One word meaning of phrases

Abbreviation
A reduced version of a
word, phrase, or sentence. Abbreviations are societal slangs.

Absolute
universals Traits,
patterns, or characteristics that occur in all languages.

Acronym
A word that is created
by taking the initial letters of some or all of the words in a phrase
or name and pronouncing them as a word; the
initial letters of some or all the words in a phrase or title and
pronouncing them as a word. This kind of word-formation is common in
names of organizations, military, and scientific terminology.

Adjective
A lexical category
that designates a property or attribute of an entity; it can often
have comparative and superlative degrees and functions as the head of
an adjective phrase

Adverb
A lexical category
that typically denotes a property of the actions, sensations, and
states designated by verbs.

Affix
A bound morpheme that
attaches to a root morpheme; a morpheme that does not belong to a
lexical category and is always bound; bound morpheme, including
prefixes, suffixes, and infixes.

Affixation
The formation of words
by adding derivational affixes to different types of bases; the
process that attaches an affix to a base.

Agglutinating
language A language
where words are formed by adding several morphemes one after the
other, e.g., (Tatar) bala (child) — bala+lar (children)—bala+lar+ga
(to the children)

Allomorph
A variation of a
morpheme; variants of a morpheme ( e. g., [- s], [- z], and [- .z]
are allomorphs of the English plural morpheme).

Allophone
A variation of a
phoneme; a sound representing a given phoneme in certain contexts;
the sounds that make up a phoneme. Allophones are usually in
complementary distribution and phonetically similar.

Ambiguity
More than one meaning
derivable from an utterance.

Amelioration
The process in which
the meaning of a word becomes more favorable; the shift of a word’s
meaning over time from neutral or negative to positive.

Anomaly
Deviation from
expected meaning.

Antonyms
Words or phrases that
have opposite meanings.

Aphesis/
aphaeresis Loss
of one or more letters at the beginning of a word:
story
(history), cello
(violoncello), and phone
(telephone).

Apocopy
Loss of one or more
letters at the end of a word:
ad (advertisement).

Applied
linguistics A
discipline that focuses on practical issues involving the learning
and teaching of foreign/ second languages.

Assimilation
Adjusting in the way a
sound is made so that it becomes similar to some other sound or
sounds near it. A
partial or total conformation to the phonetical, graphical, and
morphological standards of the receiving language and its semantic
system.

Backformation
A word-formation
process that creates a new word by removing a real or supposed affix
from another word in the language; coining
a new word from an older word which is mistakenly taken as its
derivative; the dropping of a peripheral part of a word which is
wrongly analyzed as a suffix.

Base
The form to which an
affix is added; any form to which affixes are appended in
word-formation.

Blend
(blending) A word
formed by joining together chunks of two pre-existing words; a
word-forming process where a new lexeme is produced by combining the
shortened forms of two or more words in such a way that their
constituent parts are identifiable.

Borrowing
(cf.
loan word) Adopting of
linguistic elements, such as morphemes or words of another language;
adopting lexical units or other aspects of one language into another.

Bound
morpheme A morpheme
that must be attached to another element; a morpheme which is always
appended to some other linguistic item because it is incapable of
being used on its own as a word, e.g., -ish. –en, etc.

Bound
root morpheme A
non-affix morpheme that cannot stand alone

Broadening
Change in a word’s
meaning over time to more general or inclusive

Calque
A concept is borrowed but is rendered using the words of the language
doing the borrowing.

Case
ending A marker on a
noun to indicate its grammatical function in a sentence.

Clipping
A process of
word-formation which shortens a polysyllabic word by deleting one or
more syllables, thus retaining only a part of the stem, e.g., lab
(laboratory); word-formation where a long word is shortened to one or
two syllables.

Clitic
A morpheme that is
like a word in terms of its meaning and function, but is unable to
stand alone as an independent form for phonological reasons.

Cliticization
The process where
morphemes act like
words in terms of their meaning or function, but they are unable to
stand alone by themselves: I’m, he’s, etc.

Closed
class (Cf.
Open class) Category
of words that do not accept new members (determiners, auxiliary
verbs, and conjunctions, among others)

Cognates
Words of different
languages which are somehow related in meaning and pronunciation
because they come from a common historical source. Words (with the
same basic meaning) descended from a common ancestor; two, deux
(French), and zwei (German) are cognates (Denham & Lobeck)

Coining
(neologism) Creating a
word.

Collocations
are frequently
occurring sequences of words; the occurrence of two or more words
within a short space of each other in a corpus.

Comparative
method A method where
the systematic comparison of two or more philogenically-related and
non-related languages with the aim of finding the similarities and
differences between or among them; technique of linguistic analysis
that compares lists of related words in a selection of languages to
find cognates, or words descended from a common ancestor

Complementary
pair Two antonyms
related in such a way that the negation of one is the meaning of the
other, e. g., alive means not dead. Cf. gradable pair, relational
opposites.

Complex
word A word that
contains two or more morphemes.

Componential
analysis Analysis
in terms of components; the
representation of a word’s intension in terms of smaller semantic
components called features.

Compositional
semantics The subfield
of semantics where the meanings of the whole sentences are determined
from the meanings of the words in them by the syntactic structure of
the sentence.

Compound
A word composed of two
or more words.

Compounding
Combining one or more words into a single word; a word-forming
process which coins new words not by means of affixation but by
combining two or more free morphemes.

Connotative
meaning/connotation The
personal aspect of lexical meaning, often emotional associations
which a lexeme brings to mind (Crystal, 2005); the set of
associations that a word’s use can evoke.

Constituent
A syntactic unit in a
phrase structure tree; a natural grouping of words in a sentence; one
or more words that make up a syntactic unit; group of words that
forms a larger syntactic unit

Content
words Words with
lexical meanings (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs)

Contrastive
analysis (CA) The
prediction that a contrastive analysis of structural differences
between two or more languages will allow individuals to identify
areas of contrast and predict where there will be some difficulty and
errors on the part of a second-language learner.

Contrastive
lexicology A branch of
linguistics that studies the relation between etymologically related
words and word-combinations in different languages. It deals with the
contrastive analysis of the lexicon, lexico-semantic relationships,
thesauri of entire vocabularies, classification of lexical
hierarchies, and taxonomic structure of specialized terminology

Conversion
A word-formation
process with zero derivation; a
common way to convert one part of speech to another using a form that
represents one part of speech in the position of another without
changing the form of the word at all.

Corpus
linguistics is the
creation and analysis of (normally large, computerized) corpora of
language composed of actual texts (speech and writing), and their
application to problems in descriptive and applied linguistics.

Data
mining Complex methods
of retrieving and using information from immense and varied sources
of data through the use of advanced statistical tools.

Dead
metaphor A metaphor
that is so common that it goes unnoticed as a metaphor

Deep
structure Any phrase
structure tree generated by the phrase structure rules of a
transformational grammar.

Denominal
A word ‘derived from
a noun’, e.g. childish (from the noun child) is a

denominal
adjective.

Denotation
The set of entities to
which a word or expression refers (also called its referents or
extension) (Cf.
Connotation).

Derivation
(morphology) An
affixational process that forms a word with a meaning and/ or
category distinct from that of its base; A word-formation process
that is used to create new vocabulary items, or lexemes, e.g.,
build+er=builder.

Derivation
(syntax) The process
whereby a syntactic structure is formed by syntactic operations such
as Merge and Move.

Derivational
affix An affix that
attaches to a morpheme or word to form a new word.
Derivational morpheme A
morpheme that attaches to a morpheme or word to form a new word.

Derived
word The form that
results from the addition of a derivational morpheme

Descriptive
lexicology A branch of
linguistics that studies the lexicon and lexico-semantic
relationships of a certain language at
a given stage of its development.

Descriptive
linguistics A study
that observes and catalogs languages;
a study that documents
and describes what people say, sign and write, and the grammatical,
lexical and phonological systems they use to do so

Determiner
(det) A functional
category that serves as the specifier of a noun ( e. g., a,
the, and these).

Deverbal
A word ‘derived from
a verb’, e.g. supporter
(from the verb support)
is a deverbal noun.

Dialect
A language variety
that is systematically different from another variety of the same
language and spoken by a socially identifiable subgroup of some
larger speech community.
Dialect atlas A book
of dialect maps showing the areas where specific dialectal
characteristics occur in the speech of the region.

Dialectology
The study of regional
differences in language.

Differential
meaning
The meaning of the semantic component that serves to distinguish one
word from all others containing identical morphemes.

Dissimilation
Process causing two
neighboring sounds to become less alike with respect to some feature.

Distinctive
Describes linguistic
elements that contrast.

Distribution
of a word
The
position of a word in relation to other neighbouring words.

Distributional
meaning The meaning of
a word is considered as the sum total of what it contributes to all
the utterances in which it appears.

Emoticon
A typographic symbol
or combination of symbols used to convey emotion:
Entailment The
relationship between two sentences where the truth of one necessarily
implies the truth of the other; inclusion of one aspect of a word’s
or sentence’s meaning in the meaning of another word or sentence

Enclitics
Clitics which are
attached to the end of the host.

Endocentric
compound A compound
word in which one member identifies the general class to which the
meaning of the entire word belongs.

Epenthesis
The insertion of a
sound inside a word, e.g., dresses [dresiz].

Eponym
A word taken from a
proper name, such as John
for “toilet” (I am going to the john); word that comes from the
name of a person associated with it; the
term which stands for an ordinary common noun derived from a proper
noun, the name of a person, or place.

Etymeme
A bound base that has
etymological relevance ( e. g., — ceive in receive).

Etymology
The history of words;
the study of the history of words.

Etymological
doublets Two words of
the same language which were derived from the same basic word by
different routes.

Etymological
triplets Three words
of the same language which were derived from the same basic word by
different routes.

Euphemism
A word or phrase that replaces a taboo word or is used to avoid
reference to certain acts or subjects.

Exocentric
compound A
compound whose meaning does not follow from the meaning of its parts
(e.g., redneck).

Extension
The referential part
of the meaning of an expression; the referent of a noun phrase. Folk
etymology (False etymology) merely
associates together words which resemble each other in sound and show
a real or fancied similarity of meaning, but which are not at all
related in their origin” (Greenough & Kittredge, 1967, p.145).

Free
morpheme Morpheme that
can stand alone as a word; a morpheme capable of occurring on its
own, such as a word.

Functional
category One of the
categories of function words, including determiner, auxiliary,
complementizer, and preposition. Cf. lexical category and phrasal
category.

Functional
affixes Affixes that
serve to convey grammatical meaning.

Function
word A word mainly
serving a grammatical function in a sentence; a word that does not
have clear lexical meaning but has a grammatical function; function
words include conjunctions, prepositions, articles, auxiliaries,
complementizers, and pronouns. Cf. closed class.

Gapping
The syntactic process
of deletion in which subsequent occurrences of a verb are omitted in
similar contexts.

General
lexicology A branch
of general linguistics
that studies vocabulary irrespective of the specific features of any
particular language and the meaning of words and word-combinations in
isolation and in context.

Grammatical
categories Traditionally
called “parts of speech”; also called syntactic categories;
expressions of the same grammatical category can generally substitute
for one another without loss of grammaticality, e. g., noun phrase,
verb phrase.

Grammatical
meaning
The component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual
forms of different words.

Grammatical
valency
The aptness of a word to appear in specific grammatical (or rather
syntactic) structures (Ginsburg et
al.).

Head
(of a compound) The
rightmost word. It generally indicates the category and general
meaning of the compound.

Head
(of a phrase) The
central word of a phrase whose lexical category defines the type of
phrase, e. g., the noun man is the head of the noun phrase the man
who came to dinner; the verb wrote
is the head of the verb phrase wrote
a letter to his mother;
the adjective red is the head of the adjective phrase very bright
red; word whose syntactic category determines the category of the
phrase

Headword
The form of the word
which appears at the beginning of its dictionary entry. It is
normally uninflected and often gives syllabic information.

Heteronyms
Different words spelled the same (i. e., homographs) but pronounced
differently.

Historical
and comparative linguistics The
branch of linguistics that deals with how languages change, what
kinds of changes occur, and why they occur.

Homographs
Words spelled
identically, and pronounced the same or differently; words that have
the same spelling, different meanings, and different pronunciations.

Homonyms
Two or more words that
are pronounced and/ or written the same way; words with the same
sound and spelling but different, unrelated meanings

Homophones
Words that do not
share the same spellings or meanings but sound the same

Hyponyms
Words whose meanings
are specific instances of a more general word; word whose meaning is
included, or entailed, in the meaning of a more general word (tulip/
flower)

Hypothesis
A theoretical
statement that proposes how several constructs relate to one another

Ideogram
A symbol that
represents an idea

Idiolect
An individual’s way
of speaking, reflecting that person’s grammar; the unique form of a
language represented in an individual user’s mind and attested in
their discourse.

Idiom/
idiomatic phrase An
expression whose meaning does not conform to the principle of
compositionality, that is, may be unrelated to the meaning of its
parts; collocation of words or phrases with non-literal meaning; it
has a transferred meaning, e.g., kick
the bucket (die).

Indo-European
The language
reconstructed by linguists which is assumed to be the ancestor of
most European languages; the descriptive name given to the ancestor
language of many modern language families, including Germanic,
Slavic, and Romance. Also called Proto– Indo- European.

Infix
A bound morpheme that
is inserted in the middle of a word or stem; an affix placed inside a
root.

Inflectional
affix An affix that
adds grammatical information to an existing word.

Inflectional
morpheme Bound
grammatical morpheme that is affixed to a word according to rules of
syntax, e. g., third- person singular verbal suffix — s.

Initialism
A word formed from the
initial letters of a group of words.

Internal
change The process
which substitutes one non-morphemic part for another to mark a
grammatical contrast.

Interpreting
The process of
translating from and into spoken or signed language.

Intertextuality
(Tool of Inquiry)

Isogloss
Geographical boundary
of a particular linguistic feature

Jargon
Special words peculiar
to the members of a profession or group;specialized
vocabulary associated with a trade or profession, sport, game, etc.,
e. g., airstream mechanism for phoneticians. Cf. argot.

Jargon
aphasia Form of
aphasia in which phonemes are substituted, resulting in nonsense
words; often produced by people who have Wernicke’s aphasia.

Langue
in structural
linguistics, the set of organizing principles of signs, including
rules of combination

Lexeme
A word in the sense of
an item of vocabulary that can be listed in the dictionary. A lexeme
is a lexical item; the smallest contrastive unit in a semantic system
(Crystal).

Lexical
ambiguity A word or a
phrase that has more than one meaning;
ambiguity as a result
of homonyms

Lexical
category A general
term for the word- level syntactic categories of noun, verb,
adjective, and adverb. These are the categories of content words like
man, run, large, and rapidly, as opposed to functional category words
such as the
and and.
Cf. functional category, phrasal category, open class.

Lexical
decision Task of
subjects in psycholinguistic experiments who on presentation of a
spoken or printed stimulus must decide whether it is a word or not.

Lexical
gap Possible but
non-occurring words; forms that obey the phono-tactic rules of a
language yet have no meaning, e. g., blick
in English. Lexical
gaps occur in a language when it lacks a word for a concept (which
may be expressed lexically in another language).

Lexical
semantics The subfield
of semantics concerned with the meanings of words and the meaning
relationships among words; a study of the conventions of word
meaning.

Lexical
valency
The aptness of a word to appear in various combinations (Ginzburg et
al.)

Lexicographer
One who edits or works
on a dictionary.

Lexicography
The editing or making
of a dictionary.

Lexicology
The study of the
lexicon, or word-stock, its meaning, the relations among lexemes, the
structure of lexemes,
their etymology and lexical units, and relations between lexicology
and other areas of the language: phonology, morphology, phraseology,
lexicography, and syntax.

Lexicon
Our mental dictionary;
stores information about words and the lexical rules we use to build
them.

Lingua
franca A language
common to speakers of diverse languages that can be used for
communication and commerce; a language used as a medium of
communication between speakers of different languages.

Linguistic
competence Unconscious
knowledge of grammar that allows us to produce and understand a
language.

Linguistic
relativity A theory
that language and culture influence or perhaps even determine each
other.

Linguistics
the scientific study
of language.

Linguistic
theory A theory of the
principles that characterize all human languages; the “laws of
human language.”

Linguistic
universal Characteristic
shared by all human languages.

Loan
translations Compound
words or expressions whose parts are translated literally into the
borrowing language, e. g., marriage of convenience from French
mariage de convenance.
Also called calque.

Loan
word A word in one
language whose origins are in another language; a word borrowed into
a language from another language.

Macron
A short straight line
placed above a vowel to indicate that it is pronounced long.

Malapropism
Use of the wrong word which resembles phonologically the intended
word; type of production error by which a speaker uses a semantically
incorrect word in a place of phonetically similar word without being
aware of the mistake.

Marked
In a gradable pair of
antonyms, the word that is not used in questions of degree, e. g.,
low
is the marked number of the pair high/
low because we
ordinarily ask How high
is the mountain? not
How low is the
mountain?; in a
masculine/ feminine
pair, the word that contains a derivational morpheme, usually the
feminine word, e. g., princess is marked, whereas prince is unmarked
(Cf. unmarked)

Markedness
Opposition in meaning that differentiates between the typical meaning
of a word and its “ marked” meaning or opposite (right is
unmarked, and left is marked).

Mass
nouns Nouns that
cannot ordinarily be enumerated, e. g., bread, meat, and milk (Cf.
count nouns).

Mental
lexicon The dictionary
that is in the speaker’s mind; it contains a list of words as well
as rules that help to coin words that are not listed.

Meronymy
A part– whole
relationship between lexemes.

Metaphor
Non-literal meaning of
one word or phrase describes another word or phrase.

Metonymy
Description of
something in terms of some-thing with which it is closely associated.

Mixed
metaphor A metaphor
that comprises parts of different metaphors: hit the nail on the
jackpot com-bines hit the nail on the head and hit the jackpot
(Denham & Lobeck).

Monomorphemic
word A word that
consists of one morpheme.

Morph
Any concrete
realization of a morpheme.

Morpheme
Smallest unit of
linguistic meaning or function; a minimal unit of meaning or function
in a language.

Morphological
motivation
The relationship between morphemes.

Morphological
rules Rules for
combining morphemes to form stems and words.

Morphological
typology Classification
of languages according to common morphological structures.

Morphology
The study of the
structure of words; it also includes the rules of word-formation; the
study of how languages combine morphemes to make words; the
systematic patterning of meaningful word parts, including prefixes
and suffixes; study of the system of rules underlying our knowledge
of the structure of words.

Motivation
The relationship existing between the phonemic or morphemic
composition and structural pattern of the word, on the one hand, and
its meaning on the other (Arnold).

Mutually
intelligible Language
varieties that can be understood by speakers of the two (or more)
varieties.

Narrowing
Change in words’
meanings over time to more specific meanings.

Negation
Causing a statement to
have the opposite meaning by inserting not between Aux and V

Neologism
A newly coined word
which is intended to gain or appears to be gaining common currency in
the language.

Notional
meaning A meaning when
a word expresses ideas, concepts, images, and feelings.

Nyms
Meaning relationships
among words— antonyms, synonyms, homonyms, etc.

Onomatopoeia/
onomatopoeic A word
that mirrors an aspect of its meaning; words whose pronunciations
suggest their meaning; the
naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound
associated with it, e.g., e.g.
cuckoo is onomatopoeic.

Open
form class The class
of lexical content words; a category of words that commonly adds new
words, e. g., nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs; a category of
words that accepts new members (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and
adverbs).

Overgeneralization
Application of a
grammatical rule more broadly than it is generally applied.
Paradigm A set of
forms derived from a single root morpheme; the system of grammatical
forms characteristic of a word, e. g., take, takes, taken, took,
taking; or woman, women, woman’s, and women’s.

Parole
In structural
linguistics, the physical utterance itself; the use of a sign or a
set of signs. Part of
speech Classification
of a word according to its form and function.

Philosophical
semantics The subfield
of semantics that is concerned with logical properties of language.

Phonetical
motivation
When there is a certain similarity between the sound-form of a word
and its meaning when speech sounds may suggest spatial and visual
dimensions, shape, and size.

Phrase A
syntactic unit (NP, VP, etc.) headed by a syntactic category ( N, V,
etc.); a syntactic constituent headed by a lexical category, i.e. a
noun, adjective, verb, adverb or preposition, e.g., with hospitality
(noun phrase).

Phraseology
A subfield of
lexicology that studies phraseological units.

Phraseological
unit A stable
combination of words with complete or partial transferred meaning

Phrase
structure A system of
rules that organizes words into larger units or phrases.

Phrenology
A pseudoscience, the
practice of which is determining personality traits and intellectual
ability by examination of the bumps on the skull. Its contribution to
neurolinguistics is that its methods were highly suggestive of the
modular theory of brain structure.

Pictogram
A picture or symbol
that represents an object or idea; a form of writing in which the
symbols resemble the objects represented; a non-arbitrary form of
writing.

Pidgin
A simple but
rule-governed language developed for communication among speakers of
mutually unintelligible languages, often based on one of those
languages.

Pluralia
tantum refers to a
noun that is morphologically plural but semantically singular
(trousers).

Polymorphemic
Words consisting of
more than one morpheme.

Polysemy
A semantic process
whereby a lexeme assumes two or more related meanings. Pragmatics
The study of language
use in context; the study of how context and situation affect
meaning; study of the meanings of sentences in context (utterance
meaning).

Praxis
is educational jargon
for ‘practice’ or ‘enaction,’ from the Greek verb prattein,
‘to do.’

Predicate
Syntactically, the
verb phrase (VP) in the clause [NP VP].

Prefix
An affix that is
attached to the beginning of a morpheme or stem; an affix that
attaches to the beginning of a root; an affix that goes before the
stem.

Preposition
(P) The syntactic
category, also lexical category, that heads a prepositional phrase.

Prepositional
object The grammatical
relation of the noun phrase that occurs immediately below a
prepositional phrase (PP) in deep structure.

Prepositional
phrase (PP) The
syntactic category, also phrasal category, consisting of a
preposition and a noun phrase.

Principle
of compositionality A
principle of semantic interpretation that states that the meaning of
a word, phrase, or sentence depends both on the meaning of its
components (morphemes, words, phrases) and how they are combined
structurally.

Proclitics
Clitics which are
attached to the beginning of the host.

Productive
Refers to
morphological rules that can be used freely and apply to all forms to
create new words, e. g., the addition to an adjective of —
ish meaning “ having
somewhat of the quality,” such as newish
and
tallish.

Qualitative
research Research that
is done in a natural setting, involving intensive holistic data
collection through observation at a very close personal level without
the influence of prior theory and contains mostly verbal analysis
(Perry, 2011, p. 257).

Quantitative
research A study that
uses numerical data with emphasis on statistics to answer the
research questions.

Reduplication
A morphological
process of forming new
words by repeating the entire free morpheme (total reduplication) or
a part of it (partial reduplication):
wishy- washy, teensy- weensy, etc.

Reference
deals with the relationship between linguistic elements, words,
sentences, etc., and the non-linguistic world of experience (Palmer).

Referent
The object,
relationship, and class of objects outside world to which a word
refers. Regional
dialect A dialect
spoken in a specific geographic area that may arise from, and is
reinforced by, that area’s integrity.

Regionalism
A feature that
distinguishes one regional dialect from others

Register
Manner of speaking or
writing style adopted for a particular audience (e. g., formal versus
informal); a stylistic variant of a language appropriate to a
particular social setting; also called style; language style
appropriate to a particular social setting; a way of using the
language in certain contexts and situations, often varying according
to formality of expression, choice of vocabulary and degree of
explicitness.

Register
tones Level tones;
high, mid, or low tones.

Relational
opposites Pair of
antonyms in which one describes a relationship between two objects
and the other describes the same relationship when the two objects
are reversed.

Retronym
An expression that
would once have been redundant, but which societal or technological
changes have made non-redundant.

Root
The morpheme at the
core of a word to which affixes are added.

Root
morpheme A morpheme to
which an affix can be attached.

Second
language acquisition (SLA, L2 acquisition) The
acquisition of another language or languages after first language
acquisition is under way or completed.

Semantic
features A notational
device for expressing the presence or absence of semantic properties
by pluses and minuses; the smallest component of meaning in a word;
classifications of meaning that can be expressed in terms of binary
features [+/–], such as [+/– human], [+/– animate], [+/–
count].

Semantic
fields Basic
classifications of meaning under which words are stored in our mental
lexicons.

Semantic
motivation
The co-existence of direct and figurative meanings of the same word
within the same synchronous system (Arnold).

Semantic
properties The
components of meaning of a word, e. g., “old” is a semantic
property of man, woman,
wine, story, and
movie.

Semantic
shift Change in the
meaning of words over time.

Semantics
The study of the
linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences; the
study of the meanings of words and sentences; the study of meaning
communicated through language; system of rules underlying our
knowledge of word and sentence meaning.

Semasiology
The science of meanings or sense development (of words); the
explanation of the development and changes of the meanings of words
(Encyclopedia).

Semiotics
The study of sign
systems; the use of sign systems.

Sense
deals with the complex
system of relationships that hold between the linguistic elements
themselves and is concerned with extralinguistic relations (Palmer).

Sentence
semantics The subfield
of semantics that studies the meanings of the sentences and meaning
relations between the sentences.

Shift
in connotation Change
in words’ general meanings over time.

Shift
in denotation Complete
change in words’ meanings over time.

Sign
The abstract link that
connects sound and idea.

Signification
The process of
creating and interpreting symbols.

Signified
In structural
linguistics, the concept, idea, or meaning of the signifier.

Signifier
In structural
linguistics, a spoken or signed word or a word on a page.

Simile
Comparison, usually of
two unlike things, in order to create a non-literal image.

Slang
An informal word or
expression that has not gained complete acceptability and is used by
a particular group; a
word and a phrase used
in casual speech, often invented and spread by close- knit social or
age groups, and fast changing.

Social
dialect A dialect
spoken by a particular social class (e. g., Cockney English) that is
perpetuated by the integrity of the social class (Cf. regional
dialect).

Sociolinguistics
The study of the
relationship between language and society; study of how language
varies over space (by region, ethnicity, social class, etc.).

Special
lexicology A
branch of general linguistics that studies words and
word-combinations, and describes the vocabulary and vocabulary units
of a particular language.

Spoonerism
Slip of the tongue, an
exchange error; a type of speech error where by accident (or
sometimes by design, one suspects) initial sounds in syllables of
neighboring words swap places, e.g., lighting
a fire — fighting a liar

Stem
The base to which one
or more affixes are attached to create a more complex form that may
be another stem or a word. Cf.
root, affix.

Structural
ambiguity The
phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or more
meanings based on different phrase structure analyses; ambiguity that
results from two or more possible grammatical structures assignable
to an utterance, e. g., He saw a boy with a telescope.

Structure
dependent (1) A
principle of Universal
Grammar that states
that the application of transformational
rules is determined by
phrase structure properties, as opposed to structureless sequences of
words or specific sentences; (2) the way children construct rules
using their knowledge of syntactic structure irrespective of the
specific words in the structure or their meaning (Fromkin &
Hummel, p. 669).

Style
Situation dialect, e.
g., formal speech, casual speech; also called register.

Subject
Syntactically, the
noun phrase (NP) in the clause [NP VP]

Submersion
method Educating
nonnative speakers of a language in that language, without systematic
accommodations to their native language.

Suffix
An affix that is
attached to the end of a morpheme or stem; an affix that attaches to
the end of a root.

Suppletion
A morphological process that replaces one morpheme with an entirely
different morpheme to indicate a grammatical contrast.

Suppletive
forms A term used to
refer to inflected morphemes in which the regular rules do not apply.

Syncope
The
loss of one or more
letters in the interior of a word:
specs
(spectacles).

Synesthesia
Metaphorical language
in which one kind of sensation is described in terms of another; for
example, a smell may be described as sweet or a color as loud

Synonyms
Words with the same or
nearly the same meaning; words that have similar meanings

Syntax
The rules of sentence
formation; the component of the mental grammar that rep-resents
speakers’ knowledge of the structure of phrases and sentences; the
study of how words combine into larger units.

Taxeme
The basic feature of
arrangement of morphemes.

Theoretical
linguistics builds
theories about the nature and limits of grammatical, lexical and
phonological systems.

Tree
diagram A graphical
representation of the linear and hierarchical structure of a phrase
or sentence; a phrase structure tree.

Typology
The comparative study of significant structural similarities and
differences among languages

Underextension
Use of words to apply
to things more narrowly than their actual meaning.

Valency
A lexico-syntactic property which involves the relationship between,
on the one hand, the different subclasses of a word-class (such as a
verb) and, on the other, the different structural environments
required by the subclasses, these environments varying both in the
number and in the type of elements (Allerton).

Verb
phrase A verb together
with its complements and modifiers; the predicate of the sentence is
a verb phrase (Koln & Funk, 2012).

Word
A
minimal free form; the
smallest linguistic unit capable of standing meaningfully on its own.

Word-formation
The process of coining new words from existing ones.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A sentence word (also called a one-word sentence) is a single word that forms a full sentence.

Henry Sweet described sentence words as ‘an area under one’s control’ and gave words such as «Come!», «John!», «Alas!», «Yes.» and «No.» as examples of sentence words.^[1] The Dutch linguist J. M. Hoogvliet described sentence words as «volzinwoorden».^[2] They were also noted in 1891 by Georg von der Gabelentz, whose observations were extensively elaborated by Hoogvliet in 1903; he does not list «Yes.» and «No.» as sentence words. Wegener called sentence words «Wortsätze».^[3]

Single-word utterances and child language acquisition[edit]

One of the predominant questions concerning children and language acquisition deals with the relation between the perception and the production of a child’s word usage. It is difficult to understand what a child understands about the words that they are using and what the desired outcome or goal of the utterance should be.^[4]

Holophrases are defined as a «single-word utterance which is used by a child to express more than one meaning usually attributed to that single word by adults.»^[5] The holophrastic hypothesis argues that children use single words to refer to different meanings in the same way an adult would represent those meanings by using an entire sentence or phrase. There are two opposing hypotheses as to whether holophrases are structural or functional in children. The two hypotheses are outlined below.

Structural holophrastic hypothesis[edit]

The structural version argues that children’s “single word utterances are implicit expressions of syntactic and semantic structural relations.” There are three arguments used to account for the structural version of the holophrastic hypothesis: The comprehension argument, the temporal proximity argument, and the progressive acquisition argument.^[5]

• The comprehension argument is based on the idea that comprehension in children is more advanced than production throughout language acquisition. Structuralists believe that children have knowledge of sentence structure but they are unable to express it due to a limited lexicon. For example, saying “Ball!” could mean “Throw me the ball” which would have the structural relation of the subject of the verb. However, studies attempting to show the extent to which children understand syntactic structural relation, particularly during the one-word stage, end up showing that children “are capable of extracting the lexical information from a multi-word command,” and that they “can respond correctly to a multi-word command if that command is unambiguous at the lexical level.”^[5] This argument therefore does not provide evidence needed to prove the structural version of the holophrastic hypothesis because it fails to prove that children in the single-word stage understand structural relations such as the subject of a sentence and the object of a verb.^[5]
• The temporal proximity argument is based on the observation that children produce utterances referring to the same thing, close to each other. Even the utterances aren’t connected, it is argued that children know about the linguistic relationships between the words, but cannot connect them yet.^[5] An example is laid out below:

→ Child: «Daddy» (holding pair of fathers pants)

→ Child

1. «Bai» (‘bai’ is the term the child uses for any item of clothing)

The usage of ‘Daddy’ and ‘Bai’ used in close proximity are seen to represent a child’s knowledge of linguistic relations; in this case the relation is the ‘possessive’.^[6] This argument is seen as having insufficient evidence as it is possible that the child is only switching from one way to conceptualize pants to another. It is also pointed out that if the child had knowledge of linguistic relationships between words, then the child would combine the words together, instead of using them separately.^[5]

• Finally, the last argument in support of structuralism is the progressive acquisition argument. This argument states that children progressively gain new structural relations throughout the holophrastic stage. This is also unsupported by the research.^[5]

Functional holophrastic hypothesis[edit]

Functionalists doubt whether children really have structural knowledge, and argue that children rely on gestures to carry meaning (such as declarative, interrogative, exclamative or vocative). There are three arguments used to account for the functional version of the holophrastic hypothesis: The intonation argument, the gesture argument, and the predication argument.^[5]

• The intonation argument suggests that children use intonation in a contrastive way. Researchers have established through longitudinal studies that children have knowledge of intonation and can use it to communicate a specific function across utterances.^[7][8][9] Compare the two examples below:

→ Child: «Ball.» (flat intonation) — Can mean «That is a ball.»

1. → Child: «Ball?» (rising inflection) — Can mean «Where is the ball?»

However, it has been noted by Lois Bloom that there is no evidence that a child intends for intonation to be contrastive, it is only that adults are able to interpret it as such.^[10] Martyn Barrett contrasts this with a longitudinal study performed by him, where he illustrated the acquisition of a rising inflection by a girl who was a year and a half old. Although she started out using intonation randomly, upon acquisition of the term «What’s that» she began to use rising intonation exclusively for questions, suggesting knowledge of its contrastive usage.^[11]

• The gesture argument establishes that some children use gesture instead of intonation contrastively. Compare the two examples laid out below:

→ Child: «Milk.» (points at milk jug) — could mean “That is milk.”

1. → Child: «Milk.» (open-handed gesture while reaching for a glass of milk) — could mean “I want milk.”

Each use of the word ‘milk’ in the examples above could have no use of intonation, or a random use of intonation, and so meaning is reliant on gesture. Anne Carter observed, however, that in the early stages of word acquisition children use gestures primarily to communicate, with words merely serving to intensify the message.^[12] As children move onto multi-word speech, content and context are also used alongside gesture.

• The predication argument suggests that there are three distinct functions of single word utterances, ‘Conative’, which is used to direct the behaviour of oneself or others; ‘Expressive’, which is used to express emotion; and referential, which is used to refer to things.^[13] The idea is that holophrases are predications, which is defined as the relationship between a subject and a predicate. Although McNeill originally intended this argument to support the structural hypothesis, Barrett believes that it more accurately supports the functional hypothesis, as McNeill fails to provide evidence that predication is expressed in holophrases.^[5]

Single-word utterances and adult usage[edit]

While children use sentence words as a default strategy due to lack of syntax and lexicon, adults tend to use sentence words in a more specialized way, generally in a specific context or to convey a certain meaning. Because of this distinction, single word utterances in children are called ‘holophrases’, while in adults, they are called ‘sentence words’. In both the child and adult use of sentence words, context is very important and relative to the word chosen, and the intended meaning.

Sentence word formation[edit]

Many sentence words have formed from the process of devaluation and semantic erosion. Various phrases in various languages have devolved into the words for «yes» and «no» (which can be found discussed in detail in yes and no), and these include expletive sentence words such as «Well!» and the French word «Ben!» (a parallel to «Bien!»).^[14]

However, not all word sentences suffer from this loss of lexical meaning. A subset of sentence words, which Fonagy calls «nominal phrases», exist that retain their lexical meaning. These exist in Uralic languages, and are the remainders of an archaic syntax wherein there were no explicit markers for nouns and verbs. An example of this is the Hungarian language «Fecske!», which transliterates as «Swallow!», but which has to be idiomatically translated with multiple words «Look! A swallow!» for rendering the proper meaning of the original, which to a native Hungarian speaker is neither elliptical nor emphatic. Such nominal phrase word sentences occur in English as well, particularly in telegraphese or as the rote questions that are posed to fill in form data (e.g. «Name?», «Age?»).^[14]

Sentence word syntax[edit]

A sentence word involves invisible covert syntax and visible overt syntax. The invisible section or «covert» is the syntax that is removed in order to form a one word sentence. The visible section or «overt» is the syntax that still remains in a sentence word.^[15] Within sentence word syntax there are 4 different clause-types: Declarative (making a declaration), exclamative (making an exclamation), vocative (relating to a noun), and imperative (a command).

Sentence Word Syntax Examples

	Overt	Covert
Declarative	‘That is excellent!’	‘Excellent!’
Exclamative	‘That was rude!’	‘Rude!’
Vocative	‘There is Mary!’	‘Mary!’
Imperative	‘You should leave!’	‘Leave!’
Locative	‘The chair is here.’	‘Here.’
Interrogative	‘Where is it?’	‘Where?’

The words in bold above demonstrate that in the overt syntax structures, there are words that can be omitted in order to form a covert sentence word.

Distribution cross-linguistically[edit]

Other languages use sentence words as well.

• In Japanese, a holophrastic or single-word sentence is meant to carry the least amount of information as syntactically possible, while intonation becomes the primary carrier of meaning.^[16] For example, a person saying the Japanese word e.g. «はい» (/haɪ/) = ‘yes’ on a high level pitch would command attention. Pronouncing the same word using a mid tone, could represent an answer to a roll-call. Finally, pronouncing this word with a low pitch could signify acquiescence: acceptance of something reluctantly.^[16]

Japanese Word «はい» (/haɪ/) ‘Yes’

High tone pitch	Mid tone pitch	Low tone pitch
Command attention	Represent an answer to roll-call	Signify acquiescence acceptance of something reluctantly

• Modern Hebrew also exhibits examples of sentence words in its language, e.g. «.חַם» (/χam/) = «It is hot.» or «.קַר» (/kar/) = «It is cold.».

References[edit]

Have you ever felt that people, who talk too much about nothing, start to irritate you after a while? In some situations, it’s possible to agree that talkative people can be too annoying! Of course, sometimes we cannot bring all the necessary nuances of some cases without a detailed story.

However, it doesn’t mean that you need to use many additional words to share your ideas. It’s easy to lose the whole essence of a conversation in the thousands of words!

Everybody knows how useful words can be! In this regard, you shouldn’t underestimate the power of one-word expressions and quotes! Even a single word of encouragement can help you to cheer up a person; while a simple word, said in a heated moment, is able to hurt a man to a core. Isn’t it powerful?

Words can be used as both a medicine and poison at the same time! Words are an efficient way to manipulate public opinion as well as each individual. That’s why you should always choose carefully what you want to say to avoid misunderstanding of any kind!

Perhaps, it sounds confusing, but one word may be enough to reach a specific goal! You’ll be surprised to hear that it’s easy to get a piece of motivation with the help of only one word! It’s not hard to remember motivational quotes, consisted only of a single word, to improve your life. Find your inspiration in the inspirational one-word quotes we’ve rounded up for you below!

What do you think of the idea to use famous one word sayings about life and love are the best ideas as captions for Instagram, Facebook, and other social networks in order to attract somebody’s attention? Sounds interesting, right? That’s why pay your attention to the following 1 word quotations.

They are simple to focus on and easy to use. You don’t need to spend a lot of time writing or reading these meaningful quotes and sayings: concise, deep, useful, universal, effective. Do you need any other reasons to save some of the great images with one word quotes to live by?

Whatever happens in your life, always remember that brevity is the soul of wit! Enjoy the following one word quotes for all occasions!

Inspirational Quotes To Show The Power Of One Word

Do you know at least one person who doesn’t need to be motivated? It’s easy to predict your negative answer. Sooner or later everybody needs to get a word of inspiration and motivation!

No matter how much purposeful and self-motivated you are, you’ll definitely face times of disappointment and tiredness on the way to your goal. In the case, you feel the lack of strength to move on, pay attention to the inspirational one word quotes! Be sure, even one word from the list below will inspire you:

• Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace. – Buddha
• Everything starts with one step, or one brick, or one word or one day. – Jeremy Gilley
• I cannot take back one word or action; the past does not change for anyone. – Charles Van Doren
• Sometimes kids ask how I’ve been able to write so many books. The answer is simple: one word at a time. Which is another good lesson, I think. You don’t have to do everything at once. You don’t have to know how every story is going to end. You just have to take that next step, look for that next idea, write that next word. – Andrew Clements
• One word can end a fight; One hug can start a friendship; One smile can bring Unity; One person can change your entire life! – Israelmore Ayivor

Vital One Word Sayings about Life

It may seem that it’s almost impossible to tell others about your life or thoughts with the help of just one word! It’s a widespread mistake! From time to time, a single word, chosen carefully, maybe eloquent!

Why should you believe us? This is because almost all elements of our life, important for people, can be called in one word: happiness, love, family, belief, encouragement, support, etc. Who knows, maybe, these one word sayings about life will become your guiding principle:

• My biggest regret could be summed up in one word, and that’s procrastination. – Ron Cooper
• What drove me and kept me going over the decades? If I had to use a single word, it would be ‘curiosity’. –  Eve Arnold
• Opportunities – You only get few chances to change yourself. Make sure you avail the opportunity that comes your way. – Unknown
• Forgive. Forgiveness doesn’t make the other person right; it makes you free. – Stormie Omartian
• The meaning of life. The wasted years of life. The poor choices of life. God answers the mess of life with one word: ‘grace.’  – Max Lucado

Powerful 1 Word Quotes for You To Live By

You have already heard how powerful one word can be. However, you may think that it’s only the myth, created for too gullible people. You have the chance to admit that you were wrong with your thoughts!

Relevant quotes with 1 necessary word are exactly what you need to live by! Let the following one word quotes be your life motto:

• All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope. – Winston Churchill
• Dare. Failures are made only by those who fail to dare, not by those who dare to fail. – Lester B. Pearson
• The one word that no politician will ever speak, is ‘enough.’ Enough.  – Carl Hiaasen
• If I had to describe myself in one word, ‘Hercules.‘  – Bryce Harper
• I get paralyzingly nervous a lot of times, so I tried bravado. The way I dress and carry myself, a lot of people find it intimidating. I think my whole career can be boiled down to the one word I always say in meetings: ‘strength.’  – Lorde

Famous One Word Quotes about Everything

Every situation in our life can be defined with one word. It’s up to you to decide what word it will be! There are so many things that influence your choice of the word! Everything depends on the time, place, personal attitude, feelings, and so on.

In any case, famous one word quotes will interest you as soon as they reveal the most popular aspects of life!

• Forgive. Forgiveness doesn’t make the other person right; it makes you free. – Stormie Omartian
• If someone was like, ‘Describe yourself in one word,’ I would never say, ‘Handsome.’ – Ian Harding
• Encourage. Appreciation can make a day – even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary. – Margaret Cousins
• Forgive. Forgiveness doesn’t make the other person right; it makes you free. – Stormie Omartian
• The one word that makes a good manager – decisiveness. – Lee Iacocca

Best One Word Quotes About Love

When people hear the word “love”, all of them associate it with something personal. As a rule, they unlikely to have the same thoughts. However, love has one meaning, common to everybody! What is love for you? Is it an innermost feeling, or a problem for you? If you still cannot define what love means exactly, don’t miss the best one word quotes about love! Isn’t it a good way to understand other people?

• One word frees us of all the weight and pain in life. That word is love. – Sophocles
• The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and the crimes of humanity, all lie in the one word ‘love‘. It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life. – Lydia M. Child
• Be Impeccable With Your Word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love. –  Don Miguel Ruiz
• Love is a special word, and I use it only when I mean it. You say the word too much and it becomes cheap. – Ray Charles
• I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. – Martin Luther King

Universal Single Word to Use in Motivational Quotes

People are used to thinking that long texts and phrases are better to use to motivate somebody. It’s a common belief that you should make up a kind of essay to persuade a person to change his or her life, move on, reach different goals and so on.

Although a thousand words are useful, sometimes this way may be counterproductive! Do you really want to waste your precious time, trying to cheer somebody up? We don’t think so!

That’s why you’d better apply to motivational quotes with a single word! If it’s impossible to help your friend with a single word, you don’t have any chances to motivate him or her even with a thousand words!

• One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice–president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared‘. – Dan Quayle
• Action. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Fly – Don’t think what would happen if you fail! Think, what if you fly? – Unknown
• Dream – Have the courage to pursue your dreams. Live them and act on them. -Unknown
• The strong manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience. – Tokugawa Ieyasu

Witty One Word Captions for Instagram

Don’t know how to make your page on the social net popular? Do you think that you have tried everything? That’s not entirely true! You haven’t used witty one word captions for social pages, collected in the post!

The users of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter will become interested in the short, but creative captions, used on your page! Don’t write long posts. They make everybody bored, so people begin losing their interest in your profile. One word captions are what you need!

• Grateful. I am grateful for all of my blessings.
• Kindness. I express myself with love and kindness.
• Freedom – You’re free to go. Enjoy the air of freedom and live your life.
• Question. I ask the right questions to progress in the right direction.
• Think. I create my day and life with the thoughts I think.

Great 1 Word Quotations on Universal Images

Great images with only one word are much more attractive than the same with long text. You’re surely puzzled over this statement now, aren’t you? In fact, one word contains the kind of mystery.

People can solve it, but the truth is that the answer will be different for different people. Don’t look for the deeper meaning of the following 1 word quotations on images, enjoy them:

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Phrase definition: A phrase is a grammatical term referring to a group of words that does not include a subject and verb.

What is a Phrase? Examples, Definitions

What are phrases? A phrase is a group (or pairing) of words in English. A phrase can be short or long, but it does not include the subject-verb pairing necessary to make a clause.

Some examples of phrases include:

• after the meal (prepositional phrase)
• the nice neighbor (noun phrase)
• were waiting for the movie (verb phrase)

None of these examples contains a subject doing an action (subject-verb). Therefore, each example is merely a group of words called a phrase.

A phrase will always be more than one word.

Phrases vs. Clauses: a Hierarchy of Word Units

A phrase is any group of words that does not contain a subject completing an action.

When a group of words contains a subject doing an action (subject-verb), it becomes a clause.

Phrases can be added to sentences to make them more complex.

Concepts can begin with a single word and develop into a compound sentence.

Example:

• meal (word)
• after the meal (phrase)
• that mom prepared (clause)
• After the meal that mom prepared I felt full. (sentence)
• After the meal that mom prepared, I felt full because I ate too much. (complex sentence)
• After the meal that mom prepared I felt full, but my brother was still hungry. (compound sentence)

Before we go into different types of grammatical phrases, let’s look at a few more examples of phrases.

• In the air (prepositional phrase)
• Beside the bed (prepositional phrase)
• Along the road (prepositional phrase)
• To live and breathe (infinitive phrase)
• Looking stunning (participle phrase)

As you can see, English phrases can be just about any combination of words so long as they do not contain a subject-verb pairing.

Different Types of Phrase

What is a noun phrase? Noun phrases consist of a noun and its modifiers.

• the nice neighbor
• a soft, comfortable bed

What is a verb phrase? Verb phrases consist of a verb and its modifiers.

• were waiting for the movie
• felt a prick on his arm

What is an adverbial phrase? Adverbial phrases are phrases that act as adverbs. They modify verbs, adverbs, or adjectives.

• around the block (modifying where)
• after the meal (modifying when)
• in silence (modifying how)

What is a gerund phrase? Gerund phrases are essentially noun phrases that begin with a gerund.

• running through the woods
• jumping like a kangaroo

What is an infinitive phrase? Infinitive phrases begin with a verb infinitive and include any modifiers. Infinitive phrases function as nouns, adjectives, or adverbs.

• to run out of food
• to visit to the countryside

What is an appositive phrase? An appositive is essentially a noun phrase but one that renames another noun in the sentence.

• The tree, a tall redwood, was beautiful.
• The curtains were made of lace, a beautiful and delicate fabric.

What is a participle phrase? A participle phrase begins with a present (-ing) or past (-ed) participle. A participle phrase includes the participle and its modifiers. Participle phrases function as adjectives.

• The girls giggling and playing in the park never seemed to tire.
• Fatigued and dehydrated in the desert the men traveled on.

What is a prepositional phrase? A prepositional phrase is a group of words that includes a preposition and a noun. A prepositional phrase will function as either an adjective or an adverb.

• before church
• under the stairs

What is an absolute phrase? An absolute phrase includes a noun and a participle and any modifiers.

• the flag flying at half-mast
• her hair streaked with sunlight

Summary: What are Phrases?

Define phrase: The definition of phrase is any grouping of words that does not contain a subject and a verb. A phrase is a very basic word unit in English.

• Phrases Examples:
  • Reading a book
  • The tall basketball player

Contents

• 1 What is a Phrase? Examples, Definitions
• 2 Phrases vs. Clauses: a Hierarchy of Word Units
• 3 More Phrase Examples
• 4 Different Types of Phrase
• 5 Summary: What are Phrases?