3 Form and meaning

Today, we are looking at the concept of words and word classes. Our aim is to provide some first evidence for common and inherently quantitative statements about language. For example, we might say that one word is “more common” than another or one word class has more members than another. Below we will start by by looking at word classes and we will try to provide evidence for a very simple hypothesis: There are closed word classes with a limited amount of members and open word classes with significantly more members.