Glossaries › Grammar and linguistics terms glossary

Grammar and linguistics terms glossary page 4

Grammar and linguistics terms explained in plain English. 1,075 words and meanings, most familiar first.

Word	Meaning
anacoluthon noun	A sentence or clause that is grammatically inconsistent, especially with respect to the type of clausal or phrasal complement for the initial clause.
analytic adjective	Of a language, having a grammar principally dependent on the arrangement of uninflected words within sentences to indicate meaning. Compare synthetic.
anamnesis noun	The mention of the past; quotation of exemplary authors from memory to establish one's authority.
anaphora noun	An expression that can refer to virtually any referent, the specific referent being defined by context.
antecedence noun	The relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent.
antecedent noun	A word, phrase or clause referred to by a pronoun.
anticlimax noun	An abrupt descent (either deliberate or unintentional) from the dignity of the idea which the speaker or writer appeared to be aiming for.
antistrophe noun	The repetition of words in an inverse order.
antithesis noun	A device by which two contrasting ideas are juxtaposed in parallel form; a figure of speech arranged in this manner
aorist noun	A verb paradigm found in certain languages, usually an unmarked form or one that expresses the perfective or aorist aspect.
apheresis noun	Elision, suppression, or complete loss of a letter or sound (syllable) from the beginning of a word, such as the development of special from especial; procope.
apical adjective	Produced with the tip of the tongue.
apocope noun	The loss or omission of the last vowel in a word, together with any consonants that follow it.
appellative adjective	Of or pertaining to an appellative noun or common noun.
applicative noun	A grammatical construct that casts a peripheral noun phrase as direct object.
apposition noun	A construction in which one noun or noun phrase is placed with another as an explanatory equivalent, both of them having the same syntactic function in the sentence.
appurtenance noun	A modifier that is appended or prepended to another word to coin a new word that expresses belonging.
articular adjective	Of or relating to the grammatical article.
articulation noun	The manner in which a phoneme is pronounced.
articulator noun	Any organ in the vocal tract used to articulate, produce speech.
ascensive adjective	Augmentative; intensive.
aspectual adjective	Of or pertaining to grammatical aspect.
aspirate noun	The puff of air accompanying the release of a plosive or fricative consonant.
aspirated adjective	Pronounced with an audible breath, a brief expulsion of air at the end of the sound.
atonal adjective	Not tonal, lacking tones.
atonic adjective	Not having tone (pitch)
attestation noun	An appearance in print or otherwise recorded on a permanent medium.
attested adjective	Of words or languages, proven to have existed by records.
attributive adjective	Modifying another word, typically a noun, while in the same phrase.
augmentative noun	A form of word that expresses large size, intensity, or seniority
aureate adjective	Of language: characterized by the use of (excessively) ornamental or grandiose terms, often of Latin or French origin.
aversive noun	A grammatical case indicating that something is avoided or feared; the evitative case.
barytone adjective	Not having an accent on the last syllable.
calque noun	A word or phrase in a language formed by word-for-word or morpheme-by-morpheme translation of a word in another language.
catachresis noun	A misapplication or overextension of figurative or analogical description; a wrongly applied metaphor or trope.
causal noun	A word (such as because) that expresses a reason or a cause
causative adjective	Expressing a cause or causation.
classifier noun	A word or morpheme used in some languages (such as Japanese and American Sign Language), in certain contexts (such as counting), to indicate the semantic class to which something belongs.
cognate adjective	Descended from the same source lexemes (same etymons) of an ancestor language.
coherence noun	A semantic relationship between different parts of the same text.
colligation noun	The co-occurrence of syntactic categories, usually within a sentence.
collocate verb	(said of certain words) To be often used together, form a collocation; for example strong collocates with tea.
colloquial adjective	Characteristic of familiar conversation, of common parlance; informal.
commutation noun	Substitution, as a means of discriminating between phonemes.
complementarity noun	A semantic relationship between two words wherein negative use of one entails the affirmative of the other with no gradability; the relation of binary antonyms.
complementation noun	The relationship of a phrase to its predicate
compositional adjective	Being the sum of its parts.
concomitant adjective	Of or relating to the grammatical aspect which expresses that a secondary action is occurring simultaneously to the primary action of the statement.
conjoin verb	To join as coordinate elements, often with a coordinating conjunction, such as coordinate clauses.
conjugate verb	To inflect (a verb) for each person, in order, for one or more tenses; to list or recite its principal parts.
conjugation noun	In some languages, one of several classifications of verbs according to what inflections they take.
conjunct noun	An adjunct that supplements a sentence with information, connecting the sentence with previous parts of the discourse. Not considered to be an essential part of the propositional content.
conjunctive adjective	Relating to a conjunction (part of speech).
connective noun	A word used to connect words, clauses and sentences, most commonly applied to conjunctions.
consonant noun	A sound that results from the passage of air through restrictions of the oral cavity; any sound that is not the dominant sound of a syllable, the dominant sound generally being a vowel.
construe verb	To analyze the grammatical structure of a clause or sentence; to parse.
continuant noun	A linguistic sound other than a stop.
continuative adjective	Durative.
copula noun	A word, usually a verb, used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (usually a subject complement or an adverbial), that unites or associates the subject with the predicate.
copulative adjective	That acts as a copula.
correlative noun	A pro-form; a non-personal pronominal, proadjectival, or proadverbial form
countable adjective	Freely usable with the indefinite article and with numbers, and therefore having a plural form.
counterfactual noun	A conditional statement in which the conditional clause is false.
creolize verb	To cause a pidgin language rapidly expanding in vocabulary and grammatical rules to become ultimately a creole.
curative adjective	Of a verb, conveying the meaning "the agent makes a patient do something"
cursive adjective	Of or relating to a grammatical aspect relating to an action that occurs in a straight line (in space or time).
dangler noun	A dangling participle.
dative adjective	Noting the case of a noun which expresses the remoter or indirect object, generally indicated in English by to or for with the objective.
declarative adjective	Expressing truth.
declension noun	The act of declining a word; the act of listing the inflections of a noun, pronoun or adjective in order.
decussate adjective	Consisting of two rising and two falling clauses, placed in alternate opposition to each other.
deictic adjective	Of or pertaining to deixis; to a word whose meaning is dependent on context.
demonstrative adjective	That specifies the thing or person referred to
demotic noun	Language as spoken or written by the common people.
deponent adjective	Having passive grammatical form (that is, conjugating like the passive voice), but an active meaning.

Word	Meaning
derivation noun	The act of tracing origin or descent.
descriptor noun	A word or expression used to describe or identify something.
determinative noun	An ideogram used to mark semantic categories of words in logographic scripts.
determiner noun	A member of a class of words functioning in a noun phrase to identify or distinguish a referent without describing or modifying it.
diaeresis noun	Distraction; the separation of a vowel, often a diphthong, into two distinct syllables.
digraph noun	A pair of letters, especially a pair representing a single phoneme.
disambiguate verb	To distinguish one word or lexical unit (from a different one which has a similar form).
disjunct noun	Any sentence element that is not fully integrated into the clausal structure of the sentence.
disjunctive adjective	Not used in immediate conjunction with the verb of which the pronoun is the subject.
distributive adjective	Expressing separation; denoting a taking singly, not collectively.
doublet noun	One of two or more different words in a language derived from the same etymological root but having different phonological forms (e.g., toucher and toquer in French or shade and shadow in English).
durative adjective	Of or pertaining to the aspect of a verb that expresses continuing action; continuative. Part of the imperfective aspect, as opposed to the perfective aspect, of verbs.
ejective noun	A nonpulmonic consonant formed by squeezing air trapped between the glottis and an articulator further forward, and releasing it suddenly.
elaborated adjective	Expanded
elide verb	To cut off, as a vowel or a syllable.
elision noun	The omission of a letter or syllable between two words or inside a word; sometimes marked with an apostrophe.
ellipse verb	To remove from a phrase a word which is grammatically needed, but which is clearly understood without having to be stated.
ellipsis noun	The omission of a word or phrase that can be inferred from the context.
emotive adjective	Expressing an emotion.
enate adjective	Having identical grammatical structure (but with elements that are semantically different).
enation noun	The property of being enate.
encomium noun	A general category of oratory.
epenthetic adjective	Of or pertaining to epenthesis.
epicene adjective	Of or relating to a class of Greek and Latin nouns that may refer to males or females but have a fixed grammatical gender (feminine, masculine, neuter, etc.).
epistemic adjective	Of or relating to how cognition or knowledge is expressed in language.
etymologize verb	To find or provide the etymology for a word.
etymology noun	The study of the historical development of languages, particularly as manifested in individual words.
etymon noun	The original or earlier form of an inherited or borrowed word, affix, or morpheme either from an earlier period in a language's development, from an ancestral language, or from a foreign language.
evidential noun	A syntactic element (affix, clitic, or particle) that indicates evidentiality.
excrescence noun	The epenthesis of a consonant, e.g., warmth as [ˈwɔrmpθ] (adding a [p] between [m] and [θ]), or -t (Etymology 2).
exhortative adjective	Inflected hortative verb form that a speaker uses to avidly encourage a listener.
expletive noun	A word without meaning added to fill a syntactic position.
exponent noun	A manifestation of a morphosyntactic property.
extender noun	A phrase that extends an expression to include further members of a set, e.g. "and stuff", "or something".
felicitous adjective	Of a sentence or utterance: semantically and pragmatically coherent; fitting in the context.
fluency noun	The quality of being fluent in a language; A person's command of a particular language.
formalism noun	A formal expression of a grammar; a formal grammar; a set of rules of syntax that, without reference to semantics, determine whether a sequence of symbols is a well-formed sentence in a given formal language.
fractional noun	An expression of a fractional number.
frequentative adjective	Serving to express repetition of an action.
fricative noun	Any of several sounds produced by air flowing through a constriction in the oral cavity and typically producing a sibilant, hissing, or buzzing quality; a fricative consonant.
gemination noun	The phenomenon of a consonant being pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than is normal; an instance of such lengthened pronunciation.
gendered adjective	Having grammatical gender.
genealogical adjective	Genetic (based on shared membership in a linguistic family).
genealogically adverb	Genetically (by being members of the same linguistic family).
genitive adjective	Of or pertaining to that case (as the second case of Latin and Greek nouns) which expresses a quality, origin or possession. It corresponds to the possessive case in English.
glottal adjective	Articulated with the glottis.
gnomic adjective	Expressing general truths or aphorisms.
gradable adjective	Able to occur in varying degrees; able to be inflected or modified to express degrees of meaning.
gradation noun	Apophony.
grapheme noun	In alphabetic writing, the shortest group of letters composing a phoneme.
grue adjective	A single color inclusive of both green and blue as different shades, used in translations from languages such as old Welsh and Chinese that lacked a distinction between green and blue.
headword noun	Any word which may be modified by an adjunct.
heteronym noun	A word having the same spelling as another, but a different pronunciation and meaning.
homologue noun	A phoneme, morpheme, or word shared by two languages or dialects, via cognation or naturalization.
homophonous adjective	Having the same pronunciation.
honorific noun	A word or word form expressing the speaker's respect for the hearer or the referent.
hortative adjective	Of a mood or class of imperative subjunctive moods of a verb for giving strong encouragement.
hypostasis noun	A relationship between a name and a known quantity, as a cultural personification (i.e. objectification with personality) of an entity or quality.
illative adjective	Of, or relating to the grammatical case that in some languages indicates motion towards or into something.
imbricate verb	To undergo or cause to undergo imbrication.
imbrication noun	A phenomenon occurring in many Bantu languages in which morphemes interweave in certain morphophonological conditions.
importation noun	The use of a term which consists of formally foreign elements.
inalienable adjective	Of or pertaining to a noun belonging to a special class in which the possessive construction differs from the norm, especially for particular familial relationships and body parts.
inceptive adjective	Aspectually inflected to show that the action is beginning.
inchoative adjective	Aspectually indicating that a state is about to be entered or is in the process of being entered.
incipient noun	A verb tense of the Hebrew language.
incorporation noun	A phenomenon by which a grammatical category forms a compound with its direct object or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function.
increment noun	A syllable in excess of the number of the nominative singular or the second-person singular present indicative.
infelicitous adjective	Of a sentence or utterance: not semantically and pragmatically coherent.
infinitive noun	The infinitive mood or mode (a grammatical mood).
infix verb	To insert a morpheme inside an existing word.
inflect verb	To vary the form of a word to express tense, gender, number, mood, etc.
inflected adjective	Changed in form to reflect function (referring to a word).
inflection noun	Change in the form of a word (morphologic change) to express different grammatical categories.
ingressive adjective	Uttered by drawing air inward through the mouth or nose.

Meanings from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0). Sources