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English function words may be spelled with fewer than three letters; e.g., 'I', 'an', 'in', while non-function words usually are spelled with three or more (e.g., 'eye', 'Ann', 'inn'). The following is a list of the kind of words considered to be function words with English examples. They are all uninflected in English unless marked otherwise:
In lexicography [citation needed], a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). [ citation needed ] Examples are cat , traffic light , take care of , by the way , and it's raining cats and dogs .
In terms of phrase structure rules, phrasal categories can occur to the left of the arrow while lexical categories cannot, e.g. NP → D N. Traditionally, a phrasal category should consist of two or more words, although conventions vary in this area. X-bar theory, for instance, often sees individual words corresponding to phrasal categories ...
The lexical definition of a term, also known as the dictionary definition, is the definition closely matching the meaning of the term in common usage. As its other name implies, this is the sort of definition one is likely to find in the dictionary. A lexical definition is usually the type expected from a request for definition, and it is ...
He gives the example of Hopper and Traugott (1993), who treat some putative counterexamples as cases of lexicalization in which a grammatical form is incorporated into a lexical item but does not itself become a lexical item. An example is the phrase to up the ante, which incorporates the preposition up (a function word) in a verb (a content ...
Different words have different functions depending on their lexical category and form. For example, while a plain [d] pronoun like who may typically function as a subject or object, its genitive form functions only as a determiner (e.g., the person [whose keys] I found).
Lexical meaning is not limited to a single form of a word, but rather what the word denotes as a base word. For example, the verb to walk can become walks , walked , and walking – each word has a different grammatical meaning, but the same lexical meaning ("to move one's feet at a regular pace").
The verb phrase of a sentence is generally headed by a lexical verb. [1] Lexical verbs are categorized into five categories: copular, intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, and ambitransitive. [2] [3] The descriptor lexical is applied to the words of a language's lexicon, often to indicate a content word, as distinct from a function word. [4]