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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.
An ideophone is any word in a certain word class evoking ideas in sound imitation (onomatopoeia) to express an action, manner, or property. The class of ideophones is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically; it occurs mostly in African, Australian, and Amerindian languages , and sporadically elsewhere.
English words are not generally marked for word class. It is not usually possible to tell from the form of a word which class it belongs to; inflectional endings and derivational suffixes are unique and specific to. On the other hand, most words belong to more than one word class.
A proper noun (sometimes called a proper name, though the two terms normally have different meanings) is a noun that represents a unique entity (India, Pegasus, Jupiter, Confucius, Pequod) – as distinguished from common nouns (or appellative nouns), which describe a class of entities (country, animal, planet, person, ship). [11]
Japanese adjectives are unusual in being closed class but quite numerous – about 700 adjectives – while most languages with closed class adjectives have very few. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] Some believe this is due to a grammatical change of inflection from an aspect system to a tense system, with adjectives predating the change.
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.
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English distinguishes at least seven major word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, determiners (including articles), prepositions, and conjunctions. Some analyses add pronouns as a class separate from nouns, and subdivide conjunctions into subordinators and coordinators, and add the class of interjections. [187]