Delahunty and Garvey
bers of major classes. All of the 50 most common words in English are
function words; they account for about 60% of words used in speech and
45% of those used in writing. (You can check this for yourself by count-
ing the words in this paragraph, then counting the words belonging to the
major parts of speech, and subtracting that number from the whole. The
remainder is the number of words belonging to the minor parts of speech.)
Though sometimes used to dramatize the sorry state of English, this statistic
is as true of Henry James’ prose as of the most pedestrian discourse. This is
because the minor words are essential for indicating important modifica-
tions to, and relations among, the content words, regardless of whether the
content words were chosen by the brilliant or the dull. Because they are
important for integrating content words into the structural organization of
sentences, minor class words are sometimes referred to as structure words.
In presenting the minor word classes, we will proceed mainly by list-
ing some or all of their members. We will also note semantic, functional,
and formal characteristics. Except for pronouns, the formal properties of
these items do not (in English) include inflectional or derivational marking.
Rather, they emerge from the item’s ability to combine with other words,
phrases, or sentences. For instance, after is a preposition because it can com-
bine with a noun phrase (bolded), as in after the announcement. The com-
bination of a preposition and its following noun phrase is called a prepo-
sitional phrase. We will examine this and other phrases in our chapter on
Phrases. Since minor class members may enter into several different types of
combination, they will sometimes (like content words) be members of more
than one class. For example, when after is followed by a clause, as in After
the announcement appeared, we received many phone calls, it is traditionally
thought of as a subordinating adverbial conjunction.
pronouns
The traditional definition of “pronoun” is “a word used in place of one or
more nouns.” Let’s test the adequacy of this definition by examining some
examples:
(1) a. Jonathan felt sorry for Jeremy, so he repaired his bike for him.
b. Because he wanted to sell it, Jonathan repaired his bike.
c. Jonathan repaired his bike.The traditional definition is a formal one; you can easily test it by replacing each
one of the pronouns with either of the nouns Jonathan or Jeremy in (1a-c).
While the replacement definition of pronouns seems to work well enough