Absolutive
Denotes both a case and a grammatical relation based on morphosyntactic behavior where the less agentive core argument of a transitive verb (the P) shares grammatical behavior with the single core argument of an intransitive verb (the S); opposed to ergative.
Abstraction
A shift in meaning from more concrete to more abstract, e.g., the English adverb besides was used earlier for concrete spatial location, but is now used with the more abstract meaning ‘in addition, moreover.’
Accent
The phonological characteristics of a speaker’s variety.
Accessible activation state
An idea that is not currently actively focused on in a discourse, but which has been mentioned earlier and/or is in the periphery of the addressee’s consciousness.
Accusative
A grammatical case that marks noun phrases that occur as objects of clauses.
Acoustic phonetics
The study of the physical characteristics of speech sounds, such as duration, frequency, and intensity.
Activation state
An assumption that a particular referent or idea is given, new, or accessible in the mind of the interlocutor.
Active (voice)
A construction in which the semantic agent of a transitive verb is the grammatical subject; contrasts with passive (voice).
Active articulator
An articulator which moves in the production of a sound; contrasts with passive articulator.
Adaptation
The replacement of a foreign phoneme in a loanword with the nearest phonetic equivalent in the native language.
Addressee
The person to whom an utterance is addressed (i.e., the person one is speaking to); sometimes referred to as “the hearer.”
Adjective
A word class whose members can occur either modifying a noun in a noun phrase or within a predicate; adjectives specify attributes of the referent of the associated noun.
Adposition
A word class that occurs with a noun phrase and that indicates the grammatical, spatial, temporal, or logical relationship of the noun phrase to another element of the clause; may be a preposition (which occurs before the noun) or a postposition (which occurs after the noun); adpositions are typically particles.
Adpositional phrase
A syntactic constituent headed by an adposition; includes prepositional phrases and postpositional phrases.
Adverb
A cover term for words that are not lexical nouns, verbs, or adjectives, but that still have lexical (as opposed to grammatical) content.
Adverbial clause
A dependent clause that is linked to a matrix clause by an adverbial conjunction or affix that specifies the semantic relationship between clauses, most commonly manner, time, location, quantity, condition, or cause.
Adverbial conjunction or affix
A free word or affix that specifies the semantic relationship between clauses, e.g., conditional (English if), causal (because), temporal (when).
Affective filter
The emotional component of an L2 learner’s conscious learning process, which involves how comfortable or uncomfortable he or she is when speaking an L2.
Affix
A morpheme attached to a root, e.g., the English plural -s.
Affricate
A sound produced by combining a stop with a following fricative in rapid succession.
African Diaspora
A term that refers to the movement of peoples within and outside of Africa to locations throughout the world and the commonalities and communities that resulted from these circumstances and experiences.
African-American English (AAE)
A variety of English spoken primarily by African-Americans; it is similar to other varieties of English but is its own linguistic system and contains a number of distinctive grammatical, phonological, and lexical features.
Agent
A semantic case role denoting the volitional instigator (the “do-er”) of an activity or event.
Agentivity
The degree of volition, control. or intention of an agent or potential agent.
Agglutinative
A morphological structure in which the boundaries between morphemes are clear-cut and generally encode a one-to-one morpheme-to-meaning ratio; contrasts with fusional.
Agreement
A type of inflection in which one word indexes semantic categories of another word.
Alignment patterns
Different grammatical relations based on whether the single core argument of an intransitive verb (also called the S) receives the same grammatical treatment (i.e., aligns with) the more agentive core argument of a transitive verb (the A) or the less agentive core argument of a transitive verb (the P). S/A versus P alignment is referred to as nominative-accusative alignment with the S/A defining subject and the P defining object; A versus S/P alignment is referred to as ergative-absolutive alignment with the A being the ergative and the S/P the absolutive.
Allomorph
A phonetic variant of a morpheme, often motivated by the same phonetic forces that govern the occurrence of allophones; allomorphs of the English plural suffix include /s/, /z/, and /ǝz/.
Allophone
Two or more sounds that occur predictably in mutually exclusive environments, i.e., in complementary distribution.
Alternation
Multiple forms of a phoneme, morpheme, syntactic construction, etc.
Alternation switching
Codeswitching that occurs between clauses.
Alveolar
A sound made by placing the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge.
Alveolar ridge
The hard ridge just behind the teeth before the upper surface of the mouth becomes more domed in shape.
Ambitransitive
A verb that can be used both transitively (with two core arguments) and intransitively (with a single core argument); e.g., English he tore his clothes, his clothes tore.
Analogical remodeling
In language change, the process of applying regular patterns to irregular forms, thus “repairing” or remodeling them by analogy, e.g., changing the plural of syllabus from syllabi to syllabuses by analogy with the regular English plural -s.
Analogy
A process by which speakers seek to repair perceived irregularities in their language; speakers remodel “exceptions” by analogy to other patterns.
Analytic
See isolating.
Anglicist hypothesis
A position on the origin of African-American English, suggesting that the variety developed from the acquisition of English by Africans and African-Americans.
Antepenultimate syllable
The third-to-last syllable of a word, the syllable preceding the penult; sometimes called the antepenult.
Antonyms
Broadly, two or more lexemes or other expressions with opposite meanings; narrowly, two or more lexemes that are gradable contraries, so denote opposite ends of a spectrum, such as short/tall (the relation among antonyms is called antonymy).
Applied linguistics
The field that considers how linguistics can be applied to situations in the world; includes language teaching, computational linguistics, forensic linguistics, language documentation, speech pathology, and speech and hearing sciences.
Approximant
A sound produced through a slight narrowing of the vocal tract, but not enough to cause noise or a complete obstruction.
Argument
A noun phrase holding a particular grammatical status in relation to a verb; can be core or oblique.
Articles
A small class of grammatical particles that obligatorily occur in some noun phrases in some languages; often index the definiteness (identifiability) of a noun, e.g., the and a(n) in English.
Articulatory effort
The degree of muscular effort required for the articulation of a particular sound.
Articulatory phonetics
The study of how the vocal organs produce speech.
Aspect
A grammatical category that signals the temporal consistency of an event or state, e.g., ongoing, completed, or habitual; often (but not always) marked on verbs or indicated by auxiliaries.
Aspiration
The puff of air created by a delay in the onset of voicing upon the release of a stop.
Assimilation
The process whereby one sound comes to share some phonetic property or cluster of properties with another sound in its environment; the most common type of phonological process; can involve voicing, nasalization, or point of articulation.
Associative plural
A grammatical category typically marked by an affix on personal names; most commonly it refers to two or more people associated with the person who is named; e.g., Nepali manoj-haru ‘Manoj and his group/kin/friends.’
Auditory phonetics
The study of perception of phonetic properties of speech by the auditory system.
Autoglossonym
(lit. “self-tongue-name”) the name by which speakers of a language refer to that language; for example, Deutsch is the autoglossonym of the language that English speakers call German, español is the autoglossonym for the language known in English as Spanish, and English is the autoglossonym for English.
Automaticity
The ability to process (linguistic) input and output quickly, unconsciously, and effortlessly, i.e., automatically, without having to think about each word or step in the process.
Autonym
See endonym.
Auxiliary verbs
A small subclass of verbs with fixed positions and abstract meanings; typically appear along with or instead of a main verb.
Back-formation
A word-formation process based on an analogy in which the structural interpretation of one word is applied to a different word; frequently involves applying a morpheme boundary to a word that did not originally contain one, e.g., ham-burger from original Hamburg.
Backness
A parameter for describing vowel sounds based on how far back the raised part of the tongue is during articulation; one of three main dimensions for describing vowels; may be front, back, or central.
Behaviorism
A theory from psychology suggesting that if an L2 learner hears a stimulus in an L2 and repeats the word or sentence enough times, it will become a habit and can then be used to communicate successfully.
Beneficiary
A semantic case role denoting an entity who benefits from an action.
Bidialectal
Able to speak two dialects or varieties of a particular language.
Bidialectalism
The ability to speak two dialects (also multidialectalism for two or more dialects).
Bilabial
Sound that involves a narrowing or complete closure of the upper and lower lip.
Bilingual
A person who speaks two different languages or a society where primarily two languages are spoken; contrasts with monolingual and multilingual.
Borrowing
The incorporation of a word or grammatical element from one language into another.
Bound morpheme
A morpheme that cannot stand on its own as a word, e.g., English un-.
Broad phonetic transcription
A level of phonetic transcription where detailed nuance (such as nasalization of vowels before nasal consonants) is not transcribed; contrasts with narrow transcription.
Calque
A word or expression created via morpheme-by-morpheme translation from a source language.
Case
The morphological marking of the syntactic and (in some cases) semantic relations that hold between the noun phrases and the verb of a sentence.
Causative
A construction type that typically increases by one the number of core arguments in a clause; in a causative clause an agent typically causes a patient to perform some action; also used to refer to an affix that adds the meaning ‘cause’ or ‘make,’ e.g., the English en- of en-able.
Central
A sound produced so that air flows through the center of the mouth rather than over the sides of the tongue; contrasts with lateral.
Child-Directed Speech (CDS)
A special register with distinctive linguistic properties that is used in certain societies for addressing very young children.
CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System)
An online system of resources on language acquisition, including an archive of children’s speech from various languages, programs for data analysis, and instructional materials.
Circumfix
An affix that surrounds the root, with one part before it and another after it; circumfixes add meanings beyond those of the components.
Citation form
The common, “dictionary” form of a word, with little or no inflection.
Classifier
A word class whose members serve to classify a noun by shape, animacy, function and/or other criteria.
Clause
A syntactic unit typically consisting of a verb (in some languages within a verb phrase), its noun phrase arguments, and adverbial elements (usually adverbs and adpositional phrases).
Clause chain
A syntactic construction made up of one or more non-final clauses followed by a final clause; verbs in non-final clauses are marked by special suffixes, sometimes indicating switch reference.
Climax
The culmination of a narrative plot, typically at the end of a narrative; something unusual or unexpected which makes the narrative worth listening to and telling.
Clitic
A morpheme which is phonologically bound but which is able to combine with a broader range of stems than an affix; clitics frequently are not restricted to attaching to words from a single lexical class and have semantic scope over phrases as opposed to words; an enclitic is bound to the end of a word while a proclitic is bound to the beginning of a word.
Closed syllable
A syllable that ends in a consonant.
Closed word class
A word class, whose members are often small in number, which is resistant to new members.
Co-articulation
An articulatory overlap between sounds in actual speech so that speech organs are preparing to produce the next sound while still producing the first.
Co-construction
The process by which a linguistic unit, such as an utterance, conversation, or narrative, is produced by more than one person.
Coda
A consonant or consonant cluster that follows the nucleus within the syllable.
Coded content
The meanings conventionally associated with a linguistic form; contrasts with utterance meaning.
Codeswitching
The use of two or more languages in the same interaction or utterance, while conforming to the phonological and grammatical system of each language.
Cognates
Words in genealogically related languages that are descended from the same word in a common parent language, e.g., Breton dek, Irish déich, Latvian desmit, Czech deset, Greek deka, Farsi dah, Hindi das, Dutch tien, Frisian tsien, Norwegian ti, Icelandic tíu, and English ten.
Cognition
The mental processes that take in information from the environment, use it to form mental representations, and apply this stored knowledge in activities such as learning, thinking, speaking, and remembering.
Cognitive linguistics
The study of how language is related to how humans learn and process information.
Collocations
Pairs of words that are frequently used together, and may be learned, processed, and produced as a chunk, e.g., light lunch, pretty much, right now, etc.
Communicative competence
The knowledge of grammatical rules as well as the ability to use them in culturally appropriate ways; includes grammatical and sociolinguisitic competence.
Community of practice
A social group that jointly engages in culturally meaningful activities and often develops distinctive ways of speaking.
Comparative
An adjective, adverb, or similar morpheme that compares one thing to another; for example, the -er suffix in an elephant is bigger than a mouse, or the word more in she has more money now; see also: superlative.
Comparative method
A procedure by which sounds, morphemes, and vocabulary of an earlier language can be reconstructed by comparing forms in the daughter languages.
Complement clauses
Dependent clauses that function as noun-phrase arguments of verbs.
Complementary antonyms (aka complemetaries)
A pair of expressions that make systematically and absolutely opposite contributions to the meaning of an expressed proposition: e.g., on/off, once/never, real/imaginary; can neither both be true nor both be false at any time; one is always true, and the other false.
Complementary distribution
In phonology, a distributional pattern that occurs when two phonetically similar sounds do not occur in the same phonetic environment; indicates that the two sounds are allophones of a single phoneme.
Complex predicate
Two or more words that act as a single predicate of a single clause; the clause has only one set of arguments.
Complex sentence
A sentence with more than one clause.
Complicating action
A sequence of events in a narrative which are told after the introduction and which lead to the climax.
Compositional semantics
The study of how the meanings of complex expressions are built up from, or otherwise related to, the senses of their individual parts; also see lexical semantics.
Compositionality (principle of)
The idea that the meaning of a complex expression should be a regular function of the meanings of its parts.
Compound
A word composed of two roots, stems, or words.
Computational linguistics
The study of language and computers; includes speech recognition (computers recognizing human speech) and speech synthesis (computers producing speech).
Conceptual metaphor
A figure of thought that allows one complex frame to be conceptualized in terms of another frame; e.g., UP is GOOD (the evaluative frame associated with good is conceptualized in terms of the spatial frame associated with up).
Concordance
An index of all the words in a corpus along with their immediate linguistic contexts and some information about the frequency and location of each.
Conditioned sound change
A sound change that occurs only in certain environments, for example, Old English k has been lost in present-day English, but only at the beginning of words before n, as in knight or knuckle.
Conjunctions
A class of words, typically particles, which conjoin two or more words, phrases, or clauses at the same level of structure.
Connotation
Any effect or association arising from the use of a meaningful expression, aside from its reference; contrasts with an expression’s denotation, that is, its effects on reference.
Consonant cluster
A group of two or three consonant sounds with no intervening vowels; also called a consonant blend.
Consonant harmony
A type of assimilation in which one consonant is produced with the same place or manner of articulation as a nearby consonant; see vowel harmony.
Constituency test
An argument used to prove that a particular combination of words constitutes a syntactic constituent; common constituency tests include cohesiveness, replacement by a pronoun, fixed ordering of elements, and agreement.
Constituent
A subpart of a higher unit.