Function word

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  1. The winfy prunkilmonger from the glidgement mominkled and brangified all his levensers vederously.
  2. Glop angry investigator larm blonk government harassed gerfritz infuriated sutbor pumrog listeners thoroughly.

In sentence (1) above, the content words have been changed into nonsense syllables but it is not difficult for one to posit that winfy is an adjective, prunkilmonger, glidgement, levensers as nouns, mominkled, brangified as verbs and vederously as an adverb based on clues like the derivational and inflectional morphemes. (The clue is in the suffixes: -y indicates adjectives such as "wintery"; -er, -ment and -ers indicates nouns such as "baker", "battlement" and "messengers"; -led and -fied suggests verbs such as "mingled" and "clarified"; and -ly is that of adverbs such as "vigorously"). Hence, even without lexical meaning, the sentence can be said to be rather "meaningful". However, when the reverse is done and the function words are being changed to nonsense syllables as in sentence (2), the result is a totally incomprehensible sentence as the grammatical meaning which is signaled by the structure words is not present. Hence, function words provide the grammatical relationships between the open class words and helps create meaning in sentences.





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.[2] In English, very few words other than function words begin with voiced th- [ð] (see Pronunciation of English th).


See also[edit]


  1. ^ Klammer , Thomas, Muriel R. Schulz and Angela Della Volpe. (2009). Analyzing English Grammar (6th ed).Longman.

External links[edit]