 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Function word" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(September 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Inlinguistics,function words (also calledfunctors)[1] arewords that have littlelexicalmeaning or haveambiguous meaning and expressgrammatical relationships among other words within asentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus they form important elements in the structures of sentences.[2]
Words that are not function words are calledcontent words (oropen class words,lexical words, orautosemantic words) and includenouns, mostverbs,adjectives, and mostadverbs, although some adverbs are function words (likethen andwhy).Dictionaries define the specific meanings of content words but can describe only the general usages of function words. By contrast,grammars describe the use of function words in detail but treat lexical words only in general terms.
Since it was first proposed in 1952 byC. C. Fries, the distinguishing of function/structure words from content/lexical words has been highly influential in the grammar used in second-language acquisition andEnglish-language teaching.[3]
Function words might beprepositions,pronouns,auxiliary verbs,conjunctions,grammatical articles orparticles, all of which belong to the group ofclosed-class words.Interjections are sometimes considered function words but they belong to the group ofopen-class words. Function words might or might not beinflected or might haveaffixes.
Function words belong to the closed class of words ingrammar because it is very uncommon to have new function words created in the course of speech. In the open class of words, i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs,new words may be added readily, such asslang words, technical terms, and adoptions and adaptations of foreign words.
Each function word either: gives grammatical information about other words in a sentence orclause, and cannot be isolated from other words; or gives information about the speaker's mental model as to what is being said.
Grammatical words, as a class, can have distinctphonological properties from content words. For example, in some of theKhoisan languages, most content words begin withclicks, but very few function words do.[4] In English, very few words other than function words begin with thevoicedth[ð].[5] English function words may be spelled with fewer thanthree letters; e.g., 'I', 'an', 'in', while non-function words usually are spelled with three or more (e.g., 'eye', 'Ann', 'inn').
The following is a list of the kind of words considered to be function words with English examples. They are alluninflected in English unless marked otherwise:
