function word

A word that has little meaning when standing alone, but instead serves to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker, including conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, certain frequent adverbs.

Noun

  1. A word that has little meaning when standing alone, but instead serves to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker, including conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, certain frequent adverbs.
    • Durrant (2009), for example, developed a list of 1000 academic two-word bigrams, of which 763 were lexical words combined with function words. - 2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Position vectors, homologous...

    Synonyms: functor grammatical word

    Antonyms: content word lexical word

Forms

function words