Lexical - functional words and contet words.

FUNCTIONAL WORDS AND CONTENT WORDS.

       Function words are the words we use to make our sentences grammatically correct. Pronouns (I, it, we, they, he, she), determiners (a, an, the, some, any), and prepositions (at, on, to, near), conjunction (and, so, but, however), and auxiliary verbs (am, are, has, could, should)

are examples of function words. If our function words are missing or used incorrectly, we are probably considered poor speakers of English, but our listener would probably still get the main idea of what we are saying. Since function words don't give us the main information, we don't usually want or need to do anything to give them added attention and the words remain unstressed. In addition, sometimes we do things to deliberately push function words into the background... almost the opposite of stressing. This is called reducing.

Content words are usually nouns, verbs, adjectives, and sometimes adverbs. Those are the words that help us form a picture in our head; they give us the contents of our story and tell our listener where to focus his or her attention. We want our listener to be able to quickly grasp the main content of our story, so we make the content words easier to hear by bringing attention to them with added stress.

A sentence may consist of several content words

(Dogs hate cats); we cannot build up a sentence

with only several functional words (his my by).

Thus, his my by is not a sentence.

The number of functional words is small and

limited but these words are used both in spoken

and written English much more than the content

words.