Sentence examples for function word from inspiring English sources
noun
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.
Criteria for this analysis were: only direct interactions were considered, a minimum of 3 published articles should describe the functional interaction (so called "function word level B2"), and for inclusion of a transcription factor (TF) showing TF-gene interaction, the additional criterion of at least two different input genes having this specific TFBS was compulsory.
Here grammar and usage establish that "the" is "a function word..
The article examines how likely it is that a playwright will use one function word near another, a group of tendencies they dub a "word-adjacency network".
Together, these studies show that learning a function word like "or" requires richer lexical representations than are currently assumed by our theories of word learning.
For Emily Brewster, one of Stamper's colleagues, a career highlight was discovering a previously unrecorded sense for the indefinite article "a": "used as a function word before a proper noun to distinguish the condition of the referent from a usual, former, or hypothetical condition".
When a function word, such as an auxiliary, grammaticalizes as an affix on a base, affixes trapped between the base and new affix are often lost (Harris and Faarlund 2006).
Are there gender differences in how we use function words?
Simplifying Mᴀᴛᴄʜ Wᴏʀᴅ: Evidence from English function words.
García, A. M. & Martín, J. C. Function words in authorship attribution studies.
The evidence I use mainly comes from the domain of English function words.
Out of 100,000 words in the average English speaker's vocabulary, function words account for only about 500, or 0.5%.
