Function words are characterized by their ambiguous lexical meaning and by their capacity to organize grammatical relationships between words within a sentence. There are a relatively small and fixed number of function words (as opposed to verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, which are limited but expandable sets). Prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs are all considered function words. Most of these words are uninflected although a few are inflected and may take affixes.
English_Function_Words_Set.zip (4.1 KB)