FUNCTION WORDS (also called grammatical or structure words)

The bones of any sentence are the main noun and verb positions.  (We call the usual word that fills a noun position a noun and the position itself a nominal).  Both nouns and verbs can take modifiers; we call these positions adjectival  or adverbial, and you can think of them as like muscles that go with particular major bones.  Function words are the ligaments tying the main bones together, tying pieces of muscle together sometimes, and marking which bone is which.  They are usually named according to the way they pattern or group.  They signal relationships in the sentence by performing the following tasks:

1. Function words do jobs that can be done by inflectional or derivational endings:

Ex: the bike of that boy = that boy's bike; It did rain = it rained; the most pretty = the prettiest

 

2. Function words mark the position (they say "noun coming up" or "verb coming up".

Ex: The tremendously exciting bestseller finally arrived.  (the is a determiner and determiners say "noun coming up")  (other determiners =  their, four, some, several, an)

Ex: The boy was running. Also, I have taken that class.  (was and have are auxiliary verbs, and auxiliary verbs say "main verb coming up")

 

Notice that the headline "Baby swallows fly" is ambiguous because there are no function words to mark the grammatical categories.  Putting in function words removes the ambiguity:  Baby swallows can fly (or "are able to fly").  A baby has swallowed a fly.

 

3. Function words also enable a whole group of words (instead of a single word) to fill a noun slot or a verb slot or a modifier slot.  In the preceding examples, the whole phrase the book is filling the noun slot in the sentence and the whole phrase was running is filling the verb slot.  Following are some other examples:

Ex.  The box on the shelf is for Joe.  (on the shelf modifies box).   

Ex.  He knows what they said. (What they said is functioning as a noun just like answer in "he knows the answer").  What is a function word. )

 

COMMON FUNCTION WORDS: determiners (articles), conjunctions, prepositions, verb particles, auxiliary verbs, pronouns, intensifiers and qualifiers.

 

Prepositions

 

A preposition is a pre-position:  that means it introduces a noun and shows the relation between that noun and other parts of the sentence.  The whole phrase (made up of the preposition with its noun and attached determiners or modifiers) usually functions as either an adjectival (it modifies a noun) or an adverbial (it modifies a verb).  Ex. Those shoes in the closet are coming apart.

 

Verb Particles

 

This is mostly the same set of words as that found under prepositions, except we call them verb particles when they group up with verbs instead of with nouns.  The up in "He tied up the boat" is a verb particle because it chunks with tied.  The up in "She walked up the hill" is a preposition because it chunks with hill.  What does "I cut up the chicken" mean?