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Is there commonly accepted opinion on what lexemes this/that are, determiners or pronouns?

E.g. in the following phrase:

... can help you work these out

these seem to show some properties of pronouns more than that of determiners.

More generic question: is there commonly accepted classification of the English closed class lexemes?

Denis Kulagin
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    Why can't it be both? (i.e. the same word can play different grammatical roles in different sentences) – Denis Nardin Jun 27 '18 at 07:54
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    Or different words can have the same surface structure. – Luke Sawczak Jun 27 '18 at 12:56
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    An answer about the Penn Treebank POS set is hardly an answer to the classification of this and that. And the other question is a good one, too. Is there a decent classification of closed class lexemes? – jlawler Jun 27 '18 at 15:07
  • "This/that" and the plural forms "these/those" belong to the category "demonstrative determinative", where they typically function as determiner, e.g. "this guy", "these houses". But they can also function in 'fused determiner-head constructions, which is the case in your example. In the 'fused determiner-head' construction, the head and the determiner are combined or fused into a single word -- in your example "these", where we understand "these x", where "x" is interpreted from the discourse. – BillJ Jun 28 '18 at 05:51
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    Members of the closed class comprise: preposition, determinative, subordinator and coordinator. These categories do not readily accept the addition of new members. – BillJ Jun 28 '18 at 05:58
  • Aren't the modals/auxiliaries and the pronouns also closed classes? – amI Jul 02 '18 at 21:55
  • We're talking here about word categories at the topmost level, not the sub-categories. Auxiliary verb and pronoun are sub-categories of the more general categories verb and noun, which are not of course closed class. – BillJ Jul 05 '18 at 18:05

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