Function word
Synsemantikum (also Synsemantikon, Synkategorem or function word ) (English: synsemantic word or function word) is a term used in linguistics; it includes all words or types of words that have no lexical meaning, but in a sentence have a purely grammatical function. Synsemantic words do not refer to things of the world ( such as home, beautiful, running, etc. ), but are necessary for the construction of a sentence. In the sentence The cat is sitting in front of the furnace, the products are the and the and the preposition before function words.
The scope and characteristics
Synsemantika always belong to the basic vocabulary of a language. Among them
- Article
- Conjunctions
- Particle
- Pronoun
- Prepositions
- Modal verb and auxiliary verb
Unlike the Synsemantikum is the Autosemantikum or content word (noun, verb, adjective). Synsemantika come when they are meaningful independent, also regardless of the situation to use, spoken or written in the. Content words with their semantic relation to the world, however, can only be used depending on the current situation.
Basically, in all kinds of spoken or written language, function words, the most common words. The longer a text - or the more extensive a then -studied text corpus - is, the more function words occur in an ordered according to the frequency word list from the content words. Thus there are, for example, in a study of English-language texts in the amount of 320,000 words among the 50 most common words Synsemantika 47, and only 3 content words.
Terminology
In the literature there are several alternative names for this category of words; so there are also the expressions
- Service word
- Form word
- Grammatical word
- Empty word
- Word structure
- Synkategorem
The term Synkategorem for this group of words can also be understood in a broader sense and then includes polysemous, or more intimate linguistic expressions such as the word good, which has different meanings depending on the linguistic context. ( This can be used as an adjective describe about the quality of a representational or abstract thing or a value, but for example adverbial also express agreement to a statement. )
Swell
- Helmut Glück ( ed.), in collaboration with Friederike Schmöe: Metzler Lexikon Sprache. Third, revised edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2005. ISBN 978-3-476-02056-7
- Gerhard Helbig, Joachim Buscha: German grammar. 18th edition. Leipzig include: Langenscheidt / Publishing Encyclopedia Leipzig 1998, ISBN 3-324-00118-8, Ch. 4ff.