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From: grass@uiucdcsb.Uiuc.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Name for part of speech
Message-ID: <10500067@uiucdcsb>
Date: Fri, 19-Jul-85 08:55:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: uiucdcsb.10500067
Posted: Fri Jul 19 08:55:00 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 22-Jul-85 05:03:55 EDT
References: <480@mtunh.UUCP>
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Nf-ID: #R:mtunh.UUCP:-48000:uiucdcsb:10500067:000:990
Nf-From: uiucdcsb.Uiuc.ARPA!grass    Jul 19 07:55:00 1985


>I'm working on a paper and I need to know the word which describes
>the calss of words which have no real function in the following context:
>they are noise words inserted in the sentence to make it flow and sound
>natural. They add no meaning or inflection.  An example from computer
>languages would be:
>
>	find employee WHERE salary IS > 30000
>	insert model INTO cartypes
>	for $i IN 1 2 3 ...
>	hand me my hat and MY coat
>	if you run out of cash THEN write a check
>			Marcus Hand	(mtunh!mgh)

In computer languages those are sometimes refered to as "syntactic sugar".
(A term I don't particularly like, for no good reason).  I suppose you
could call them "filler words".  I have heard other terms for such, but
only in reference to computer languages (you could probably get them
from net.lang subscribers).  I don't know of a linguistic
term for this kind of redundant word.
	- Judy Grass,  University of Illinois - Urbana
	  {ihnp4,pur-ee,convex}!uiucdcs!grass   grass%uiuc.arpa