Lexical and grammatical words in English –the double character of the word just in the English language
Lexical and grammatical words in English –the double character of the word just in the English language

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on a feature of words in the English language, namely the division into notional and functional words, or “full” and “empty” words as they are sometimes called, or “lexical” and “grammatical” words. English, as any other language, should not be regarded as comprising simply a host of separate items called “words”. A word tends to team up with one or more other words to constitute a “lexical unit”, and it is this lexical unit that assumes meaning. When we pronounce or see the lexical words we can imagine a picture of them. Grammatical words are essential signals telling us about the kind of connection that is to be understood between lexical words. They have a special kind of meaning. They belong to a relatively small and permanent set of words as compared with the “full words” of the vocabulary, or we can say that lexical words present open lists but grammatical words are in closed lists. We chose for illustration the word “just”, which can be an adjective as a lexical word, and an adverb as a grammatical word.

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