In linguistics, function words are words that have little lexicalmeaning or have ambiguous meaning and expressgrammaticalrelationships among 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 form important elements in the structures of sentences. Words that are not function words are called content words : these include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs, although some adverbs are function words. Dictionaries define the specific meanings of content words, but can only describe the general usages of function words. By contrast, grammars describe the use of function words in detail, but treat lexical words in general terms only. Since it was first proposed in 1952 by C. C. Fries, this distinguishing of function/structure words from content/lexical words has been highly influential in the grammar used in second language acquisition and English language teaching.
Overview
Function words might be prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, grammatical articles or particles, all of which belong to the group of closed-class words. Interjections are sometimes considered function words but they belong to the group of open-class words. Function words might or might not be inflected or might have affixes. Function words belong to the closed class of words in grammar in that it is very uncommon to have new function words created in the course of speech, whereas in the open class of words new words may be added readily. Seeneologism. Each function word either gives some grammatical information on other words in a sentence or clause, and cannot be isolated from other words, or it may indicate the speaker's mental model as to what is being said. Grammatical words, as a class, can have distinct phonological properties from content words. Grammatical words sometimes do not make full use of all the sounds in a language. For example, in some of the Khoisan languages, most content words begin with clicks, but very few function words do. In English, very few words other than function words begin with voiced th voiced dental fricative| ; English function words may have fewer than three letters 'I', 'an', 'in' while non-function words usually have three or more 'eye', 'Ann', 'inn'. The following is a list of the kind of words considered to be function words:
