FUNCTION WORDS AND CATEGORIES OF MEANING

A. Definition

According to Richard Nordquist, “function word is a word that expresses a grammatical or structural relationship with other words in a sentence”. It means that function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker.
Words that are not function words are called content words (or open class words or lexical words or autosemantic words): these include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and most adverbs, although some adverbs are function words (e.g., then and why). Dictionaries define the specific meaning of content words, but can only describe the use general usages of fuctiion words. By contrast, grammar describe the use of function words in detail, but treat lexical words in general terms only.
Fuction words might be preposition, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, conjuctions, grammatical articles or particles, all of which belong to the group of closed-class words. Function words belong to the closed class of words in grammar in that it is very uncommon to have new function words created in the course of speech, whereas in the open class of words (that is nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs) new words may be added readily.
The following is a list of the kind of words considered to be function words:
Prepositions        : about, in, of, from, for, at, along, etc.
Articles        : the and a
Pronouns        : inflected in English, as he – him, she – her, etc.

Conjunctions        : uninflected in English, as and, but, after, so, how,if, etc.
Auxiliary verbs    : can, may, might, could, must, shall, will, etc.
Adverbs    : here, there, today, tomorrow, now, then, etc.

1.    Tense and Modality
    The category tense refers to both word meaning and clause meaning. Modality or mood is a category through which speakers can convey their attitude towards the truth or reliability of their assertions (Epistemic Modality) or can express obligation, permission, or suggestion (Deotic Modality).
Examples:
Epistemic modality
She has probably left town by now. (probability)
She has left town by now. (assertion)
They may come to the party (possibility)
Deotic modality
He must come tomorrow. (command)
They may take the disher away. (permission)
You should come to his house. (suggestion)
You must go to library tomorrow. (obligation)

2.    Reference
In semantics, reference is generally construed as the relationships between noun phrases and their referents. For example, there is a difference in the two sentences below:
“The teacher teachs in the classroom”.
“A teacher teachs in the classroom”.
The articles “the” and “a” show different reference. The first belong to a “definite” teacher, while the second refer to an “indefinite” teacher.

3.    Deixis
    According to Richard Nordquist, “deixis is a word (such as this, that, these, those, now, then) that points to the time, place, or situation in which the speaker is speaking”. The term deixis applies to the use of expressions in which the meaninig can be traced directly to features of the act of utterance – when and where it take place, and who is involved as speaker and as addressee. In their primary meaning, for example, now and here are used deictically to refer respectively to the time and place of the utterance.

Kinds of Deixis
a)    Personal Deixis
        Personal deixis concern itself with the grammatical persons involved in an utterance. They are comments or questions about the speaker, the listener or the third person (the person whom both the speaker and the listener is talking about). In English, the distinctions are generally indicated by pronouns.
For example:
I (speaker)
You (listener)
We, They (plural)
He, She, It (singular)

b)    Spatial Deixis
        Spatial deixis or place deixis, concerns itself with the spatial locations relevant to an utterance. Similarly to person deixis, the locations may be either those of the speaker and addressee or those of persons or objects being referred to. The most salient English examples are the adverbs “here” and “there” and the demonstratrives “this” and “that” although those are far from being the only deictic words.

Examples:
I enjoy living in this city.
Here is where we will place the statue.
She was sitting over there.

c)    Temporal Deixis
        Time deixis or temporal deixis concerns itself with various times involved in and referred to in an utterance. This includes time adverbs like “now”, “then”, “soon”, and so forth, and also different tenses. A good example is the word “tomorrow”, which denotes the consecutive next day after every day. The “tomorrow” of a day last year was a different day from the “tomorrow” of a day next week.
        Tenses are generally separated into absolute (deictic) and relative tense. So, for example, simple English past tense is absolute, such as in “He went to Jogjakarta last week”.

d)    Textual Deixis
Textual deixis or discourse deixis refers to the use of expressions within an utterance to refer to parts of the discourse that contains the utterance – including the utterance itself. For examples:
This is a great story        : this refers to an upcoming portion of the discourse.
That was an amazing day.    : that refers to a prior portion of the discourse.





REFERENCES

Blog.proesl.com/2009/12/accent
Chomsky, N (1986) Barriers. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 13, MIT Press.
Richard Nordquist, About.com Guide.