Function Words

Other syntactic categories include grammatical or function words. Conjunctions such as or and also and, prepositions such as in or of, the articles the and a or an, part of the class of determiners (see chapter4), and pronouns have been referred to as closed class words. It is not easy to think of new conjunctions or prepositions or pronouns that have recently entered the language. There is a small set of personal pronouns such as I, me, mine, he, she, and so on. With the growth of the feminist movement some proposal have been made for adding a new neutral singular pronoun, neither masculine nor feminine, which could be used as the general, or generic, form. Had such a pronoun existed, it might have prevented the department chairperson in a large university from making the incongruous statement, ‘We will hire the best person for the job, regardless of his sex’. The American psychologist Donald MacKay has suggested that we use ‘e’, Pronounced like the letter name, for this pronoun, with various alternative form; other point out that they and their are already being used as neutral third-person singular forms, as in ‘Anyone can do it if they try hard enough’, or ‘Everyone can do their best’, This use of the various forms of they is recognized by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as part of the practice of non-discriminatory language. Everybody and everyone can now be considered either singular or plural, similar to such words as committee or government.

These classes of content and function words appear to have psychological and neurological validity. As discussed earlier, some brain-damaged patients have greater difficulty in using or understanding or reading function words than content words. Some are unable to read function words such as in or which but can read the lexical contents words inn or witch. Other patients do just opposite. The two classes of words also seem to function differently in slips of the tongue produced by normal individuals. For example, a speaker may inadvertently switch words producing ‘the journal of the editor’ instead of ‘ the editor of the journal’, but the switching or exchanging of function words has not been observed. The important feature of these two classes is their function rather than their degree of ‘openness’. What is an ‘open class’ in one language may be ‘closed’ in another. In Akan, the major spoken language in Ghana, for example, there are only a handful of ‘adjectives’: most English adjectives are in the verb class in Akan. Instead of saying ‘The sun is bright today’, an Akan speaker will say ‘The sun brightens today’.