Explain, in your own words, why functional words, as opposed to content words, are limited in number.
Question: Explain, in your own words, why functional words, as opposed to content words, are limited in number.
Functional words, such as conjunctions, prepositions, and articles, are limited in number because they serve primarily grammatical functions and do not carry much lexical meaning. In contrast, content words, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, carry the main semantic content of a sentence. While there are many ways to express semantic content through different combinations of content words, the range of functional words needed to convey grammatical relationships is relatively small. As a result, functional words are typically a closed class of words, meaning that new words are rarely added to the language over time.
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