[Corpora-List] complete list of closed-class words in English

John F. Sowa sowa at bestweb.net
Thu Nov 24 13:54:33 CET 2011


On 11/24/2011 2:56 AM, Daniel Zeman wrote:
> some time ago I collected my own list of English closed-class words. It
> is closer to a laundry list than an ontology.

Thanks for the list.

It's useful, but it illustrates the point that nothing in any NL is ever complete or closed.

An obvious example is numerals. Why stop at 'billion'? As economies (and inflation) grow, 'trillion' has become quite common. Scientific terminology has introduced productive prefixes, such as kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-, zetta-, yotta-.

If you include Latin terms like 'et', 'versus', and 'vs.', then it's hard to exclude 'etc.', 'et al.', or 'e.g.' If you include all the common ones, there is a flood of legal and medical terminology that comes in.

The pronouns are mostly closed, but archaic forms like 'thou' are still used. And dialects have many plurals for 'you', such as 'youse', 'you all', and 'youns'.

The articles 'a', 'an', and 'the' best qualify as a closed class. Yet many foreign terms creep in. Some people say 'the hoi polloi', but purists drop 'the'. Does that make 'hoi' an addition to the list of English articles? Similar issues arise with articles that are part of names and phrases borrowed from other European languages.

John



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