ABSTRACT
It seems likely that all languages make a distinction between words belonging to functional categories and those belonging to lexical categories, a distinction that roughly coincides with the sets of open and closed class items. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives constitute the class of lexical categories in English, while determiners, prepositions, auxiliaries, modals, complementizers, conjunctions, and other sorts of particles fall into the class of functional categories. The distinction between lexical and functional categories plays an important role in characterizing the syntactic properties of sentences (Abney, 1987; Chomsky, 1986; Fukui & Speas, 1986; Grimshaw, 1991; Jackendoff, 1977; Pollock, 1989).
