Significatum – See Signification-1

Signified – the plane of content of a sign.

Signifier – the plane of expression of a sign.

Simplification (of stems) – morphological process under which a morphologically divisible word becomes an indivisible one, when former morphologically complex structure is no longer identified as such; former affixes are no longer identified as such but become part of the stem (e.g. behave).

Size-of-unit problem – words vary considerably when they become units of different levels of linguistic analysis (lexical, grammatical); the researcher's aim is to consider words as separate and independent units in the flow of speech. The question is whether it is possible to establish objectively where one word ends and another begins in oral speech as words 'flow' and get fused together. E.g., are has been, get up, flower pot univerbs or multiverbal units?

Slang – non-standard vocabulary composed of words or senses characterized primarily by connotations of extreme informality and usually by a currency not limited to a particular region. It is composed typically of coinages or arbitrarily changed words, clipped or shortened forms, extravagant, forced, or facetious figures of speech, or verbal novelties. S. consists of the words and expressions that have escaped from the cant, jargon, and argot (q.v.) (and to a lesser extent from dialectal, nonstandard, and taboo speech) of specific subgroups of society so that they are known and used by an appreciable percentage of the general population, even though the words and expressions often retain some associations with the subgroups that originally used and popularized them. E.g., the American slang to neck (to kiss and caress) was originally student cant; flattop (an aircraft carrier) was originally navy jargon; and pineapple (a bomb or hand grenade) was originally criminal argot.

Sociolect – language spoken by a social group or a class, characterized by lexical, grammatical, phonetic, stylistic peculiarities. – See Idiolect

Sociolinguistics – branch of linguistics studying causation between language and the life of the speaking community; the study of language in relation to social factors.

Sound imitation – See Onomatopoeia

Sound interchange – an opposition in which words or word forms are differentiated due to an alteration in phonemic composition of the root; as means of word formation can be regarded as purely a diachronic one, synchronically it is a basis for contrasting words belonging to the same word-family and different parts of speech or different lexico-grammatical groups. Typology of s.i.:

• ablaut (q.v.);

• umlaut (q.v.);

• consonant interchange caused by phonetic surroundings. E.g. speak v – speech; bake v – batch n; wake v – watch n – due to the fact that the palatal OE [k] very early became [t ] but was retained in verbs because of the position before the consonants [s] and [ ] in the second and third persons singular.

• phonological changes of vowel or consonant: strong – strength; heal – health; steal – stealth; long – length.

Sound symbolism – the use of euphonic effects for stylistic purposes, based on psychologically and psychophysiologically relevant associative correspondences between certain concepts and sounds (e.g. fricative sounds are mostly associated with aggression).

Source domain – See Cognitive metaphor; Metaphorization; Domain, source d.

Source of borrowing – the term is applied to the language from which (or via which) the loan word was taken into English. – See Borrowing, Origin of borrowing

Special lexis – terms, words of certain jargon.

Specialization/specification of meaning – the restriction of the semantic capacity of a word in the course of its historical development; usu. when a generic/hypernymic term becomes a specific/hyponymic one (e.g. deer formerly denoted any animal, now – a species of animals). – See Semantic changes, Semantic shift

Speech – the activity of man using language to communicate with other men, i.e. the use of different linguistic means to convey certain content. Opp. to language.

Split of polysemy (disintegration of polysemy) – the split of a polysemantic unit when no semantic links are identified between lexico-semantic variants (q.v.) which formerly constituted one polysemantic unit.

Stem – that part of a word which remains unchanged throughout its paradigm and to which grammatical inflexions and affixes are added.

'Stone-wall' problem – concerns actually two problems: 1) the part-of-speech status of the first element of N+N type of phrase (e.g. stone wall, cannon ball, verb phrase) – whether it is a noun or an adjective or a special part of speech called attribituve noun; 2) whether the combination is a complex word – a compound or it is a free word combination based on syntactic principles – a free phrase. – See Compounds, unstable c.