Notionals and Functionals

Both traditionalists and descriptivists divide parts of speech into notionals (major , autosemantic words, variables, semantically full words) and functionals (synsemantic words, invariables, semantically empty words).

Notionals are open classes, indefinitely extendable. It’s impossible to inventory all the nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. It is transposition (conversion) which makes nouns and verbs limitlessly open (I’m wifed, aunted and cousined. There’s no one manning or womaning the camera. I’ve been anniversaried several times). Nouns can be limitlessly verbalized, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, forms of verbs, whole phrases, prefixes and suffixes can be nominalized ( His life was all blacks and whites. There was smth on it…two somethings actually: a white something and a dark something. What time is it now? – It’s half past now). Lexically full words have a paradigm. They are communicatively important, serve as members of a sentence.

Functionals are closed classes, we cannot invent new prepositions and conjunctions. They can be easily listed. But in reality the situation is not that rigid. There appear new functionals. Such is the conjunction like, derived from the adjective like(Never do like he has done). Such is the intensifiers bloody, that (Why bloody not? It was not that good).The form given of the verb to give is often used as a preposition, meaning considering, provided, on account of (Given the circumstances, we could not ask for better treatment). Functionals have no paradigm. They are communicatively unimportant, they are never members of a sentence. Their meaning is generalized, contextually dependent.