VCE English Language Unit 1&2 Metalanguage

Assimilation

When a sound changes to become more like a neighbouring sound.

Nasal Assimilation

Nasals assimilate to consonants around them.

Flapping

Voiceless consonants are voiced, such as in the word 'butter' where the voiceless 't' changes to a voiced 'd'.

Vowel Reduction

The process when vowels in unstressed positions reduce to a schwa sound.

Elision

The removal or omission of one or more sounds from a word or phrase.

Insertion

The addition of sounds where they don’t strictly belong, such as 'drawing' becoming 'drawring'.

Stress

The emphasis placed on certain syllables or words in speech.

Intonation

The rise and fall in pitch while speaking.

Pitch

The highness or lowness of a word.

Tempo

The speed at which someone speaks.

Volume

The loudness or softness of speech.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of meaning in a language.

Free Morphemes

Morphemes that can stand alone as words, such as 'banana' and 'school'.

Bound Morphemes

Morphemes that cannot exist independently and must be attached to free morphemes to create meaning.

Affix

A morpheme that is added to a word to change its meaning, including prefixes, suffixes, and infixes.

Inflectional Morphemes

Affixes that provide grammatical information such as tense or plurality without changing a word's meaning or class.

Derivational Morphemes

Affixes that change the meaning of a word and may also change the word class.

Morphological Over-generalisation

The inference that extends the meaning of a word beyond its accepted use.

Noun

A part of speech that names people, places, things, qualities, or actions.

Pronouns

Words used to replace nouns and noun phrases.

Verbs

Words that denote actions, processes, and states.

Adjectives

Words that define or modify nouns.

Adverbs

Words that modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs.

Prepositions

Words that show the relationship between nouns or pronouns.

Conjunctions

Words that link lexemes, phrases, clauses, and sentences together.

Determiners

Words that introduce noun phrases and function as modifiers.

Interjections

Words used to express sudden or strong emotions.

Function Words

Words that serve a grammatical purpose and belong to a closed class.

Content Words

Words that carry lexical meaning and information about the sentence.

Neologism

A newly formed phrase, expression, or lexeme.

Commonisation

The process of proper nouns entering everyday language as new common words.

Nominalisation

The process of creating a noun from a word of another class.

Obsolescence

The process where a word ceases to serve its purpose and is removed from the language.

Phrase

A group of related words that form a single structural unit.

Clause

A group of words containing a subject and predicate.

Declarative Sentence

A sentence that states a fact or opinion and ends with a full stop.

Interrogative Sentence

A sentence that asks a question and ends with a question mark.

Compound Sentence

A sentence containing two or more independent clauses joined by coordinators.

Complex Sentence

A sentence consisting of one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.

Semantic Change

Processes through which the meanings of words change over time.

Code Switching

The practice of alternating between two or more languages or language varieties in conversation.