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

[John F. Sowa]

On 11/24/2011 2:56 AM, Daniel Zeman wrote:
> some time ago I collected my own list of English closed-class words. It
> is closer to a laundry list than an ontology.

Thanks for the list.

It's useful, but it illustrates the point that nothing
in any NL is ever complete or closed.

An obvious example is numerals.  Why stop at 'billion'?  As economies
(and inflation) grow, 'trillion' has become quite common.  Scientific
terminology has introduced productive prefixes, such as kilo-, mega-,
giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-, zetta-, yotta-.

If you include Latin terms like 'et', 'versus', and 'vs.', then it's
hard to exclude 'etc.', 'et al.', or 'e.g.'  If you include all the
common ones, there is a flood of legal and medical terminology that
comes in.

The pronouns are mostly closed, but archaic forms like 'thou' are
still used.  And dialects have many plurals for 'you', such as
'youse', 'you all', and 'youns'.

The articles 'a', 'an', and 'the' best qualify as a closed class.
Yet many foreign terms creep in.  Some people say 'the hoi polloi',
but purists drop 'the'.  Does that make 'hoi' an addition to the list
of English articles?  Similar issues arise with articles that are
part of names and phrases borrowed from other European languages.

John







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