The grammatical words which play so large a
part in English grammar are for the most part
sharply and obviously different from the lexical
words. A rough and ready difference which may
seem the most obvious is that grammatical words 【1】______
have "less meaning", but in fact some grammarians 【2】______
have called them "empty" words as opposed in the 【3】______
"full" words of vocabulary. But this is a rather misled 【4】______
way of expressing the distinction. Although a word like
the is not the name of something as man is, it is very
far away from being meaningless; there is a sharp 【5】______
difference in meaning between "man is vile" and
"the man is vile", yet the is the single vehicle of this 【6】______
difference in meaning. Moreover, grammatical words
differ considerably among themselves as the amount of 【7】______
meaning they have even in the lexical sense. Another
name for the grammatical words has been "little
words". But size is by no mean a good criterion for 【8】______
distinguishing the grammatical words of English,
when we consider that we have lexical words as 【9】______
go, man, say, car. Apart from this, however,
there is a good deal of truth in what some people
say: we certainly do create a great number of 【10】______
obscurity when we omit them. This is illustrated not
only in the poetry of Robert Browning but in the prose
of telegrams and newspaper headlines.
【M1】