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The term form class is also used, although this has various conflicting definitions. [4] Word classes may be classified as open or closed: open classes (typically including nouns, verbs and adjectives) acquire new members constantly, while closed classes (such as pronouns and conjunctions) acquire new members infrequently, if at all.
The parts of speech that form closed classes and have mainly just functional content are called functional categories: Lexical categories Adjective (A) and adjective phrase (AP), adverb (Adv) and adverb phrase (AdvP), noun (N) and noun phrase (NP), verb and verb phrase (VP), preposition and prepositional phrase (PP) Functional categories
In this case the number is marked overtly on the noun, and is also reflected by verb agreement. However: The sheep can run. In this case the number of the noun (or of the verb) is not manifested at all in the surface form of the sentence, and thus ambiguity is introduced (at least, when the sentence is viewed in isolation).
Proper nouns that are plural in form take a plural verb in both AmE and BrE; for example, The Beatles are a well-known band; The Diamondbacks are the champions, with one major exception: in American English, the United States is almost universally used with a singular verb.
Modern English permits this only in the case of a small class of verbs ("special verbs"), consisting of auxiliaries as well as forms of the copula be (see subject–auxiliary inversion). To form a question from a sentence which does not have such an auxiliary or copula present, the auxiliary verb do ( does , did ) needs to be inserted, along ...
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Such a word may in fact have a number of plural forms, to allow for simultaneous agreement within other categories such as case, person and gender, as well as marking of categories belonging to the word itself (such as tense of verbs, degree of comparison of adjectives, etc.) Verbs often agree with their subject in number (as well as in person ...
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