Glossary

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.

References

Aitchison, J. (1987). Words in the mind. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell Inc.

Algeo, J., & Pyles, T. (2010). The origins and development of the English language (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth.

Allerton, D. J. (2005). Valency grammar. In K. Brown (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of

language and linguistics (pp. 4878–4886). Kidlington, UK: Elsevier Science.

Arnold, I. (1986). The English word. Moscow: Visshaya Shkola.

Austin, J. L. (1975). How to do things with words. (2nd ed.). London, UK: Clarendon Press.

Ayers, D. (1986). English words. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.

Barber, C. (1964). The story of speech and language. New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.

Baugh, A., & Cable, T. (1993). A history of the English language (4^th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice.

Bauer, L. (1983). English word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bauer, L. (2008). ‘Les composés exocentriques de l’anglais’ in Dany Amiot (ed.), La composition dans uneperspective typologique. Arras: Artois Presses Université, 35-47.

Bauer, L., & Nation, P. (1993). Word families. International Journal of Lexicography, 6(4), 253-279.

Blake, W. (1793). Two sunflowers move in the yellow room. Retrieved from http://www.portablepoetry.com/poems/william_blake/ah_sunflower.html

Bloomfield, L. (1935). Language. London: Allen & Unwin.

Boguslavsky, I., Cardeñosa, J., & Gallardo, C. (2009). A novel approach to creating disambiguated multilingual dictionaries. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete.

Burchfield, R. (1986). Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Cabré, M.T. (1992). Terminology: Theory, methods, and applications. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing.

Cowie, A.P. (2001). Phraseology: Theory, analysis, and application. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Crystal, D. (2003). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language (2^nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Denham, K., & Lobeck, A. (2011). Linguistics for everyone: An Introduction. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning

De Saussure, F. (1959). Course in general linguistics. (W. Baskin, Trans.). New York, NY: Philosophical Library.

Dictionary. (2002). Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia. Retrieved from Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia database.

Doroszewski, W. (1973). Elements of lexicology and semiotics. Mouton: Polish Scientific Publishers.

Elgin, S. (1979). What is linguistics? Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Encyclopedia. (2011). Columbia electronic encyclopedia (6th ed.). Retrieved from Academic Search Complete.

Firbas, J. (1992). Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Fries, C. C. (1957). The Structure of English: An introduction to the construction of English sentences. London, England: Longmans, Green.

Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., Hyams, N., & Hummel, K. (2010). An introduction to language (4th Canadian ed.). Toronto, ON: Nelson/Thompson.

Gardiner, A.H. (1922). The definition of the word and the sentence. The British Journal of Psychology, 12(4), 352-361. DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1922.tb00067.x

Ginzburg, R. S., Khidekel, S.S., Knyazeva, G.Y, Sankin, A.A. (1979). A course in modern English lexicology (2^nd Ed.). Moscow: Visshaya Shkola.

Glaser, R. (2001). The stylistic potential of phraseological units in the light of genre analysis. In A.P. Cowie (Ed.), Phraseology: Theory, analysis, and application (pp. 125-143). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Greenough, J., Kittredge, G. (1967). Folk etymology. In D. E. Hayden, E.P. Alworth, & G.Tate (Eds), Classics in Linguistics (pp.144-154). New York, NY: Philosophical Library.

Grondelaers, S., & Geeraerts, D. (2003). Towards a pragmatic model of cognitive onomasiology. In Cuyckens, H., Dirven, R., Taylor, J. (eds.). Cognitive approaches to cognitive semantics. Berlin, Germany, 67-92.

Halliday, M.A.K., Yallop, C. (2007). Lexicology: A short introduction. Great Britain: Cromwell Press.

Hendrickson, R. (2008). Word and phrase origins (4^th ed.). New York, NY: Checkmark Books.

Hobbs, J. (1999). Homophones and homographs (3^rd ed.). Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

Hurford, J., Heasley, B., Smith, M. (2007). Semantics (2^nd ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Introducing ‘tebowing.’ (2011). Retrieved from http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/shutdown_corner/post/Introducing-Tebowing-It-8217-s-like-planking-?urn=nfl-wp10549

Jackson, H. (1991). Words and their meaning. London, England: Longman.

Jackson, H., & Ze Amvela. (2007). Words, meaning, and vocabulary: An introduction to modern English lexicology (2^nd ed.). London, England: Continuum.

Jesperson, O. (1938). Growth and structure of the English Language. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

Kolln, M., Funk, R. (2012). Understanding English grammar (9^th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Longman.

Krapp, J. (1925). The English language in America (Vol.1). New York, NY: Frederick Ungar.

Кunin, А.V. (1972). English phraseology. Мoscow, RF.

Кunin, А.V. (1996). A course in English phraseology. Мoscow, RF.

Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lehman, C. (n.d.). Lexicography. Retrieved from http://www.christianlehmann.eu/ling/ling_meth/ling_description/lexicography/index.html

Leroy, M. (1967). Main trends in modern linguistics. (G. Price, Trans.). Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: California University Press.

Linsky, L. (Ed.). (1972). Semantics and the philosophy of language. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Lipka, L. (2002). English lexicology: Lexical structure, word semantics and word-formation. Tübingen, Germany: Narr.

The living Webster: Encyclopedic dictionary of the English language. (1977). Chicago, IL: The English Language Institute of America.

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: University Press.

Meillet A. (1926). Linguistique historique et linguistique generate. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honore Champion.

Menken, H. L. (1921). The American Language. New York, NY: Alfred A.Knopf.

Menner, R. (1936). The conflicts of homophones in English. Language, 12, 229-244.

Morehead, P. (Ed.). (1978). The New American Roget’s College Thesaurus. New York, NY: Signet

Murphy, M.L. (2006). Antonomy and incompatibility. In K. Allan, Concise encyclopedia of semantics (pp.25-28). Oxford, UK: Elsevier.

Murphy, M. L. (2003). Semantic relations and the lexicon. Cambridge, UK: University Press.

Murphy, P. (2011). The technical aspects of technicality. International Journal of Evidence and Proof, 15, 144-160. doi:10.1350/ijep.2011.15.2.374

Newmeyer, F. (1980). Linguistic theory in America. New York, NY: Academic Press.

Nist, A. (1966). A structural history of English. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

O’Grady, W., Archibald, J., Aronoff, M., & Rees-Miller, J. (2001). Contemporary linguistics (4^th ed.). New York, NY: St.Martin’s.

Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The measurement of meaning. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Palmer, F.R. (1990). Semantics (2^nd ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Parker, F., & Riley, K. (2010). Linguistics for non-linguists: A primer with exercises (5^th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Panati, C. (1984). The browser’s book of beginnings. Boston, MA: Houghton and Mifflin Co.

Pawley, A. (2001). Phraseology, linguistics and the dictionary. International Journal of Lexicography, 14(2), 122-134.

Pei, M. (1965). Invitation to linguistics. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company.

Pei, M. (1967). The story of the English language. Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company.

Perry, F. (2011). Research in applied linguistics (2^nd ed.). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.

Peters, R. (1968). A linguistic history of English. New York, NY: Houghton Mufflin.

Programming guide. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ace5hbzh.aspx

Pyles, T. (1971). The origins and development of the English language (2^nd ed.). Chicago, IL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Pyles, T., & Algeo, J. (1993). The origins and development of the English language (4^th ed.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers.

Read, A.W. (1948). An account of the word ‘semantics’. Word. The second American Congress on General Semantics. Chicago.

Rowe, B., & Levine, D. (2012). A concise introduction to linguistics (3^rd. ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Saeed, J. (2009). Semantics (3rd ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Sapir, E.  (1921). Language: An introduction to the study of speech.  New York, NY: Harcourt.

Schaefer, M., & Rotte, M. (2010). Combining a semantic differential with fMRI to investigate brands as cultural symbols. SCAN, 5, 274 – 281. doi:10.1093/scan/nsp055

Sheridan, R. (1775). The rivals. The Project Gutenberg. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24761

Some famous malapropisms. Retrieved from http://www.fun-with-words.com/mala_famous.html

Southworth, F., & Daswani, C.J. (1974). Foundations of linguistics. New York, NY: The Free Press (A Division of Macmillan Publishing).

Strang, B. (1970). A history of English. London, UK: Methuen.

Sweet, H. (1898). A new English grammar, logical and historical. Oxford, UK: The Clarendon Press.

Tserdanelis, G., Wong, W. (2004). Language files. Columbus: OH: The Ohio University Press.

Ullman, S. (1951). The principles of semantics. Glasgow, UK: Jackson, Son & Company.

Wilde, O. (1882). The Canterville ghost. Retrieved from http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/CanGho.shtml

Williams, J. (1975). Origins of the English language. New York, NY: The Free Press (A Division of Macmillan Publishing).

Words of the Year. American Dialect Society. Retrieved from http://www.americandialect.org/