empty and full word

CHAPTER II

DISCUSSSION

A.    Empty Word

Empty words are the words traditionally grouped into the following parts of speech: interjections, particles, articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions –

1. Particle: a part of speech sharing the features of the verb and the noun
2. Interjection: a part of speech expressing emotion alone
3. Preposition: a part of speech placed before other words in composition and in syntax
4. Adverb: a part of speech without inflection, in modification of or in addition to a verb, adjective, clause, sentence, or other adverb
5. Conjunction: a part of speech binding together the discourse and filling gaps in its interpretation.

Not all of them are necessarily manifested in every language. Some adverbs also belong to these, and occasionally, in text adjectives and nouns of certain general semantics could function like empty words.

 It is hard to discuss without putting it in a context. It is discussed in terms of grammatical phrase or combined with full words. While Empty word does not have semantic decomposition.

Therefore  Closed word classes is included into empty word:

• auxiliary verbs
• clitics
• coverbs
• conjunctions
• determiners (articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
• particles
• measure words
• adpositions (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
• preverbs
• pronouns
• contractions
• cardinal numbers

6. Noun: a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a concrete or abstract entity
7. Verb: a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone
8. Pronoun: a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for a person

English words have been traditionally classified into eight lexical categories, or parts of speech (and are still done so in most dictionaries):

Noun

any abstract or concrete entity; a person (police officer, Michael), place (coastline, London), thing (necktie, television), idea (happiness), or quality (bravery)

Pronoun

any substitute for a noun or noun phrase

Adjective

any qualifier of a noun

Verb

any action (walk), occurrence (happen), or state of being (be)

Adverb

any qualifier of an adjective, verb, clause, sentence, or other adverb

Preposition

any establisher of relation and syntactic context

Conjunction

any syntactic connector

Interjection

any emotional greeting (or "exclamation")

Although these are the traditional eight English parts of speech, modern linguists have been able to classify English words into even more specific categories and sub-categories based on function.

The four main parts of speech in English, namely nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, are labelled form classes as well. This is because prototypical members of each class share the ability to change their form by accepting derivational or inflectional morphemes. The term form is used because it refers literally to the similarities in shape of the word in its pronunciation and spelling for each part of speech.^[10]

Neither written nor spoken English generally marks words as belonging to one part of speech or another, as they tend to be understood in the context of the sentence. Words like neigh, break, outlaw, laser, microwave, and telephone might all be either verb forms or nouns. Although -ly is a frequent adverb marker, not all adverbs end in -ly (-wise is another common adverb marker) and not all words ending in -ly are adverbs. For instance, tomorrow, fast, very can all be adverbs, while early, friendly, ugly are all adjectives (though early can also function as an adverb). Verbs can also be used as adjectives (e.g. "The astonished child watched the spectacle unfold" instead of the verb usage "The unfolding spectacle astonished the child"). In such cases, the verb is in its participle form.

In certain circumstances, even words with primarily grammatical functions can be used as verbs or nouns, as in "We must look to the how's and not just the why's" or "Miranda was to-ing and fro-ing and not paying attention".

Functional classification

The study of linguistics has expanded the understanding of lexical categories in various languages and allowed for better classifying words by function. Common lexical categories in English by function may include:

• Open word classes:
• adjectives
• adverbs
• nouns
• verbs (except auxiliary verbs)
• interjections

A.    Empty word and Full word

Full word in English are forms of the major parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Ex:

a.     Adjectives :beautiful, diligent, smart, cleaver, etc.,

b.      Nouns :table,chair,pen, books, key, etc.,

c.       Verbs  :sleep, sit, eat, take, put, etc.,

in the process of communication full words perform two important functions – semantic and grammatical:

a.       full words present the semantic material for building the lexical meaning and the theme in the text,

b.      full words function as sentence members - they structure  sentences grammatically.

The difference between full words and empty words :

Full words have the following general qualities: they are semiotic signs, i.e. they denote things,events, properties, etc., of the outer word. These signs are members of the system, which means that the meaning and value of these discrete elements are determined by the relationship to the other members within the system. Every full word can be substituted by another full word of the same paradigmatic quality in the formal structure. E.g., the English word “daffodil” can have certain semantic functions in a sentence (which is the most complicated structural unit it self) and be substituted by wild lily, hope, rose.

Empty words are principally un inflected forms, they are not members of the formal structure, they cannot be independent sentence members. The substitution of the given element with another one of the same class, as it is formulated in the case of full words, is therefore, non-relevant for empty words. Their main and essential function is of semantic character.