Closed classes

Determiners

Determiners occur preceding the head within noun phrases and function to modify the noun in terms of definiteness or quantity. Some quantifiers can inflect for grade, for example, few, fewer, fewest. Some have irregular forms, for example, many or much, more, most and little, less, least.

There are six types of determiners: articles (for example, a/an, the), demonstratives (for example, this, that, these, those), interrogatives (for example, what, which), numbers (for example, one, two, three ... fifteen and so on), quantifiers (for example, some, few, any, several, no, all, both), and possessives (for example, Christie's, my).

• The definite article the specifies a particular entity which has already been referred to or is known, for example, Please move the car.

• The indefinite article a is used with an entity which is not known or specified, for example, Ivan wants a car. There are two morphological forms of the indefinite article, a which occurs with nouns starting with consonants and an which occurs before vowels.

• Demonstratives specify an entity in terms of the distance (real or metaphorical) from the speaker, for example, this week, those books. Note that demonstratives can also function as pronouns, replacing a specified noun or noun phrase, for example, Do you want that?

• Interrogatives question the identity of the referent, for example, Which fence did the horse break?

• Numbers specify the quantity of the referent(s) of the head noun, for example, nine bats.

• Quantifiers assign a relative quantity to the referent(s) of the head noun, for example, many people.

• Possessives modify the noun in terms of ownership, and include possessive nouns, for example, Zac's horse, and pronouns, for example, their house.

Prepositions

Prepositions function as the heads of prepositional phrases. They take a noun phrase as a complement and relate it to other constituents in a sentence. Prototypical prepositions encode spatial (for example, to the park, from Paris) and temporal relations (for example, after dinner, in a week), but they can also express manner (for example, with grace) and agency (for example, by the police).

Many prepositions can fulfil more than one semantic function. For example, over encodes both place (for example, over the gate) and time (for example, over several days). Some prepositions can have functions traditionally related to other parts of speech, for example, before can be a preposition (for example, Mel went every year before 1995), a subordinator (for example, Mel wants to go before it closes) or an adverb (for example, Mel has only been once before).

Prepositions do not have inflections.

Some verbs require prepositions as particles. This means they function as part of the verb, for example, switch on (the light), fold up (the umbrella). See the discussion of prepositional phrases.

Coordinators

Coordinators join two or more equal constituents together. The constituents may be words, phrases, or clauses. In English, the coordinators are and, or and but. Here are some examples:

• coordinating words (for example, the nouns in I like tea and cake or Do you want milk or cream in your coffee?)

• coordinating phrases (for example, the prepositional phrases in We searched in the house and in the car and I found my keys not in my purse but under the newspaper.)

• coordinating clauses within a sentence (for example, I like hot chips and I like ice cream or We have butter but we don't have margarine.)

Subordinators

Subordinators join two clauses which do not have equal syntactic status: they join a subordinate clause to the main clause. One important function of subordinators is to allow the inclusion of contextual information within a clause. Some important semantic categories of English subordinators are listed below, with examples.

• place (for example, I can put the box down wherever you like.)

• time (for example, I will leave for work after I've done the dishes.)

• purpose (for example, Can you lend me some money so that I can pay my library fine?)

• reason (for example, I am only in a hurry because I'm late.)

• condition (for example, If you finish your homework you can watch TV.)

• concession (for example, Although it was raining, we decided to continue with the bike ride.)