The head word of a phrase

In English grammar, a head is the key word that determines the nature of a phrase (in contrast to any modifiers or determiners).

For example, in a noun phrase, the head is a noun or pronoun («a tiny sandwich«). In an adjective phrase, the head is an adjective («completely inadequate«). In an adverb phrase, the head is an adverb («quite clearly«).

A head is sometimes called a headword, though this term shouldn’t be confused with the more common use of headword to mean a word placed at the beginning of an entry in a glossary, dictionary, or other reference work.

Also Known As

head word (HW), governor

Examples and Observations

  • «Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship(Humphrey Bogart as Rick in Casablanca, 1942)
  • «As the leader of all illegal activities in Casablanca, I am an influential and respected man(Sydney Greenstreet as Senor Ferrari in Casablanca, 1942)
  • «The head of the noun phrase a big man is man, and it is the singular form of this item which relates to the co-occurrence of singular verb forms, such as is, walks, etc.; the head of the verb phrase has put is put, and it is this verb which accounts for the use of object and adverbial later in the sentence (e.g. put it there). In phrases such as men and women, either item could be the head.»(David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003)

Testing for Heads

«Noun phrases must contain a head. Most frequently this will be a noun or pronoun, but occasionally it can be an adjective or determiner. The heads of noun phrases can be identified by three tests:

1. They cannot be deleted.

2. They can usually be replaced by a pronoun.

3. They can usually be made plural or singular (this may not be possible with proper names).

Only test 1 holds good for all heads: the results for 2 and 3 depend on the type of head.» (Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare’s Grammar. Bloomsbury, 2003)

Determiners as Heads

«Determiners may be used as heads, as in the following examples:

Some arrived this morning.

I have never seen many.

He gave us two

Like third person pronouns these force us to refer back in the context to see what is being referred to. Some arrived this morning makes us ask ‘Some what?’, just as He arrived this morning makes us ask ‘Who did?’ But there is a difference. He stands in place of a whole noun phrase (e.g. the minister) while some is part of a noun phrase doing duty for the whole (e.g. some applications). . . .

«Most determiners occurring as heads are back-referring [that is, anaphoric]. The examples given above amply illustrate this point. However, they are not all so. This is especially the case with this, that, these, and those. For instance, the sentence Have you seen these before? could be spoken while the speaker is pointing to some newly built houses. He is then not referring ‘back’ to something mentioned, but referring ‘out’ to something outside the text [that is, exophora].»

(David J. Young, Introducing English Grammar. Taylor & Francis, 2003) 

Narrower and Wider Definitions

«There are two main definitions [of head], one narrower and due largely to Bloomfield, the other wider and now more usual, following work by R.S. Jackendoff in the 1970s.

1. In the narrower definition, a phrase p has a head h if h alone can bear any syntactic function that p can bear. E.g. very cold can be replaced by cold in any construction: very cold water or cold water, I feel very cold or I feel cold. Therefore the adjective is its head and, by that token, the whole is an ‘adjective phrase.’

2. In the wider definition, a phrase p has a head h if the presence of h determines the range of syntactic functions that p can bear. E.g. the constructions into which on the table can enter are determined by the presence of a preposition, on. Therefore the preposition is its head and, by that token, it is a ‘prepositional phrase.'»


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Also called headword, guide word. a word printed at the top of a page in a reference book indicating the first or last entry or article on that page.

What is a guide word example?

The definition of a guide word is a word printed at the top of a page indicating the first or last word entry on that page. An example of guide word is the word «hesitate» printed on a page in a dictionary with the word «hesitate» listed as the first word on the page.

What is guide word and entry word?

Guide Words: These are the words in bold at the top of each page that help to locate an entry word. • The first guide word is the first word on the page. • The second guide word is the last word on the page.

What is headword example?

The headword (or head) in a phrase is that word which is essential to the core meaning of the phrase. It is the word to which the phrase is reducible, for example: This environmentally-friendly car has been using additive-free petrol. CAR USES PETROL.

What is the headword meaning?

1 : a word or term placed at the beginning (as of a chapter or an entry in an encyclopedia)

45 related questions found

What is the headword part of speech?

headword. / (ˈhɛdˌwɜːd) / noun. a key word placed at the beginning of a line, paragraph, etc, as in a dictionary entry.

How you can identify a headword in a dictionary?

a word or phrase that is listed separately with its own definition, examples of use, etc. in a dictionary or similar book: The headwords are in bold dark blue type. «Hard line» is not covered under «line» but is a headword in its own right.

What Is a head words in NLP?

In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun water. Analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound.

What is head word in a sentence?

The head is the most important word in a phrase. All the other words in a phrase depend on the head. Words which are part of the phrase and which come before the head are called the pre-head. Words which are part of the phrase and which come after the head are called the post-head. … In a verb phrase, the head is a verb.

What do you mean by words?

1 : a sound or combination of sounds that has meaning and is spoken by a human being. 2 : a written or printed letter or letters standing for a spoken word. 3 : a brief remark or conversation I’d like a word with you.

What is the headword in the entry?

A headword, lemma, or catchword is the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appears. … The headword is used to locate the entry, and dictates its alphabetical position.

What are guide words typically used for?

At the top of each page are two large boldface words separated by a dot. These are called guide words. They show the alphabetical range of the entries on that page, and you can use them to help you find a word quickly.

How do guide words help you in using the dictionary?

Guide words appear on each page of a dictionary. They tell you the first word and last word on the page. The other words on the page come between the guide words in alphabetical order. … If one word is shorter, and there are no more letters to compare, then the shorter word comes first in alphabetical order.

What do you mean by guide?

1a : one that leads or directs another’s way needed a guide for the safari. b : a person who exhibits and explains points of interest The museum guide was very helpful. c : something that provides a person with guiding information used the stars as a guide to find their way back. d : signpost sense 1.

What do you call a person that guides?

leader. A person or thing that leads; directing, commanding, or guiding head, as of a group or activity.

What are the types of Concord in grammar?

  • Agreement in terms of number (singular/plural) …
  • Concord Relating to the nature of certain nouns. …
  • Concord between subject and complement of a sentence. …
  • Concord involving the principle of proximity.
  • Concord between Determiners and the Nouns they Modify. …
  • Concord Involving the Personal Pronouns in the Third Person.

What is Postmodifier example?

postmodifiers. DEFINITIONS1. the part of a noun group, adjective group, or verb group that comes after the most important word (the head) and adds information about it. For example in the noun group ‘the rules of the game’, the prepositional phrase ‘of the game’ is a postmodifier.

What are the examples of determiners?

Determiners in English

  • Definite article : the.
  • Indefinite articles : a, an.
  • Demonstratives: this, that, these, those.
  • Pronouns and possessive determiners : my, your, his, her, its, our, their.
  • Quantifiers : a few, a little, much, many, a lot of, most, some, any, enough.
  • Numbers : one, ten, thirty.

What is phrase in NLP?

The form of n-gram that takes center stage in NLP context analysis is the noun phrase. Noun phrases are part of speech patterns that include a noun. They can also include whatever other parts of speech make grammatical sense, and can include multiple nouns. Some common noun phrase patterns are: Noun.

What is corpus in NLP?

In linguistics and NLP, corpus (literally Latin for body) refers to a collection of texts. Such collections may be formed of a single language of texts, or can span multiple languages — there are numerous reasons for which multilingual corpora (the plural of corpus) may be useful.

What is semantic NLP?

The semantic analysis of natural language content starts by reading all of the words in content to capture the real meaning of any text. It identifies the text elements and assigns them to their logical and grammatical role. … It also understands the relationships between different concepts in the text.

Does a dictionary indicate the idiomatic use of the headword?

A dictionary is a reference book about words and as such it describes the functioning of individual words (sometimes called lexical items). It does so by listing these words in alphabetical order in the form of headwords, the words listed as entries in the dictionary.

What is a headword count?

The headword count refers to the number of headwords a student needs to know in order to read the text with relative ease. The number of headwords is controlled to provide a challenging but accessible read. You can find the number of headwords for each level in a Reader series by checking the series page.

What are post modifiers?

In English grammar, a postmodifier is a modifier that follows the word or phrase it limits or qualifies. Modification by a postmodifier is called postmodification. There are many different types of postmodifiers, but the most common are prepositional phrases and relative clauses.

Table of Contents

  1. What is the head word in the first entry?
  2. What is a head Word example?
  3. What are the different meanings of head?
  4. Is Head present tense?
  5. What is the origin of Head?
  6. Why do we say heads up when we actually duck?
  7. What is the Old English word for head?
  8. Who is the head of the family?
  9. What are older family members called?
  10. Why father is head of the family?
  11. What is the oldest female in the family called?
  12. What is a female patriarch called?
  13. What is a female leader called?
  14. What is a female headed household called?
  15. Can female be considered household head?
  16. What is a male headed family called?
  17. What causes female-headed households?
  18. What is a female household?
  19. What is the most significant factor contributing to the high number of female headed households?
  20. What problems do female headed families face?
  21. What is land entitlement to woman?
  22. Why are female headed households at greatest risk for poverty?
  23. What is meant by gender?
  24. What are the 4 genders?
  25. What is gender example?
  26. What is gender roles and examples?
  27. What is gender language and examples?
  28. What is a common gender?

In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun water. Analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound.

What is the head word in the first entry?

A head is sometimes called a headword, though this term shouldn’t be confused with the more common use of headword to mean a word placed at the beginning of an entry in a glossary, dictionary, or other reference work.

What is a head Word example?

The headword (or head) in a phrase is that word which is essential to the core meaning of the phrase. It is the word to which the phrase is reducible, for example: This environmentally-friendly car has been using additive-free petrol. CAR USES PETROL.

What are the different meanings of head?

(Entry 1 of 3) 1 : the upper or anterior division of the animal body that contains the brain, the chief sense organs, and the mouth nodded his head in agreement. 2a : the seat of the intellect : mind two heads are better than one. b : a person with respect to mental qualities let wiser heads prevail.

Is Head present tense?

Word forms: plural, 3rd person singular present tense heads , present participle heading , past tense, past participle headed Head is used in a large number of expressions which are explained under other words in the dictionary.

Old English heafod “top of the body,” also “upper end of a slope,” also “chief person, leader, ruler; capital city,” from Proto-Germanic *haubid (source also of Old Saxon hobid, Old Norse hofuð, Old Frisian haved, Middle Dutch hovet, Dutch hoofd, Old High German houbit, German Haupt, Gothic haubiþ “head”), from PIE …

Why do we say heads up when we actually duck?

Because it means pay attention—Look out. It’s an easy way to get someone’s attention without overthinking to say something better. Duck would be perfect in some cases, but heads up has become synonymous with all other warning exclamations.

What is the Old English word for head?

hēafod

Who is the head of the family?

“Head of the family” is a term commonly used by family members to describe an authority position within their lineage. This paper describes family headship as reported by a representative sample of adult men and women.

What are older family members called?

An extended family is a family that extends beyond the nuclear family, consisting of parents like father, mother, and their children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins, all living in the same household.

Why father is head of the family?

A father is the head of the family. Every father has his own way of dealing with his family. He has responsibility for each member of the family, and this responsibility should be put into action in order to have a better result for the family.

What is the oldest female in the family called?

: a woman who rules or dominates a family, group, or state specifically : a mother who is head and ruler of her family and descendants Our grandmother was the family’s matriarch.

What is a female patriarch called?

matriarch Add to list Share. In any case, patriarch has come to mean the male head of a family or clan, while matriarch is used if the head of a family or clan is female.

What is a female leader called?

other words for female ruler monarch. ruler. consort. empress. regent.

What is a female headed household called?

Families are increasingly headed by women and in such cases are commonly referred to as female -headed, women -headed, or mother -headed families. The terms lone mother and single mother typically refer to the same family structure in different countries.

Can female be considered household head?

In most countries, women are not usually considered as heads of households unless no adult male is living permanently in the household.

What is a male headed family called?

A patriarch is a male leader. Your father might be the patriarch of your family, but your kid brother could be the patriarch of his club house. Although the noun patriarch specifically refers to a male head of the family, it can more generally refer to any older, respected male.

What causes female-headed households?

The number of female-headed households has increased dramatically in the recent half-century, especially in developing countries [6], due to divorce, spouse death, addiction or disability of husband, increased life expectancy among women, migration, or being abandoned by husband [7, 8].

What is a female household?

In the developed countries most female-headed households consist of women who are never married or who are divorced. The feminization of poverty – the process whereby poverty becomes more concentrated among Individuals living in female-headed households – is a key concept for describing FHH social and economic levels.

What is the most significant factor contributing to the high number of female headed households?

Hunger and food-insecurity are caused by poverty. Gender discrimination and, for many, racial/ethnic discrimination make women more likely to be poor. Female-headed households are more than twice as likely as all U.S. households to be poor (30.6 percent vs. 14.8 percent).

What problems do female headed families face?

2 Problems facing women- headed families are: poverty, economic insecurity, social, political, powerlessness, and health problems. While problems facing their children are: poverty, social, and health problems.

What is land entitlement to woman?

Section 6 of the Bill says that every woman farmer should have equal ownership of and inheritance rights over land acquired by her husband; his share of the family property; or his share of land transferred through a government land reform or resettlement scheme.

Why are female headed households at greatest risk for poverty?

Female headed households are most susceptible to poverty because they have fewer income earners to provide financial support within the household.

What is meant by gender?

Gender is used to describe the characteristics of women and men that are socially constructed, while sex refers to those that are biologically determined. People are born female or male, but learn to be girls and boys who grow into women and men.

What are the 4 genders?

The four genders are masculine, feminine, neuter and common.

What is gender example?

Gender is defined as the socially constructed roles and behaviors that a society typically associates with males and females. An example of gender is referring to someone who wears a dress as a female. One’s identity as female or male or as neither entirely female nor entirely male.

What is gender roles and examples?

What are gender roles? Gender roles in society means how we’re expected to act, speak, dress, groom, and conduct ourselves based upon our assigned sex. For example, girls and women are generally expected to dress in typically feminine ways and be polite, accommodating, and nurturing.

What is gender language and examples?

Another example of gendered language is the way the titles “Mr.,” “Miss,” and “Mrs.” are used. “Mr.” can refer to any man, regardless of whether he is single or married, but “Miss” and “Mrs.” define women by whether they are married, which until quite recently meant defining them by their relationships with men.

What is a common gender?

in English, a noun that is the same whether it is referring to either gender, such as cat, people, spouse. in some languages, such as Latin, a noun that may be masculine or feminine, but not neuter.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun (head noun) water. Analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound. For example, the head of the compound noun handbag is bag, since a handbag is a bag, not a hand. The other elements of the phrase or compound modify the head, and are therefore the head’s dependents.[1] Headed phrases and compounds are called endocentric, whereas exocentric («headless») phrases and compounds (if they exist) lack a clear head. Heads are crucial to establishing the direction of branching. Head-initial phrases are right-branching, head-final phrases are left-branching, and head-medial phrases combine left- and right-branching.

Basic examples[edit]

Examine the following expressions:

big red dog
birdsong

The word dog is the head of big red dog since it determines that the phrase is a noun phrase, not an adjective phrase. Because the adjectives big and red modify this head noun, they are its dependents.[2] Similarly, in the compound noun birdsong, the stem song is the head since it determines the basic meaning of the compound. The stem bird modifies this meaning and is therefore dependent on song. Birdsong is a kind of song, not a kind of bird. Conversely, a songbird is a type of bird since the stem bird is the head in this compound. The heads of phrases can often be identified by way of constituency tests. For instance, substituting a single word in place of the phrase big red dog requires the substitute to be a noun (or pronoun), not an adjective.

Representing heads[edit]

Trees[edit]

Many theories of syntax represent heads by means of tree structures. These trees tend to be organized in terms of one of two relations: either in terms of the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars or the dependency relation of dependency grammars. Both relations are illustrated with the following trees:[3]

Representing heads

The constituency relation is shown on the left and the dependency relation on the right. The a-trees identify heads by way of category labels, whereas the b-trees use the words themselves as the labels.[4] The noun stories (N) is the head over the adjective funny (A). In the constituency trees on the left, the noun projects its category status up to the mother node, so that the entire phrase is identified as a noun phrase (NP). In the dependency trees on the right, the noun projects only a single node, whereby this node dominates the one node that the adjective projects, a situation that also identifies the entirety as an NP. The constituency trees are structurally the same as their dependency counterparts, the only difference being that a different convention is used for marking heads and dependents. The conventions illustrated with these trees are just a couple of the various tools that grammarians employ to identify heads and dependents. While other conventions abound, they are usually similar to the ones illustrated here.

More trees[edit]

The four trees above show a head-final structure. The following trees illustrate head-final structures further as well as head-initial and head-medial structures. The constituency trees (= a-trees) appear on the left, and dependency trees (= b-trees) on the right. Henceforth the convention is employed where the words appear as the labels on the nodes. The next four trees are additional examples of head-final phrases:

Head-final trees

The following six trees illustrate head-initial phrases:

Head-initial trees

And the following six trees are examples of head-medial phrases:

Head-medial trees

The head-medial constituency trees here assume a more traditional n-ary branching analysis. Since some prominent phrase structure grammars (e.g. most work in Government and binding theory and the Minimalist Program) take all branching to be binary, these head-medial a-trees may be controversial.

X-bar trees[edit]

Trees that are based on the X-bar schema also acknowledge head-initial, head-final, and head-medial phrases, although the depiction of heads is less direct. The standard X-bar schema for English is as follows:

X-bar structure

This structure is both head-initial and head-final, which makes it head-medial in a sense. It is head-initial insofar as the head X0 precedes its complement, but it is head-final insofar as the projection X’ of the head follows its specifier.

Head-initial vs. head-final languages[edit]

Some language typologists classify language syntax according to a head directionality parameter in word order, that is, whether a phrase is head-initial (= right-branching) or head-final (= left-branching), assuming that it has a fixed word order at all. English is more head-initial than head-final, as illustrated with the following dependency tree of the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis:

The Metamorphosis-English

The tree shows the extent to which English is primarily a head-initial language. Structure is descending as speech and processing move from left to right. Most dependencies have the head preceding its dependent(s), although there are also head-final dependencies in the tree. For instance, the determiner-noun and adjective-noun dependencies are head-final as well as the subject-verb dependencies. Most other dependencies in English are, however, head-initial as the tree shows. The mixed nature of head-initial and head-final structures is common across languages. In fact purely head-initial or purely head-final languages probably do not exist, although there are some languages that approach purity in this respect, for instance Japanese.

The following tree is of the same sentence from Kafka’s story. The glossing conventions are those established by Lehmann. One can easily see the extent to which Japanese is head-final:

The Metamorphosis-Japanese

A large majority of head-dependent orderings in Japanese are head-final. This fact is obvious in this tree, since structure is strongly ascending as speech and processing move from left to right. Thus the word order of Japanese is in a sense the opposite of English.

Head-marking vs. dependent-marking[edit]

It is also common to classify language morphology according to whether a phrase is head-marking or dependent-marking. A given dependency is head-marking, if something about the dependent influences the form of the head, and a given dependency is dependent-marking, if something about the head influences the form of the dependent.

For instance, in the English possessive case, possessive marking (s) appears on the dependent (the possessor), whereas in Hungarian possessive marking appears on the head noun:[5]

English: the man‘s house
Hungarian: az ember ház-a (the man house-POSSESSIVE)

Prosodic head[edit]

In a prosodic unit, the head is the part that extends from the first stressed syllable up to (but not including) the tonic syllable. A high head is the stressed syllable that begins the head and is high in pitch, usually higher than the beginning pitch of the tone on the tonic syllable. For example:

The bus was late.

A low head is the syllable that begins the head and is low in pitch, usually lower than the beginning pitch of the tone on the tonic syllable.

The bus was late.

See also[edit]

  • Branching
  • Constituent
  • Dependency grammar
  • Head-driven phrase structure grammar
  • Head directionality parameter
  • Head-marking language
  • Phrase
  • Phrase structure grammar

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ For a good general discussion of heads, see Miller (2011:41ff.). However, take note Miller miscites Hudson’s (1990) listing of Zwicky’s criteria of headhood as if these were Matthews’.
  2. ^ Discerning heads from dependents is not always easy. The exact criteria that one employs to identify the head of a phrase vary, and definitions of «head» have been debated in detail. See the exchange between Zwicky (1985, 1993) and Hudson (1987) in this regard.
  3. ^ Dependency grammar trees similar to the ones produced in this article can be found, for instance, in Ágel et al. (2003/6).
  4. ^ Using the words themselves as the labels on the nodes in trees is a convention that is consistent with bare phrase structure (BPS). See Chomsky (1995).
  5. ^ See Nichols (1986).

References[edit]

  • Chomsky, N. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
  • Corbett, G., N. Fraser, and S. McGlashan (eds). 1993. Heads in Grammatical Theory. Cambridge University Press.
  • Hudson, R. A. 1987. Zwicky on heads. Journal of Linguistics 23, 109–132.
  • Miller, J. 2011. A critical introduction to syntax. London: Continuum.
  • Nichols, J. 1986. Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. Language 62, 56-119.
  • Zwicky, A. 1985. Heads. Journal of Linguistics 21, pp. 1–29.
  • Zwicky, A. 1993. Heads, bases and functors. In G. Corbett, et al. (eds) 1993, 292–315.

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;
a
mbiguity 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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