Content Words

- are best explained and listed in the dictionary, like 'book,

teddy bear or encapsulate

Structure Words
- are best explained in the grammar, i.e. in terms of
how they fit into sentences: the is a definite
article that goes with nouns

- exist in large numbers, tens or hundreds of thousands, as seen - are very limited in number, consisting of 220 or
so in English
in any dictionary
- are mostly very high frequency, for example all
- vary in frequency from common words like beer to very rare
the top ten for English and 45% of the top 100 are
like adduction (6 times in a 100 million words)
structure words
- are used more in written language

- are used more in spoken language

- are more likely to be preceded by a pause in speech I like

bananas, perhaps because there are more to choose from

- are less likely to be preceded by a pause in

speech I hate the referee, perhaps because
there are less of them to choose from

- consist of Nouns (glass), Verbs (move), Adjectives

(glossy) etc

- consist of Prepositions (to), Articles the),

Auxiliaries (can) etc

- are always pronounced and spelled in essentially the same

way; tree is always said with the same consonants and vowel

- vary in pronunciation for emphasisetc; have

can be said as /hQv/, as /hv/ with a change of
vowel and as /v/ (ve)

- usually have a fixed stress or stresses; theatre is always

theatre /'Tit/) never theatre /Ti't:/

- are usually unstressed but given stress for

emphasis etc; Ive done it/I have done
it/I have done it

- usually have more than two letters, as in eye, two, inn

- can consist of one or two letters, as in I, to,

in

- starting in th are pronounced with a voiceless th /T/ think,

theme

- starting in th are pronounced with a voiced

th /D/ this, them, there

- can never be invented, apart from changes over

- can always be invented I heard vagueity on the radio this time. One attempt was per for he/she, which has
morning. Virtually all the new words coming into the language never caught on.
say cyberpunk, are content words.

Structure words (in black italic above) are further classified

into Determiners, Prepositions, Conjunctions and Pronouns.
We'll be looking at them later. They are very common, and there
are only a couple of hundred of them. Most of them are short,

worn down from constant use.

grammatical relations.

They mostly indicate

Content
words (in
blue)
are
further
classified
into Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Adverbs. There are tens of
thousands of them in a language and so they make up most of
the words in a dictionary. Proper nouns (names of people and
places) are not usually a problem for understanding, but are also
Content Words.
In linguistics content words as well as autosemantic are words
such as nouns, most verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that refer to
some object, action, or characteristic. Content words contrast
with function words, which function primarily to express
the grammatical relationships between other words in a
sentence. Content words are open class words, meaning that new
content words can be added to the lexicon easily.[1] In relation to
phonology, content words adhere to the minimal word
constraint, while function words do not.[2]