function word
in a language, a word that has little or no meaning of its own but plays an important grammatical role: Examples include the articles (a, an, the), prepositions (in, of, etc.), and conjunctions (and, but, etc.). Function words are of high frequency, are typically short, and do not generally admit new members (see closed-class words). The distinction between function words and content words is of great interest to the study of language disorders, language acquisition, and psycholinguistic processing. Psycholinguists are especially interested in function words because of their role in facilitating sentence parsing. In combination with nonsense words, they can be used to create sentence frames whose grammaticality can be recognized but whose content is meaningless, such as He zibbed from the fluv by sibbing the flix. Also called empty word; functional moneme;
functor; relational word; structure word.