Handouts, etc.
- DQ #4
- Slides — 1-up or 4-up
- Pullum’s new preposition
Today we continued our discussion of morphology mainly by taking a closer look at lexical categories. In addition to the “open class” items like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, which are on display in the Jabberwocky poem (from Monday), we also discussed “function words” which are considered a closed class because new ones are rarely added to a lexicon. You can check the slides to review the different categories of function words we looked at. We spent the end of class talking about whether the category preposition is a closed class, as traditional grammar would suggest, or whether it might admit new members, as Geoff Pullum argues in the radio transcript we read (handout linked above).
We didn’t get to the last question on today’s DQs, so that won’t be on the quiz on Monday.