Talk:Open class (linguistics)

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This Redirect must be deleted, as the expression open word class is totally and utterly meaningless. It should be "Open class word" as it is the opposite to "closed class word".

Here is a copy of what I wrote in "Closed-class word":

...I think where the confusion has arisen was with the meanings of "closed class" and "open class" on the one hand, and "word class" on the other hand. "Closed class" refers to a class of words to which no new words are normally added, or very rarely added, because the number of words with a particular meaning are complete or nearly complete, and are not added to, such as the article "the". You only have one definite article in English and that is "the". No other word has been added to the definite article class. It took hundreds of years to change from the archaic "ye" to crystallize into "the". Therefore there is no other term equivalent to "the", and that kind of thing is meant by "closed class". A closed class has a relatively small number of words and consists of grammatic terms such as prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, and determiners.

In other words, can anyone say when we had any prepositions such as "for", "to", "against" added in the vocabulary of the English language? Or pronouns such as "she", "it", "his"? Or conjunctions such as "and", "or", "when"? These words have been in use for a long time and nothing has been added to them. That is why they belong to the "closed-class" kind of words. In contrast, "open class" words are words which belong to a class which is continuously added to in usage, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs, through either borrowing from other languages such "to strafe" as a particular type of "firing on people", compounding such as "homework" which originally consisted of two words "home" and "work", exclamations such as "hi", "hello", "arrgh" which are continuously being coined, snd therefore belong to an "open class". A great source of the latter type of exclamation are comics where particular kinds of noises generate new words all the time.

A "word class" on the other hand is merely the class of words a word belongs to, such as a verb, noun, determiner, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun, conjunction, etc. A great article discussing this is "Word Classes" (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/wordclas/xwdc11.htm). So, Ruakh, not quite so confused as you think, eh?

I noticed you changed the "open-class word to "open-word class", wrongly, for the above reasons. It needs to be changed back to "Open-class word. Badly. It is the opposite to "closed-class word". Dieter Simon 00:22, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

There is no such linguistic term as "open word class", I think you got confused with instructions of how to "Open Word" in Microsoft. The first twenty or so websites I looked at in Yahoo were in fact just such instructions. But no website I saw for Open word class. I shall pursue this, I am afraid, because this utterly confusing to those who want to consult the above linguistic/grammatical key phrases. Dieter Simon 00:22, 24 May 2006 (UTC)