[Corpora-List] complete list of closed-class words in English

[Yannick Versley]

>
> But I disagree with your assumption that Wikipedia is not
> "authentic" - Wikipedia has sophisticated mechanisms for fostering and
> monitoring supervised collaboration, producing a resource which is arguably
> more authoritative and unbiased than a single-authored source; e.g. see
> [...]
>
I think what *was* meant was something closer to the original research.

Wikipedia is meant as an encyclopedia - not a primary source (i.e. original
research) or
a secondary source (survey papers, textbooks). Encyclopedias (tertiary
sources) gain
credibility by looking (or formulating) a consensus between texts inside a
domain and
making them accessible to people outside a domain.

WP often gets coverage for obscure topics that have no secondary sources
and then people delete the article for non-notability or lack of sources
(these
are part of the "sophisticated mechanisms" - Wikipedia has long drifted away
from the initial anarchy, but it also introduced scary-looking people with
truncheons
in the process).

If you look at the WP page on "Closed class", the article is relatively
short and
incoherent (but the WP:Administrators don't seem to have noticed it),
whereas
the one for "function word" is a lot longer and has "citation needed" and
"original
research" stuck to its top. The "function word" article links to a page
with a
list of "function words" where they include

Auxiliary Verbs
Conjunctions
Determiners
Prepositions
Pronouns
Quantifiers


And, of course, some people think that prepositions don't really fit the
function
word criteria and say that they're somewhere between function words (which
usually have no meaning that is independent of context) and lexical words
(which do).
http://www.atsweb.neu.edu/hlittlefield/ResearchDocs/Chapter1.pdf
seems to give a sensible overview on who claims what in that discussion.

Best,
Yannick Versley
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