LIN204H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Reflexive Pronoun, Linguistic Prescription, Hypercorrection
Document Summary
English has a core vocabulary made up of nouns, verbs, adjecives, and adverbs. These words are called content words; they contain meaning independent of one another. An image of a cat or cats comes to mind. Some examples of content words would be: cat, love, exincion, run quiet gradually. This is a massive, open set of words. New content words are always coming into existence. English also has a small, closed set of vocabulary items that can be grouped into various categories: determiners, auxiliaries, qualiiers, preposiions, conjuncions, pronouns, relaives, and interrogaives, among others. Closed set, because new funcion words cannot be coined or inverted like content words can. In terms of meaning, funcion words have litle if any conceptual content that can be associated wit hthe real word. In other words, they have no independent meaning. Well, their funcion is to provide the sentence infrastructure into which the content words can be placed.
