Word Classes
The traditional term used by grammarians and English teachers to refer to word categories in language.
What is part of speech.
The traditional definition of this lexical category.
What is words that describe a person, place or thing.
The traditional definition (or dictionary definition) of this lexical category.
What is a state, action, or event.
This is the term for the subcategory of function words that includes the words in, to, from, with, through, around, near, after. In English, these words appear as heads of a phrase where they occupy the initial position and require a Noun Phrase complement (e.g., from the store, to the library).
What is prepositions.
The study of how language is represented in the brain.
What is neurolinguistics.
The term used to describe the word categories which accept new words as the lexicon of a language grows.
What is open class.
The inflectional morpheme that distinguishes this lexical category from all others in English.
What is the plural morpheme.
The inflectional morpheme that distinguish this lexical category from all others in English.
What is the past tense morpheme.
The subcategory of function words with only three members in English: and, or, but.
What is conjunctions.
The term used for any kind of language disorder that results from an injury to the brain, such as a stroke or a tumor.
What is aphasia.
The term used to describe the word categories which are fixed in size, i.e., the language doesn't add new words to this categories.
The term we use for the subcategory of nouns which don't take a plural morpheme because they refer to entities that aren't countable.
What is mass nouns.
The term linguists use to refer to the following subcategory of verbs: can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, must.
What is modal auxiliaries.
The subcategory of function words in English which includes the articles a/an and the, demonstratives like this, that, those, these, and "possessive pronouns" like my, your, their.
What are determiners.
The term used for the type of aphasia observed among patients whose speech production is characterized by twice as many nouns as verbs.
What is agrammatic aphasia.
Another term used to describe open class categories to reflect that these categories do most of the semantic (meaning-related) work in a sentence.
What is content words.
The criterion linguists use to group both count and mass nouns into one lexical category.
What is their syntactic distribution.
The term linguists use to refer to the way this lexical category represents speech time, event time, and reference time.
What is tense.
The term for the subcategory of function words which are used to refer to quantities, such as many, most, several, as well as numerals, such as three, twenty, five.
What is quantifiers.
The term used for the type of aphasia observed among patients whose speech production is characterized by fewer nouns than verbs.
What is anomic aphasia.
Another term used to describe closed class categories to reflect that these categories do most of the grammatical work in a sentence.
What is function words.
The class of words which replace a whole noun phrase in English.
What is pronouns.
The term linguists use to refer to the way the temporal nature of an event (such as its inception, progress, duration, or completion) is marked on a verb in a language.
What is aspect.
The subcategory of function words that are used to introduce an embedded clause, e.g., the word because in the sentence I read because it's fun.
What is complementizers.
Brain and child language research shows that these two types of words are treated differently by the human brain. For example, some aphasics are unable to read the words in and which, but can read the words inn and witch.
What is content vs. function words.