function word

A word, such as a preposition, a conjunction, or an article, that has little semantic content of its own and chiefly indicates a grammatical relationship. Also called form word, functor.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

function word

(Grammar) grammar a word, such as the, with a particular grammatical role but little identifiable meaning. Compare content word, grammatical meaning

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

func′tion word`

a word, as a preposition, conjunction, or article, that chiefly expresses grammatical relationships and has little semantic content of its own (disting. from content word).

[1935–40]

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

function word - a word that is uninflected and serves a grammatical function but has little identifiable meaning

closed-class word

word - a unit of language that native speakers can identify; "words are the blocks from which sentences are made"; "he hardly said ten words all morning"

determinative, determiner - one of a limited class of noun modifiers that determine the referents of noun phrases

preposition - a function word that combines with a noun or pronoun or noun phrase to form a prepositional phrase that can have an adverbial or adjectival relation to some other word

pronoun - a function word that is used in place of a noun or noun phrase

conjunctive, connective, continuative, conjunction - an uninflected function word that serves to conjoin words or phrases or clauses or sentences

particle - a function word that can be used in English to form phrasal verbs

grammatical meaning - the meaning of a word that depends on its role in a sentence; varies with inflectional form

Translations

mot-outil

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

Function word frames (7 types): frame consists of only function words such as prepositions, determiners, conjunctions, pronouns, etc.

Target frames in British hotel websites

There were two independent factors: the syntactic role of the word in which the target letter appeared (content word versus function word) and the position in which the letter appeared (first position or second position in the word).

Language-specific and language-general factors in text reading in Arabic: evidence from the Missing Letter Effect

The first remark is the recurrent 'used as a function word to indicate'.

U.S. Presidential discourse, September 11-20, 2011: the birth of the war on terror

In English, a function word comes before a content word (the dog, his hat, with friends, for example) and the duration of the content word is longer, while in Japanese or Hindi, the order is reversed, and the pitch of the content word higher.

Bilingual babies get a grip on grammar by 7 months

Nominal Verbal Expression Expression Definition of New Term (fare) spamming to spanning 'junk email as a collective/the sending of junk email' -noun suggests verbal action (fare) blogging il blogging 'the act of contributing to blogs/ writing or engaging in blogs -noun suggests verbal action (fare) scrolling to scrolling 'the function of moving through pages on the computer screen' -noun suggests verbal action Consequently, the telic (functional) role associated with fare is very much in line with the connotative core vocabulary of Italian on the Internet and therefore it is to be expected that a function word of this sort, used to perform dynamic activities, might play such a central role.

Morphosyntactic aspects of Italian Internet terminology: toward an understanding of Galisson's lexical banalisation

Craig claims that function word tests support this conclusion, but the results are not shown.

Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney (eds). Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship

--Strong forms of function words occur if the function word --is isolated --is focused --is at the edge of a phonological phrase

Weak function word shift **

After the corpus is tagged, frequencies are collected for each tag and for each function word (determiners, prepositions, etc.), and also for each adjacent pair of tags and function words.

Automated essay evaluation: the Criterion Online writing service

Depending on a function word everyone uses (of), and being unambiguously countable, Wells's negative markers warrant careful scrutiny.

Paradigms of Authorship