Glossary

affix - element added to a word to change its meaning or grammatical function. Affixes include prefixes (e.g. ‘un-’, ‘anti-’), suffixes (e.g. ‘-ed\ ‘less’).

anaphoric - a pronoun or other pro-form, used anaphorically, substitutes for a word or expression used earlier.

animacy - grammatical category involving distinct forms for reference to (some or all) living things, e.g. English ‘who’.

antecedent - the initial expression used to identify someone or something for which an anaphor is used later.

attributable silence- the absence of talk when a speaker is given the right to speak in conversation.

auxiliary (verb) - verb with mainly grammatical function, used together with a main verb which carries most of the ‘outside world’ meaning.

backchannels/backchannel signals - vocal indications of attention, e.g. ‘uh-huh’, ‘hmm’, when someone else is talking.

background entailment - any logical consequence of an utterance.

bald on record - utterances, e.g. orders, directly addressed to another where the illocutionary force is made explicit.

bleaching - reduction of meaning resulting from grammaticalization, as in the future auxiliary ‘will’, which no longer means ‘want’.

case - cases (e.g. nominative, accusative, genitive, dative) are forms of nouns and pronouns, and of other words that agree with them.

cataphora - the use of a word (typically a pronoun) to introduce someone or something that is more fully identified later.

classifierWord used with nouns in some languages to indicate membership of noun class.

clause - unit containing a verb form and one or more noun phrases, which can communicate information about an action, event, situation, or process.

coherence - the familiar and expected relationships in experience which we use to connect the meanings of utterances, even when those connections are not explicitly made.

context - the physical environment in which a word is used: cf. co-text.

contrastive pragmatics - the study of culturally different ways of using language.

conventional implicature- an additional unstated meaning asso­ciated with the use of a specific word.

conversational implicature - an additional unstated meaning that has to be assumed in order to maintain the cooperative principle.

conversational style - particular way of participating in conversa­tion

conjugation - verb class whose members share a particular set of inflections.

constraint - part of a rule that outlaws ungrammatical over- generalizations.

content word - word (like most nouns, verbs, or adjectives) that refers to something in the outside world.

context- the physical environment in which a word is used.

contraction -Auxiliary merged with another word, e.g. ‘I’ll’, ‘don’t

contrastive pragmatics- the study of culturally different ways of using language.

conversational style - particular way of participating in conversation.

core grammar - that part of grammar which is claimed to be universal to language and known as part of our genetic endowment.

corpus - plural (corpora). Searchable electronic database of spoken and/or written lexis.

creole - full-scale language which originated as a pidgin.

critical period - the age range after which, it is believed, children’s capacity for fully successful language learning ‘switches off’.

declension - class(e.g. ofnouns or adjectives) whose members share a particular set of inflections.

definiteness - a definite item is known’, identifiable by speaker and hearer.

deictic center - the speaker’s location/time.

deictic expression - seedeixis.

deictic projection - speakers acting as if they are somewhere else. .

deixis - pointing’ via language, using a deictic expression, e.g. ‘this’, ‘here’.

derivational morphology - rules for changing words so as to produce a new meaning or word class.

determiner - comes before adjectives innoun phrases and shows what part of a general class is being talked about. They include articles, possessives, demonstrative pronouns(this,that) and quantifiers(each, many,all, etc.).

dialect - variety ol a language; especially a non standard variety.

directive - a speech act used to get someone else to do something, e.g. an order.

direct object - noun phrase whose form or position typically encodes meanings such as ‘patient’ or ‘affected participant’, e.g. ‘The police have arrested my brother’.

direct speech act - speech act where a direct relationship exists between the structure and communicative function of an utterance.

discourse - language as put to communicative use in speech or writing.

discourse analysis - the study of language use with reference to the social and psychological factors that influence communication.

discourse marker - Wind 01 expo . .ion used

elicitation test - way of getting an informant to produce natural examples of language.

ellipsis -leaving out words, e.g, Seen Nigel?’, ‘Yes, I have’.

embedding - using, a structure as a component of another structure. evidentially - showing the source of a speaker’s knowledge grammatically, e.g. by the form of the verb.

finite - in languages with tense systems, verb form which carries tense, e.g. ‘sees’, ‘saw’.

first person - form indicating reference to (or including) speaker, e.g. ‘I’, ‘our’, ‘am’.formal (grammar) - grammatical theory which takes grammatical forms, rather than functions, as basis.

formulaic language - multi-word lexical items (‘chunks’) which are stored in and retrieved from memory as unanalysed wholes.

function word - word which has a grammatical function rather than outside-world reference.

functional (grammar) - grammatical theory which takes functions and meanings as basic.

gender - system whereby nouns are divided into grammatically differentiated classes, as in the Russian ‘masculine/feminine/ neuter’ categorization.

generative rule or grammar - rule or grammar that can be used to generate (specify) all the grammatical sentences and none of the ungrammatical sentences in the relevant domain.

given - term used for information presented as being already known, or as background to what is being communicated.

grammar - set of devices (word order, inflection, use of function words, intonation contours) needed especially to express certain kinds of necessary meaning that cannot be conveyed by referential vocabulary alone: in particular, relationships between concepts, participant roles, and mood. These devices are also widely used to encode other relatively abstract meanings such as time relationships, number, or evidentiality. The term grammar is also used for a description or theory of grammar, grammaticality judgment - way of assessing the grammaticality of a sentence or other linguistic unit by consulting native speakers.

grammaticalization - process whereby a word or expression moves from outside-world reference to a more grammatical function, as in the change from the older use of will (‘want’) to its modern auxiliary form.

head - word which acts as the core of a phrase and gives it its grammatical character.

hedges - cautious notes expressed about how an utterance is to be taken, e.g. ‘as far as I know’ used when giving some informa­tion.

hierarchical organization – form of organization in which linguistic units are components of higher-level units.

honorific – grammatical or lexical form used to express respect.

indexicals- like deictic expressions, forms used for ‘pointing’ via language.

indirect object – noun phrase whose form or position typically encodes a meaning such as ‘recipient’ or ‘goal’.(e.g. I sent the secretary all the details).

indirect speech act - speech act where an indirect relationship exists between the structure and communicative function of an utterance.

inference - the listener’s use of additional knowledge to make sense of what is not explicit in an utterance.

inflecting language - language in which grammatical meanings and relations are largely repressed by inflections.

inflection - change in the form of a word to signal grammatical relation or meaning, as in English ‘word'/'words’ or ‘buy’/ ‘bought’.

input - the language to which learners are exposed, and from which they derive some or all of their linguistic knowledge.

interlanguage pragmatics - the study of how non-native speakers communicate in a second language.

interpersonal function - the use of language for maintaining social roles and taking part in social interaction.

intonation -patterns of voice pitch which add grammatical or other kinds of meaning to structures.

intransitive -an intransitive verb does not normally have a direct object mil normally have a direct object, e.g. ‘sleep’, ‘wonder’.

isolating language - languagesuch as Mandarin Chinese in which words do not inflect.

lexical, lexis - to do with vocabulary.

linguistic relativity - the idea that the meaning distinctions expressed in a language reflect and shape its speakers’ categorization of reality; often called the ‘Sapir- Whorf hypothesis’.

modal auxiliaries - group of English auxiliary verbs with particular grammatical characteristics that express meanings mostly relating to certainty or possibility, e.g. ‘can’, ‘may’, ‘must’.

modifier - word or expression which adds to or limits the meaning of another word or expression, e.g. ‘really sorry’, ‘green glass’.

modularity - the idea that particular aspects of cognition (e.g. language or grammar) are handled by separate modules in the mind or brain.

mood - grammatical category relating to the informative or communicative status of utterances, e.g. whether they refer to established facts, question, express a supposition or conditieon, deny, request.

morpheme - smallest meaningful unit of language, e.g. ‘un-’, ‘-ed’ (bound morphemes), ‘out’, ‘elephant’ (free morphemes).

morphology - the branch of grammar concerned with the way words change their form to express differences in meaning or grammatical function.

neural network - computer model used to explore the way a group of brain cells might operate.

new - term used for that part of a message which carries the information focus.

Nominalize - make a noun from a verb, e.g. ‘erupt’ —► ‘eruption’, ‘arrive’ —► ‘arrival’.

non-finite - in languages with tense systems, verb form which does not carry tense, e.g. ‘waiting’, ‘broken’, ‘be’.

noun phrase (NP) - group of words with a noun as head.

number - system whereby different forms are used to indicate reference to one and more than one (e.g. I/‘we’, ‘horse’/ ‘horses’); some languages have distinct number forms for reference to two (dual), three (trial) or a small number (paucal).

parameter – hypothesized component of universal grammar which provides innate knowledge of the limited possible ways in which a particular aspect of language can operate.

part of speech - word class ,e.g.noun, preposition.

particle - small function word.

patient - receptive or affected participant in a process, typically encoded as grammatical object in many languages.

performance - instances of language produced by speakers or writers.

performative verb - a verb that explicitly names the speech act, e.g. the verb ‘promise’ in the utterance ‘I promise to be there’.

peripheral grammar - that part of grammar which is not claimed to be univeisal to language, hut belongs to the structure of one or more particular languages.

person – grammatical system forshowing whether reference is, for example, to speaker or hearer.

person deixis - forms used to point to people, e.g. ‘me’, ‘you’.

phrasal verb - compound verb consisting of a base verb plus a preposition or adverb particle, or bothe.g. ‘look at’, ‘break up’, ‘get on with'.

phrase- group of words that acts as a constituent in clause structure.

pildgin -rudimentary contact language used, for example, for trade.

poverty of the stimulus- the idea that the linguistic input children receive is not enough to explain their knowledge of their mother tongues.

pragmatic accent - aspects of talk that indicate what is assumed to be communicated without being said.

pragmatic connection- a conventional association between a person’s name and a kind of object, e.g. ‘Shakespeare’ used to identify a book.

pragmatics - the study of speaker meaning as distinct from word or sentence meaning.

preferred - the structurally expected next utterance used in a response.

presupposition - something the speaker assumes to be the case.

proximal - near speaker, e.g. ‘this’, ‘here’: cf. distal. Psychological distance Speaker’s marking of how close or distant something is perceived to be.

pro-drop - in a pro drop language, pronouns (especially subject pronouns) are not grammatically required.

pro-form - pronoun or other form used as substitute for a more specific expression, e.g. ‘He did’, ‘Look at that’.

progressive - verb form that presents an action or situation as ongoing, not complete, e.g. ‘It was raining’.

recursion - repeated operation of a grammatical process such as embedding.

redundancy - expressing something more completely than is strictly necessary.

reference - an act by which a speaker uses a word, or words, to enable a listener to identify someone or something.

referential use - using an expression to identify someone or something when the person or thing is assumed to be known.

referring expression - a linguistic form which enables a listener, or reader, to identify something.

representative - aspeech act in which the speaker states what is believed or known.

register - level of formality in language.

relative clause - clause modifying a noun phrase, e.g. ‘the big man who is dancing on the table’.

rule - description or knowledge of a regularity.

second person - form indicating reference to (or including) hearer, e.g. ‘you’, ‘yourselves’.

selection criteria - rules specifying what forms can or must be used together with a particular word.

selectional idiom - preferred way of expressing a particular stereo­typed or recurrent meaning, e.g. ‘I’m being served’, ‘out of work’, ‘Can I take a message?’.

semantic - to do with meaning,

semantics - the study of how words literally connect to things, or more generally, the investigation of meaning as encoded in lan­guage.

social deixis - forms used to indicate relative social status.

solidarity strategy - an emphasis on the closeness of speaker and addressee

spatial deixis - forms used to point to location, e.g. ‘here’, ‘there’.

split infinitive - structure in which an adverb comes between ‘to’ and an infinitive verb, e.g. ‘to boldly go’.

standard (language) - variety favoured for official purposes, generally used in writing, and taught in schools.

structure-dependency - the fact that in all languages grammatical processes operate primarily on structures, not single words; seen by some linguists as evidence for innate universal grammar.

subject - noun phrase whose form or position typically encodes meanings such as ‘agent’ or ‘causative participant’.

substratum - elements in a language which show the influence of an older language once spoken in the same area, e.g. a Welsh accent in English, some structures in Irish English.

syntax - the rules governing the ways in which words are assembled into structures.

tense - grammatical system for showing time relations through changes in the forms of verbs.

third person - form indicating reference to somebody/something other than speaker or hearer, e.g. ‘they’.

topic - what in utterance is ‘about’. Topic has' separate grammatical status in some languages.

transitive - a transitive verb normally has a direct object, e.g. ‘cut’, ‘improve’.

T/V distinction- a distinction between forms used for a familiar (‘tu’) and a non-familiar (‘vous’) addressee, in French and other languages.

universal grammar (UG) - hypothesized innate knowledge of the universal structural features underlying the grammar of all languages.

usage - term used especially in the discussion of variable aspects of language or elements about which there is disagreement.

usage-based associative learning - the idea that language acquisition proceeds only from exposure to, and unconscious analysis of, linguistic input. |

verb phrase (VP) -group of words consisting of one or more auxiliary verbs together with a main verb.

vernacular - casual, informal, or non-standard variety of language.

voice - the category that includes active and passive.

Wernicke’s area - part of the brain near the left ear. Damage to Wernicke’s area results in speech which is seriously disrupted in terms of content, but remains fluent and grammatical.