Content-words and Functional-markers We distinguish between content-words which are meaning bearing elements and functional-markers, which serve to add polarity, modality or definiteness information to the meaning bearing elements, but do not carry semantic meaning of their own, such as the auxiliary verb "have" in Figure 1.
we treat words with a dependency-label of det, poss, neg, aux, auxpass, ps, mark, complm and prt as functional-markers.