determiners, pronouns and conjunctions, prepositions form a closed class of words. Prepositions are relation words Prepositions…
