Page 42 - اللغة الإنجليزية

English for Tourism & Hospitality by Prof. Adel AlSheikh 2020/2021

Content and function words

Function words carry only grammatical meaning

such as:
articles (a, an, the),
prepositions (in, on, at etc.),
auxiliaries (are, was, do… etc.),
quantifiers (some, any, all… etc.),
pronouns (he, we, this etc.),
conjunctions (and, or, but, although… etc).

Function words help us connect important
information. They are essential for understanding,
but they add little meaning beyond defining the
relationship between two words. The number of
function words is limited (about 176 words). Since
they represent between 40% to 60% of the total
number of words of most English sentences, they
should be mastered.

Content words, on the other hand, carry real

meaning such as:
nouns (Susan, chair, computer… etc.),

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