Function word
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Function words (or grammatical words or synsemantic words or structure-class words) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, 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 serve as important elements to the structures of sentences.
The following is a list of the kind of words considered to be function words:
- articles — the and a. In some inflected languages, the articles may take on the case of the declension of the following noun.
- pronouns — inflected in English, as he — him, she — her, etc.
- adpositions — uninflected in English
- conjunctions — uninflected in English
- auxiliary verbs — forming part of the conjugation (pattern of the tenses of main verbs), always inflected
- interjections — sometimes called "filled pauses", uninflected
- particles — convey the attitude of the speaker and are uninflected, as if, then, well, however, thus, etc.
- expletives — take the place of sentences, among other functions.
- pro-sentences — yes, okay, etc.
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See also
- Content word
- Stop word in computer science
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Function word" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
