In the framework of
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
's
Minimalist Program
In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
Following Imre Lakatos's distinction, Chomsky presents minima ...
, items of the
lexicon
A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...
are of two types: with or without substantive content. Items of the former category are called lexical items, whereas items of the latter category are functional items. Functional items carry the grammatical content of a sentence, which means that by taking them out of the sentence one would still understand the meaning, although it would not be grammatical. In other words, they are the 'glue' that holds the sentence together.
Functional items can also be classified as
closed class
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech ( abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ...
, that is, belonging to parts of speech that do not easily allow new members.
If functional items are removed from a sentence, the words that would be left are the lexical items. The lexical items of a sentence are those that are used in
telegraphic speech
Telegraphic speech, according to linguistics and psychology, is speech during the two-word stage of language acquisition in children, which is laconic and efficient. It follows the Holophrastic speech stage of language acquisition in children. ...
; functional items are the grammatical units that hold the sentence together and make it more fluid. Functional Items are feature sets. Functional items include two type of morphemes. Free morphemes, like
modals,
auxiliaries
Auxiliaries are combat support, support personnel that assist the military or police but are organised differently from regular army, regular forces. Auxiliary may be military volunteers undertaking support functions or performing certain duties ...
,
determiners
Determiner, also called determinative (abbreviated ), is a term used in some models of grammatical description to describe a word or affix belonging to a class of noun modifiers. A determiner combines with a noun to express its reference. Exampl ...
,
complementizers and
bound morphemes
In linguistics, a bound morpheme is a morpheme (the elementary unit of morphosyntax) that can appear only as part of a larger expression, while a free morpheme (or unbound morpheme) is one that can stand alone. A bound morpheme is a type of bound f ...
such as nominal and verbal affixes. Though functional items have feature structure, they do not enter into
θ-marking.
The following table provides examples of commonly used functional items:
Infants' Acquisition of Functional Items
Infants start identifying functional items in the second semester after birth. They are able to recognize functional items by hearing them frequently and also through phonological and distributional cues. Moreover, infants are able to distinguish between functional and lexical items based on phonological and acoustic cues.
Children's first word combinations are limited in the range of relational meanings. According to some views of language acquisition, cognitive development provides the categories of early combinational speech, and input from the child's speech provides lexical items that fill those categories. Functional items commonly included English children's early acquisition include early stage words such as "in, on, a, the, 'm, 's, 're (contractible copulas) and possessive 's.
Children with specific language impairments have difficulties with a range of elements within functional categories. Compared to younger, normally developing children with equal mean utterance lengths, impaired children do not use grammatical elements associated with the categories as much. However, there is no evidence that they lack whole functional categories altogether; even children with very limited speech are shown to use two or more different elements within each functional category system.
[{{cite journal, last=LB, first=Leonard, title=Functional categories in the grammars of children with specific language impairment., journal=Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, year=1995, issue=6, pages=0022–4685, url=http://jslhr.asha.org/cgi/content/abstract/38/6/1270, access-date=1 October 2013]
References
Thematic roles