Linguistica inglese completo

Content words and function words

Henry Sweet in his famous grammar of 1891 (p.22), writes: "In a sentence such as The earth is round, we have no difficulty in recognizing earth and round as ultimate independent sense-units... Such words as the and is, on the other hand, though independent in form, are not independent in meaning: the and is by themselves do not convey any ideas, as earth and round do. We call such words as the and is form-words, because they are words in form only. When a form-word is entirely devoid of meaning, we may call it an empty word, as opposed to full words such as earth and round."

• Content words: noun, adjective, adverb, main verb
• Function words: auxiliary verb, modal verb, pronoun, preposition, determiner, conjunction

Language principles according to Professor John Sinclair

According to Prof. John Sinclair, there are two principles at work in language: the open choice and the idiom principle.

The open choice principle

• Language is creative
• Sentences can be thought of as empty slots
• The speaker chooses how to fill each slot
• Each choice is a separate one (that is, the choice of words is completely open)
• This is the traditional view of language, taught in many pedagogical grammars

The idiom principle

• In fact, much of language co-occurs systematically so that words are not chosen individually, but in groups.
• Collocation: This term covers the notion that there are regularities in how words occur together.

Key factors of collocation

• A) Words co-occur
• B) The relationships between words have varying degrees of exclusivity

Examples of exclusive relations between words

• Blonde almost only occurs with (collocates with) hair, woman, and lady. They collocate strongly.
• Nice day, nice salary, nice view – weak collocations