Editing Language (section)

====Word classes====
Languages organize their [[parts of speech]] into classes according to their functions and positions relative to other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic distinction between a group of words that prototypically denotes things and concepts and a group of words that prototypically denotes actions and events. The first group, which includes English words such as "dog" and "song", are usually called [[noun]]s. The second, which includes "think" and "sing", are called [[verb]]s. Another common category is the [[adjective]]: words that describe properties or qualities of nouns, such as "red" or "big". Word classes can be "open" if new words can continuously be added to the class, or relatively "closed" if there is a fixed number of words in a class. In English, the class of pronouns is closed, whereas the class of adjectives is open, since an infinite number of adjectives can be constructed from verbs (e.g. "saddened") or nouns (e.g. with the -like suffix, as in "noun-like"). In other languages such as [[Korean language|Korean]], the situation is the opposite, and new pronouns can be constructed, whereas the number of adjectives is fixed.<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Trask|2007|p=208}}</ref>

Word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically, verbs are used to construct [[predicate (grammar)|predicates]], while nouns are used as [[argument (linguistics)|argument]]s of predicates. In a sentence such as "Sally runs", the predicate is "runs", because it is the word that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally". Some verbs such as "curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John". A predicate that can only take a single argument is called [[transitivity (grammar)|''intransitive'']], while a predicate that can take two arguments is called [[transitive verb|''transitive'']].<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Trask|2007|p=305}}</ref>

Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as [[conjunction (grammar)|conjunctions]] like "and" that serve to join two sentences, [[article (grammar)|articles]] that introduce a noun, [[interjections]] such as "wow!", or [[ideophones]] like "splash" that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity. Many languages have [[Classifier (linguistics)|classifiers]] that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in [[Japanese language|Japanese]], the general noun classifier for humans is ''nin'' (人), and it is used for counting humans, whatever they are called:<ref>{{harvcoltxt|Senft|2008}}</ref>

:''san-nin no gakusei'' (三人の学生) lit. "3 human-classifier of student"&nbsp;– three students
For trees, it would be:
:''san-bon no ki'' (三本の木) lit. "3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree"&nbsp;– three trees