closed class

closed class (plural closed classes)

1. (linguistics) A set of words in a given language that cannot easily gain new members.

   Antonym: open class

   • 2012 March 2, Neal Whitman, “The Forgotten Helping Verbs”, in Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus‎, archived from the original on 2023-06-05:

     Songs and other mnemonics are popular ways to teach parts of speech in closed classes. Parts of speech like nouns and verbs are said to be in open classes; that is, new nouns and verbs are added all the time. You can't teach what a noun is by having your students memorize a song containing every noun in the English language. On the other hand, pronouns are a good example of a closed class. Look at all the failed attempts through the centuries to add a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun to the language. For a part of speech that includes only a couple dozen words, an extensional definition can be much easier to teach than the defining characteristics of the class, especially since closed classes tend to be made up of "function words" that don't have easily stated meanings.

   • 2013 July 30, “The Demonstrative Determiner in English Grammar”, in Linguistics Girl‎, archived from the original on 2013-08-18:

     Determiners are a closed class of words that provide information such as familiarity, location, quantity, and number about a noun or noun phrase. Determiners differ in form and function from adjectives, which describe attributes of nouns and noun phrases. […] The four demonstrative determiners in English grammar are: this, that, these, those.