Quantifying the semantic contribution of particles

Certain word types of natural languages - conjunctions, articles, prepositions and some verbs - have a very low or very grammatically marked semantic contribution. They are usually named functional categories or relational items. Recently, the possibility of considering prepositions as simple parametrical variations of semantic features instead of categorial features or as the irrelevance of such categorial features has been pointed out. The discussion about such particles has been and still is widespread and controversial. Nonetheless, there is no quantitative evidence of such semantic weakness and no satisfactory evidence against the coexistence of categorial requirements and the fragility of the semantic aspects. This study aims to quantify the semantic contribution of particles and presents some corpora-based results for English that suggest that such weakness and its relational uncertainty come from the categorial irrelevance mentioned before.Peer Reviewe