function word

English

Noun

function word (plural function words)

1. (linguistics) 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, such as prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, or conjunctions.

   Synonyms: functor, grammatical word

   Antonyms: content word, lexical word

   • 2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Position vectors, homologous chromosomes and gamma rays: Promoting disciplinary literacy through Secondary Phrase Lists”, in English for Specific Purposes, →DOI, page 2:

     Durrant (2009), for example, developed a list of 1000 academic two-word bigrams, of which 763 were lexical words combined with function words.

Translations

function word

• Arabic: كَلِمَة وَظِيفِيَّة f (kalima waẓīfiyya)
• Dutch: functiewoord (nl) n
• Finnish: funktiosana (fi), kieliopillinen sana
• French: mot-outil (fr) m, mot grammatical m
• German: Synsemantikum (de) n, Synsemantikon (de) n
• Hindi: please add this translation if you can
• Italian: parola vuota f
• Japanese: 機能語 (kinōgo)
• Korean: 문법형태소 (munbeophyeongtaeso)
• Polish: funktor m
• Portuguese: palavra gramatical f
• Russian: служебное сло́во (ru) n (služebnoje slóvo)
• Spanish: palabra funcional f, palabra gramatical f, palabra cenemática f
• Swahili: please add this translation if you can
• Swedish: formord (sv) n, funktionsord n
• Welsh: gair ffwythiannol m