Functional categories

Thus far, we have looked at the five major grammatical categories of English (i.e. the five categories with the largest membership), viz. noun, verb, preposition, adjective and adverb. For typographical convenience, it is standard practice to use capital-letter abbreviations for categories, thus N for noun, V for verb, P for preposition, A for adjective and ADV for adverb. The words which belong to these five categories are traditionally said to be contentives (or content words), in that they have substantive descriptive content. However, in addition to content words languages also contain functors (or function words) – i.e. words which serve primarily to carry information about the grammatical function of particular types of expression within the sentence (e.g. information about grammatical properties such as person, number, gender, case etc.). The differences between contentives and functors can be illustrated by comparing a (contentive) noun like car with a (functional) pronoun like they. A noun like car has obvious descriptive content in that it denotes an object which typically has four wheels and an engine, and it would be easy enough to draw a picture of a typical car; by contrast, a pronoun such as they has no descriptive content (e.g. you can’t draw a picture of they), but rather is a functor which (as we shall see shortly) simply encodes a set of grammatical (more specifically, person, number and case) properties in that it is a third-person-plural nominative pronoun.

One test of whether words have descriptive content is to see whether they have antonyms (i.e. opposites): if a word has an antonym, it is a contentive (though if it has no antonym, you can’t be sure whether it is a functor or a contentive). For

example, a noun/N such as loss has the antonym gain; a verb/V such as rise has the antonym fall; an adjective/A such as tall has the antonym short; an adverb/ADV such as early (as in He arrived early) has the antonym late; and a preposition/P such as inside has the antonym outside. This reflects the fact that nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions typically have substantive descriptive content, and so are contentives. By contrast, a particle like infinitival to, or an auxiliary like do (e.g. ‘Do you want to smoke?’), or a determiner like the, or a pronoun like they, or a complementizer (i.e. complement-clause-introducing particle) like that (as used in a sentence like ‘I said that I was tired’) have no obvious antonyms, and thus can be said to lack descriptive content, and so to be functors. Using rather different (but equivalent) terminology, we can say that contentives have substantive lexical content (i.e. idiosyncratic descriptive content which varies from one lexical item/word to another), whereas functors have functional content. We can then conclude that nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions are lexical or substantive categories (because the words belonging to these categories have substantive lexical/descriptive content) whereas particles, auxiliaries, determiners, pronouns and complementizers are functional categories (because words belonging to these categories have an essentially grammatical function). We will take a closer look at the main functional categories found in English.