Glossary of linguistic terms UVSA

Accent

Accent

Deviation from standard pronunciation

Accusative

Form of a noun when it is the direct object of the sentence

Acronym

Complex word consisting of initial letters of its components

Adjective

Words that typically describe nouns, can be gradable

Adjunct

optional constituent of a clause

Adverb

word/s that specify manner, cause or spatial and temporal dimensions

Adverbial

words that give more information about a verb. They can be one word (angrily, here) or phrases (at home...)

Adverbial of manner

indicates the manner in which something is done etc.

Adverbial of place

indicating place of action, event or state

Adverbial of time

indicates the time or duration of a verbal action

Affix

cover term for prefixes and suffixes

Agentive noun

noun created from a verb (to clean -> cleaner)

Allomorph

one of a set of forms that a morpheme may take in different contexts

Allophone

realization of a phoneme

Analogy

Irregular forms are regularized by assimilating them into the regular form

Analytical language

type of language that conveys relationships between words in a sentence with helper words as opposed to changing the word form

Anaphora

word expression referring to previous mention

Antonym

word expressing the opposite of another word

Aphasia

a speech disorder caused by organic damage to the brain

Arbitrariness

absence of any natural or necessary connection between a word's meaning and its sound or form

Article

a word indicating whether the noun it modifies is definite/indefinite, specific/general

Aspect

grammatical category of finite verbs, provides info about the manner and duration of the verbal action

Assimilation

the influence of a sound on the articulation of another sound

Attribute

modification of a noun -> a new car, a recently excavated temple

Auxiliary

verbs with dominantly grammatical function co-occurring with another verb to form compound tenses

Back-formation

process of forming a new word by removing actual or supposed affixes from another word

Behaviourism

a research tradition in psychology restricted to the analysis and measurement of observable behaviour, stimulus-and-response

Blend

a complex word created by fusing its two components

Bloomfieldian structuralism

Dominant school in American linguistics, Leonard Bloomfield in 30' and 50', recording and describing the sound systems and grammars of languages

Case

noun category indicating grammatical function, in Eng common and genitive, dative -> realised analytically

Cataphora

the use of an expression or word that co-refers with a later, more specific, expression in the discourse

Causative construction

expresses that the subject causes someone to do something or something to become something else

Chiasmus

a figure of speech in which the grammar of one phrase is inverted in the following phrase, such that two key concepts from the original phrase reappear in the second phrase in inverted order. "She has all my love; my heart belongs to her."

Clause

a grammatical unit that: includes, at minimum, a predicate and an explicit or implied subject

Cleft sentence

syntactic construction in which one constituent is emphasised by separating it from the rest of the sentence

Clipping

abbreviated word forms which originate from omitting the beginning or end of words

Code-switching

when multilingual ppl switch between the languages they know, even in one sentence

Coherence

what makes a text semantically (logically) consistent

Cohesion

grammatical and lexical linking within a text or sentence that holds a text together and gives it meaning

Collection of citations

viz corpus

Collocation

tendency of words to co-occur in ways beyond grammatical and logical semantic restrictions

Communication

the purposeful transmission of meaningful contents, can be verbal and non-verbal

Competence

the unconscious knowledge of grammar that allows a speaker to use and understand a language

Complement

a constituent that is necessary for a sentence to be complete

Complementary distribution

mutually exclusive relationship between two phonetically similar segments

Complex sentence

sentences with at least one dependent clause

Compound word

word formed by at least two morphemes

Conjugation

the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar)

Conjunction

linguistic elements that link two or more words, phrases, clauses, or sentences within a larger unit, in such a way that a specific semantic relation is established between them

Connotation

the wide array of positive and negative associations that most words naturally carry with them

Consonant

sound produced with an obstruction to the airflow

Constituent

word or group of words that function as a single unit within a sentence

Constituent order

the position of constituents within a

Conversation analysis

a sub-discipline mainly concerned with investigating how cohesion and coherence are established in everyday conversation

Conversion

change of word class

Corpus

A collection of texts compiled for linguistic analysis

Creole

a language that developed from pidgin, when pidgin becomes a native language of someone said pidgin becomes a creole language

Dative

indirect object case in languages that express grammatical relations by means of cases

Declarative clause

a statement that declares something

Declension

changes that nouns, pronouns, articles, and adjectives undergo to indicate their role in a sentence, usually by changing the endings of a noun

Deixis

the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words tomorrow, there, and they. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denoted meaning varies depending on time and/or place.

Demonstrative pronoun

pronoun allowing the reference to extra-linguistic or textual contexts, the most important in Eng today: this/that and these/those, pronouns of literal and figurative distance

Denotation

refers to the "objective" meaning of a word, in contrast with connotation

Derivation

the formation of a word by changing the form of the base or by adding affixes to it

Determiner

Elements which do not replace the entire noun phrase but are a part of it, word or affix that belongs to a class of noun modifiers that expresses the reference, including quantity, of a noun

Diachronic

the historical analysis of linguistic facts, film (f.e. from Latin to french)

Dialect

a regionally specific variety of a language differing in pronunciation, grammar and lexis

Diphthong

a vowel sound which changes its quality -> from a to u as in au

Discourse

synonym for "text" or situation-specific communication or the generic term for speech conventions which are socially and historically typical of an era

Dissimilation

A sound change where similar or same sounds become different

Distinctive feature

the most basic unit of phonological structure that distinguishes one sound from another within a language

Dysphemism

substitution of a word in an offensive/impolite manner

Elicitation

Collection of primary language data by questioning informants, forming of a corpus

Error Analysis

A branch of applied linguistics which uses the analysis of learners' errors as the basis for investigating foreign language acquisition

Etymology

the branch of linguistic science that treats the history of words and their components, with the aim of determining their origin and their derivation

Euphemism

Substitution of a word for a less offensive /polite variant

Final devoicing

A phonological pattern in which a normally voiced consonant in final-syllable position is replaced by a voiceless consonant

Finite verb form

a verb form agreeing in person and number with a subject or signalling grammatical tense

Folk/popular etymology

a change in the form and /or meaning of a word, which results from the incorrect assumption that it has a certain etymological origin

Formalism

focuses on the structure of the language, emphasising the deductive properties of the language system, grammar structures are important, opposed to functionalism

Function word

A word which lost its lexical meaning now serves to express grammatical relations within a sentence

Functional sentence perspective FSP

model to describe the information structure of a sentence, theme/topic and rheme/comment -> theme provides known/contextually given or otherwise lowe-order info, rheme provides new or high-order info, typically it's theme before rheme

Functionalism

collective name for linguistic schools that think that grammatical form is wholly or partly shaped by meaning/semantics and speakers' communicative needs/pragmatics

General/theoretical linguistics

branch of linguistics studying similarities among many different human languages and properties of human language in general

Generative grammar

theory of grammar by Chompsky -> grammars of natural languages are formal systems

Gerund

verb form with the suffix -ing, said verb can then become a noun

Glide, semi-vowel

"something in between" vowel and consonant /w/ and /j/ -> they don't fit in with either vowels or consonants

Grammar

the description of structural rules for combining words into constituents and clauses, word formation and syntax

Hendiadys

the expression of a single idea by two words connected with 'and'

Historical-comparative linguistics

branch of linguistics concerned with reconstruction of older states of languages and the study of the relationship among languages which have developed from a common source, Indo-European is the most advanced branch

Homography

Same spelling different pronunciation gotta be careful bcs of Polysemy

Homonymy

Same spelling and pronunciation but different meaning

Homophony

Same pronunciation different spelling

Hypercorrection

Overcorrecting to the point where one uses a form that is impossible according to grammatical rules, it's a tendency of learners

Hyperonym and hyponym

Super and subordinate terms

Idiom

a semantic unit whose meaning cannot be deduced from the meanings of its constituents

Idiomatic language

uses words in a way that sounds natural to native speakers of the language, tricky for learners because it does not make much sense for them, u use idioms and collocations that do not go logically together but make sense to a native speaker and are correct

Implication

One statement implies another statement if the latter can be deduced from the former

Implicature

something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed

Infinitive

A non-finite verb form which is in Eng identical to the base and introduced by ‘to’