Open and Closed Class in Syntax

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are all lexical parts of speech that allow us to add neologism (new word to be a new member). In addition Carnie (2006:43) called it as Open Class. This kind of word is easily learned and adopt by speaker of English. Meanwhile, functional parts of speech by contrast provide the grammatical information and Carnie called it as a “glue” that holds a sentence together and cannot adds a new word to be its member. The functional parts of speech are (Carnie, 2006: 44):

                                                     a.     Determiner (D), the class of determiners is a little broader. It  contains  a  number  of subcategories including  articles,  quantifiers,  numerals,  deictics,  and possessive  pronouns. Determiners appear at the very beginning of English noun phrases.

·       Determiners of  English (D)

1).   Articles: the, a, an

2).   Deictic articles: this, that, these, those, yon  

3).   Quantifiers: every, some, many, most, few, all, each, any, less, fewer, no

4).   (Cardinal) numerals: one, two, three, four, etc.

5).   Possessive pronouns: my, your, his, her, its, our, their

6).   Some Wh-question words: which, whose

                                                     b.     Preposition (P), appear before nouns (or more precisely    noun phrases). English prepositions include the following:

·       Prepositions of English (P): to,  from,  under,  over,  with,  by,  at,  above, before, after, through, near, on, off, for, in, into, of, during, across, without, since, until.

                                                     c.     Complementizers (C), also connects structures together, but they embed  one  clause  inside  of  another  instead  of  keeping  them  on  an  equal level:

·       Complementizers of  English (C): that, for, if, whether

 One of the most important categories that we will use is the category of Tense (T). Instead the category T consists of auxiliaries, modals and the non-finite clause marker. In the older syntactic literature, the category T is sometimes called Infl (inflection) or Aux (Auxiliary).

·       Tense categories of  English (T)

1).   Auxiliaries: have, has, had, am, is, are, was, were, do

2).   Modals: will, would, shall, should, can, could

3).   Non-finite Tense marker: to

                                                     d.     Conjunctions       (Conj)   are  words  that  connect  two  or  more  phrases  together on an equal level:

·       Conjunctions of  English (Conj): and, or, nor, neither … nor, either … or