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A syntactic category is a syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. [1] Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech (e.g. noun, verb, preposition, etc.), are syntactic categories.
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.
Noun classes form a system of grammatical agreement. A noun in a given class may require: agreement affixes on adjectives, pronouns, numerals, etc. in the same noun phrase, agreement affixes on the verb, a special form of pronoun to replace the noun, an affix on the noun, a class-specific word in the noun phrase.
Exponents of grammatical categories often appear in the same position or "slot" in the word (such as prefix, suffix or enclitic). An example of this is the Latin cases , which are all suffixal: ros a , ros ae , ros ae , ros am , ros a , ros ā ("rose", in the nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , vocative and ablative ).
English adjectives, as with other word classes, cannot in general be identified as such by their form, [24] although many of them are formed from nouns or other words by the addition of a suffix, such as -al (habitual), -ful (blissful), -ic (atomic), -ish (impish, youngish), -ous (hazardous), etc.; or from other adjectives using a prefix ...
The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman nom (other forms include nomme, and noun itself). The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical forms that they take. In Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and number.
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A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its referent, such as sex, animacy, shape, although in some instances a noun can be placed in a particular class based purely on its grammatical behavior. Some authors use the term "grammatical gender" as a synonym of "noun class", but others use different definitions for ...