function word

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.