Content words vs. function words
When talking about words we also need to distinguish between content words and function words. Finegan (1994: 161) expresses the difference well, writing that content words “have meaning in that they refer to objects, events, and abstract concepts; are marked as being characteristic of particular social, ethnic, and regional dialects and of particular contexts; and convey information about the feelings and attitudes of language users.” Function words also have meaning, but in a different way.
Most nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are content words. Function words are often best defined by their function. Examples of function words are determiners, pronouns, conjunctions, and certain verbs – those with little or no meaning such as be, should, or must.
Paris
in the
the spring
If you are like many people, the first time you see the graphic above, you read, “Paris in the spring.” Look again. It says, “Paris in the the spring.” This is a well-known case of expectation affecting perception. You expect only one definite determiner, so you don’t realize the stimulus contains two. This trick doesn’t work if we write “Paris Paris in the spring,” or “Paris in the spring spring.” The key is to repeat a function word because we tend to take words like the for granted. A similar perception trick repeats the “a” of “Once upon a time.” Again, it capitalizes on the fact that a is a function word.
Function words are like thumbtacks. We don’t notice thumbtacks; we look at what they are holding up. If we were to take the tacks away, the calendars and posters would fall down. Likewise, if we took the function words out of speech, it would be hard to figure out what was going on:
took function words speech hard figure going on
This is what the previous sentence would look like if we took out all of the function words.
One generalization we can make is that while content words are an open class and it is possible to coin new ones, function words are a closed class. A person cannot easily invent a new preposition or conjunction. Perhaps most telling is the long history of people trying to invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun for English. Suggestions have included co, et, hesh, na, e, and thon. Some linguists have recently proposed tey (on the analogy of plural they, which is gender-neutral), with further forms tem and ter (modeled on them and her). None of these novel words has caught on, while novel content words like modem and cell phone enter the language relatively smoothly.
3 Our use of “adverb” here mirrors that of traditional grammar. Some modern linguists would give very and not different labels.
4 In modern syntax, prepositions are considered a lexical category. This does not make them content words.
