7
votes
What kind of a word class are numbers?
It depends on your ideology of word class, and probably on the language (depending on your ideology of word class). In a number of Bantu languages, they constitute an autonomous word class. They have ...
- 82k
7
votes
Does Japanese have pronouns?
The OP focused on one peculiarity of Japanese pronouns: they can be qualified. One can note that in English 'me' rather than 'I' would be qualified and if there is any conjugation it will be in the ...
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6
votes
What languages lack personal pronouns, and why?
According to WALS, Wichita and Wari' lacks any personal pronoun. Since they're polysynthetic languages, they probably used personal affixes to convey the same meaning instead.
(And this is not just ...
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6
votes
Does there exist a pair of words with the same parts of speech, same base form, but different inflections?
I don't know of an example in Russian, but in English, we have "lie" (be untruthful, past tense is "lied") and "lie" (recline, past tense is "laid" or "lay&...
- 64k
6
votes
Accepted
Does there exist a pair of words with the same parts of speech, same base form, but different inflections?
Russian:
граф - graph(math), граф - graf (duke). First is inanimate, second is animate, so, in accusative has ending -а: увидел граф versus увидел графа.
график - the same, either plot or drawing ...
- 6,622
5
votes
How do we distinguish a preposition from an adverb?
Like many things in syntax, parts of speech are an abstraction—they don't necessarily correspond to any physical fact about reality. Instead, they're invented by theorists in order to explain the data ...
- 64k
5
votes
always | never | "all the time" - what kind of words are these?
I would say those are temporal adverbs.
To be precise, all the time can not be an adverb since "adverb" is a word class but this phrase is not a single word. And you asked about the "kinds of words"...
- 6,478
4
votes
Is the word "here" a preposition?
"Here" is not a preposition per se.
By definition, prepositions come before a noun phrase (or determiner phrase) to create prepositional phrases:
He was (in (the house)).
They saw him (with ...
- 64k
4
votes
Specific English word classification
Some additional contributions of mine:
Stressed vs unstressed:
Nouns, adjectives, lexical verbs, numerals and adverbs in English all carry primary stress, whereas articles don't. Prepositions will ...
- 3,431
4
votes
Accepted
The Grelling-Nelson Paradox
Just as you can view the question of the self-descriptiveness of "non-self-descriptive" as a form of the liar's paradox ("this statement is false") you can similarly view the question of whether "...
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3
votes
Accepted
Terminology around non-word, but word-like, structures
Those things are considered special parts-of-speech in corpus linguistics. There are several lists for parts-of-speech in general use, and in Universal Dependencies they are called "Symbols". Some of ...
- 29.8k
3
votes
What kind of a word class are numbers?
It seems in English, numbers can be adjectives, determiners, and nouns.
(Though I feel the nouns are really just adjectives that have an implied noun.)
Types of numbers
Ordinals: first, second...
...
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3
votes
always | never | "all the time" - what kind of words are these?
Always and never are adverbs of frequency. The phrase all the time is a noun phrase.
We use all three of these items as (temporal) adjuncts, a term which refers to their syntactic function, in other ...
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3
votes
Does Japanese have pronouns?
There is no real linguistic definition of a “pronoun”.
Grammatically, however, words that are often called “pronouns” in Japanese behave in an identical distribution to any other normal noun.
But, ...
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3
votes
Are prepositions ever a wide open class in any language?
There is a term "adposition" which avoids the "pre-" vs "post-" problem. I don't know if your issue is specifically with prepositions (and not postpositions), or is it ...
- 82k
2
votes
When are numbers nouns?
Each word is classified by what is permissible in the instances in which it appears. In English, "three" can be a noun, an adjective, a pronoun, or a numeral. I will use French as the second language ...
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2
votes
Does adding the suffix -ly to a noun or an adjective provide morphological evidence for word class?
Since -ly can be affixed to nouns (gentlemanly, friendly, ghostly, spritely) and adjectives (unlikely, quickly, heavily, lightly), but not to verbs, then it isn't much use as a diagnostic of word ...
- 82k
2
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always | never | "all the time" - what kind of words are these?
I think your question is not really about linguistics, but about rhetoric, especially after this comment:
I added more context, which will make it more apparent that, 'exaggerations', was the ...
- 2,625
2
votes
Does Japanese have pronouns?
This is somewhat complicated by the fact that many people who write about this stuff in English are not professional linguists nor professional scholars/historians of the Japanese language: they ...
2
votes
Specific English word classification
Yielding roughly the same as the distinction between open and closed word classes, but from a more functional perspecive rather than w.r.t. productivity (i.e. how frequently are new words form based ...
- 6,478
2
votes
Does there exist a pair of words with the same parts of speech, same base form, but different inflections?
Japanese has consonant-stem verbs and vowel-stem verbs (and few irregular verbs). If using 終止形 as lemma, then there are some consonant-stem verbs and vowel-stem verbs with the same lemma, but with ...
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2
votes
Does there exist a pair of words with the same parts of speech, same base form, but different inflections?
A Romanian example:
măr: "apple" (neutral) / "apple tree" (masculine); in the singular they are identical, in the plural:
no article
definite article
nominative
mere / meri
...
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1
vote
Looking for a theoretical treatment of closed- and open-classes
I ended up finding this volume, and the first, introductory chapter was what I was looking for.
Corver, N., & van Riemsdijk, H. (Eds.). (2013). "Semi-lexical categories : The function of ...
- 542
1
vote
Are cold as in cool and cold as in calm seperate words? What is "cool" without context, it can't be a word?
That distinction is often called a "sense" of a word, thus "mean" in the sense "average" / "cruel" / "intend" etc. People also call that a "reading".
- 82k
1
vote
What is a word called that can function as multiple other types of words?
Firstly, a working definition of 'word' needs to be posited. Here, the non-well-defined 'orthographic word of given form, but with homographs being distinct words' is chosen (so 'periodic' roughly = '...
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1
vote
What is a word called that can function as multiple other types of words?
There are multiple ways of interpreting it.
Treating it as a single word with multiple categories. The different forms sometimes have subtly different shades of meaning, so some people don't like ...
- 2,364
1
vote
Specific English word classification
There is indeed some kind of classification along the lines you sketch, it is open versus closed word classes.
Open classes easily accept neologisms and contain a lot of different words
Closed ...
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1
vote
What kind of a word class are numbers?
Of course, there are lots of "It depends", but in practically all part-of-speech tagsets I am aware of Cardinal Numbers are a class of their own (called cardinal number, cardinal, oder numeral)
- 29.8k
1
vote
What kind of a word class are numbers?
As I've learned it, numerals are like a form of determiners, so 'six books' is similar to 'those books'.
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