retroflex

en-adj

retroflex (comparative more retroflex, superlative most retroflex)

more retroflex (comparative)
most retroflex (superlative)

From Latin rētrōflexus, the perfect participle of rētrōflectō (“bend, turn”), from flectō (“bend, turn”).

apiko-postalveolar

of pronunciation in which the tongue tip approaches/touches the back of the alveolar ridge

lamino-postalveolar

of pronunciation in which the tongue blade approaches/touches the back of the alveolar ridge

(phonetics) Of pronunciation in which the tip of the tongue is raised and bent backwards, so that the underside of the tongue approaches or touches the palate.

subapiko-palatal

of pronunciation in which the tongue underside approaches/touches the palate

subapical palatal

of pronunciation with the tongue underside

(phonetics) Of pronunciation in which the tip of the tongue approaches or touches the back of the alveolar ridge.

(phonetics) Of pronunciation in which the blade of the tongue approaches or touches the back of the alveolar ridge.


retroflex

spółgłoska apikalna zadziąsłowa

consonant pronounced with the tongue tip approaching/touching the back of the alveolar ridge

spółgłoska laminalna zadziąsłowa

consonant pronounced with the tongue blade approaching/touching the back of the alveolar ridge

(phonetics) A consonant pronounced with the underside of the tongue approaching or touching the palate.

spółgłoska subapikalno-prepalatalna

consonant pronounced with the tongue underside approaching/touching the palate

(phonetics) A consonant pronounced with the tip of the tongue approaching or touching the back of the alveolar ridge.

(phonetics) A consonant pronounced with the blade of the tongue approaching or touching the back of the alveolar ridge.


cocktail party effect

en-noun

cocktail party effect (plural cocktail party effects)

Suggesting a party where many groups of people are talking at the same time.

The ability (or the difficulty) of focusing one's attention on a single auditory source in a jumble of noises.


pada

There were quatrains and broken verses and entire poems. There were padas that she had started and scratched out.

1997, Kiran Nagarkar, Cuckold, HarperCollins, published 2013, page 79:

(Sanskrit prosody) The basic metric unit of Vedic poetry, consisting of one line of verse in Sanskrit, typically as part of a four-line stanza.


VSO

(linguistics) Initialism of verb-subject-object. A language is VSO if a typical sentence starts with a verb, followed by the subject, followed by the object.


lene

Anglicisation of Latin lēnis. Doublet of lenis.

(phonetics) The smooth breathing (spiritus lenis).

When in a crasis, a lene consonant […] is combined with an aspirated vowel, the lene is always changed (except in the Ionic dialect) into the corresponding aspirate […]

(phonetics) A voiceless, or unaspirated, stopped consonant, such as Greek pi, kappa, or tau.


pin-pen merger

Before we get to those, however, let us consider how we might discover a vowel merger taking place (and most work in this area has been on vowel merger or on conditioned vowel mergers, such as the pin–pen merger in the US south or the pool–pull merger in Utah, discussed below).

2011, Scott F. Kiesling, Linguistic Variation and Change, page 141:

(phonology) A phonemic merger where the vowels in "pin" and "pen" are pronounced the same before /n/ and /m/, making "pin" and "pen" homonyms.


autoglossonym

/ˌɔː.təʊˈɡlɒ.sə.nɪm/

"Nederlands" is the autoglossonym of Dutch.

The name of a language in that specific language.


OOV

Rather, the n-grams are calculated as usual only for the most common k words, and all other words are regarded as Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) items and mapped to a single token such as .

1991, Christopher D. Manning, Hinrich Schütze, Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, →ISBN, page 199:

computational linguistics
computational linguistics

(computational linguistics) Initialism of out of vocabulary: describing a term encountered in the input which is not present in a system's dictionary or database of known terms.


past perfect

A tense which describes actions that occurred before another action or event in the past; the pluperfect or the past anterior tense.


a.

(linguistics, by extension) Abbreviation of transitive.

Abbreviation of active.
Abbreviation of transitive.


genealogically

German and Danish are genealogically related.

(linguistics) Genetically (by being members of the same linguistic family).


cinquain

A five-line poetic form which consists of 2, 4, 6, 8 then 2 syllables.

(education) A five-line poetic form set as a writing exercise for children, consisting of one noun, two adjectives, three actions, four feeling words, and the initial noun again.


holonym

meronym

antonym(s) of “term that denotes a whole”

The word "face" is a holonym of the word "eye", which is a holonym of the word "retina".

(semantics) A term that denotes a whole, a part of which is denoted by a second term.


meronym

LL-Q1860 (eng)-I learned some phrases-meronym.wav

From mero- + -onym, from Ancient Greek μέρος (méros, “part”) + ὄνυμα (ónuma, “name”).

The word "leaf" is a meronym of the word "tree".

If one starts with some complex whole, like {automobile} or {human_body}, it can be broken down into several levels of meronyms, but many of those meronyms will also be meronyms of other wholes. That is to say, some components serve as parts of many different things: think of all the different mechanisms that have gears.

1998, George A. Miller, “Nouns in WordNet”, in Christiane Fellbaum, editor, Wordnet: An Electronic Lexical Database, MIT Press, →ISBN, page 38:

(semantics) A term used to denote a thing that is a part of something else.

metonym

but be aware that some metonyms derive from meronyms; for example, wheels/automobile, jet/jet airplane, head/cow


gingival

/ˈd͡ʒɪnd͡ʒɪvəl/


vt

(grammar) verb transitive or transitive verb (often in dictionaries)


Kangxi

From the Hanyu Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin 康熙 (Kāngxī).

According to Kangxi, this word has two kinds of pronunciation.

1992, O. Harrassowitz, Central Asiatic Journal, volume 36, page 189:

[He wrote] Textual Criticism of Kangxi Zidian, 1827[,] in which he identified more than 2500 erroneous citations in Kangxi.

2003, Lexicography: Reference works across time, space and languages, →ISBN:

The Kangxi Dictionary, a dictionary and cross reference of Chinese characters, first published in 1716 at the behest of the Kangxi emperor, and used to the present day.


phrasal

en-adj

phrasal (comparative more phrasal, superlative most phrasal)

more phrasal (comparative)
most phrasal (superlative)

phrasal preposition

(grammar) Consisting of multiple words, but behaving as a single part of speech.


phrasal

Furthermore, children demonstrated that they understood the mapping by elaborating phrasals to sententials, and reducing sententials to phrasals when imitating.

1985, Dan Isaac Slobin, The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, page 105:

(grammar) A grammatical construct that consists of multiple words, but behaves as a single part of speech.


jer

(linguistics) Ultra-short or reduced vowel in Proto- and Late Common Slavonic (or Slavic), then represented as ъ (back jer [ŭ]) or ь (front jer [ĭ]).


pronominal adverb

en-noun

pronominal adverb (plural pronominal adverbs)

(grammar) An adverb which contains a pronominal element; generally such an adverb replaces a phrase of preposition + pronoun.


qualifier

(grammar) A word or phrase, such as an adjective or adverb, that describes or characterizes another word or phrase, such as a noun or verb; a modifier; that adds or subtracts attributes to another.


iterative

noniterative

antonym(s) of “involving repetition of steps”

/ˈɪtəˌɹeɪtɪv/

[ˈɪɾ.(ə.)ɹə.ɾɪv]

/ˈɪtəˌɹeɪtɪv/

[ˈɪɾ.əˌɹeɪ.tɪv]

[ˈɪɾ.əˌɹeɪ.ɾɪv]

[ˈɪɾ.(ə.)ɹə.ɾɪv]

(grammar) Expressive of an action that is repeated with frequency.


iterative

/ˈɪtəˌɹeɪtɪv/

[ˈɪɾ.(ə.)ɹə.ɾɪv]

/ˈɪtəˌɹeɪtɪv/

[ˈɪɾ.əˌɹeɪ.tɪv]

[ˈɪɾ.əˌɹeɪ.ɾɪv]

[ˈɪɾ.(ə.)ɹə.ɾɪv]

(grammar) A verb showing the iterative aspect.


double negative

double negative (plural double negatives)

Nuh-nuh-doin'-duh... Nuh-nuh-doin'-duh... We don't need no education...
Yes, you do. You've just used a double negative.

2006 Feb. 17, Graham Linehan, The IT Crowd, Season 1, Episode 4

(rhetoric, usually derogatory) A phrase including two negative words (no, not, never, etc.) especially when used as intensifiers in informal English.

dvojitý zápor

phrase in which there are two negative words


backshift

backshift (countable and uncountable, plural backshifts)

(grammar) The changing of the tense of a verb from present to past in reported speech.


backshift

en-verb

backshift (third-person singular simple present backshifts, present participle backshifting, simple past and past participle backshifted)

backshifts (present singular third-person)
backshifting (participle present)
backshifted (participle past)
backshifted (past)

(grammar, transitive) To change the tense of a verb from present to past in reported speech.


syntagma

en-noun

syntagma (plural syntagmata or syntagmas)

From Late Latin syntagma, from Ancient Greek σύνταγμα (súntagma, “orderly arrangement”), from συντάσσω (suntássō, “arrange together”, “to order”).

uder

The syntagma “the God of peace” (in Greek ὁ Θεὸς τῆς εἰρήνης) occurs in all undisputed Pauline letters.

(linguistics) A constituent segment within a text, such as a word or a phrase that forms a syntactic unit.

To combine a sequence of shots into a larger syntagma, there has to be a connection between the successive shots.

The Gospel is not a system of Theology, nor a Syntagma of theoretical propositions and conclusions for the enlargement of speculative knowledge, ethical or metaphysical.

1825, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Aphorisms on that which is indeed spiritual religion”, in Aids to Reflection, page 198:

(semiotics) An arrangement of units that together bears a meaning.


reported speech

If we were to change "Fred says, 'I will do the housework'" into reported speech it would become "Fred said that he would do the housework."

(grammar, narratology) A form of speech used to express what another has said, often involving a change in tense.

ситләтелгән телмәр

a form of speech used to express what another has said


barytone

en-adj

barytone (comparative more barytone, superlative most barytone)

more barytone (comparative)
most barytone (superlative)

From Latin barytonos, from Ancient Greek βαρύτονος (barútonos, “not oxytone”). Doublet of baritone and baryton.

der

(linguistics) Not having an accent on the last syllable.

(linguistics) Of or pertaining to a word not having an accent on the last syllable.


barytone

(linguistics) A word that is not accented on the ultimate syllable.

(linguistics) A word that is accented on the penultimate syllable.


Darkinjung

No. 4 represents the country occupied by the tribes speaking the Darkinung, Wannerawa, Warrimee, Wannungine, Dharrook and some other dialects.

1898, R. H. Mathews, “Initiation in Australian Tribes”, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge, volume 37:

The Darkiñung speaking people adjoined the Kamilaroi on the south-east and occupied a considerable range of country in the counties of Hunter, Northumberland and Cook, extending from Wilberforce and Wiseman’s Ferry on the Hawkesbury river, to Jerry’s Plains and Singleton on the Hunter, and including the basins of the Colo and Macdonald rivers, Wollombi Brook and other streams.

1903, R. H. Mathews, “Languages of the Kamilaroi and other Aboriginal tribes of New South Wales”, in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, volume 33:

Aboriginal languages spoken in the settled areas of the Cumberland Plain, which lies to the east of the Blue Mountains in the immediate vicinity of Syndey, included speakers of Dharuk, Iyora, Guringgai, Dharawal, Gundungura, Darkinyung and Awabakal.

1996, Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication in the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas:

Four languages are recognised as being spoken across the study area at contact: Darginyung, Guringai, Dharuk and Dharawal.

Old materials on O1, Dharuk, give 1du as ŋala or ŋalu and there is no explanation for the final vowel (note, though, that ŋali is found in the closely related language O2, Darkinjung).

2002, R. M. W. Dixon, Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development:

(linguistics) The extinct language of the people of that region.


hysterokinetic

/ˌhɪstəɹəʊkɪˈnɛtɪk/

The PIE word for ‘father’ was hysterokinetic: nominative singular *ph₂-tér-s, genitive *ph₂-tr-és.

(linguistics) Of Indo-European nouns, characterised by having an accent on the suffix in strong cases, which shifts to the ending in weak cases.


diaphone

From dia- + phone (i.e., dia(lect) + phone).

(phonology) A particular dialectal variant of a phoneme; all the dialectal variants of a phoneme, considered as a whole.


causative

From French causatif, from Latin causātīvus (“causative, pertaining to a lawsuit, accusative”), from causa (“to cause”); see cause (verb) and -ive.

պատճառական

linguistics: expressing cause or causation

The ablative is a causative case.

(linguistics) Expressing a cause or causation.


causative

(linguistics) An expression of an agent causing or forcing a patient to perform an action (or to be in a certain condition).


æ-tensing

(phonology) a process that occurs almost ubiquitously in North American English in which the phoneme /æ/ is raised and lengthened or diphthongized in certain or all environments.


bad-lad split

(phonology) a phonemic split of the phoneme /æ/ into a short /æ/ and a long /æː/, as heard in some varieties of British and Australian English, in which "bad" is pronounced /bæːd/ and "lad" is pronounced /læd/


trap-bath split

/ˈtɹæp ˈbɑːθ ˌsplɪt/

(linguistics) a vowel split in some varieties of English (such as British English as spoken in southern England, American English spoken in Boston, and Australian, New Zealand and South African English) in which the phoneme /æ/, as pronounced in other varieties of English, is pronounced in some words as /ɑː/.


nationism

en-noun

nationism (countable and uncountable, plural nationisms)

From nation + -ism, by Joshua Fishman, 1968.

In determining language policies, Fishman contends that a country needs to balance the concerns of nationalism (the feelings that develop from a sense of group identity) and nationism (the practical concerns of governing).

1992, Sandra McKay, Teaching English Overseas: an Introduction, page 9:

For these nations language was a prior criterion of national identity, in the sense of ‘nationalism’, and only later became and issue at the level of ‘nation’, once these societies had made the transition from nationalism to nationism.

2002, Tim Ingold, Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, page 544:

Instead of this, the dominant role of language in nation-building in many states, at least in the early post-independence era, has been […] pragmatic nationism rather than aggressive nationalism.

2008, Andrew Simpson, Language and National Identity in Africa, page 22:

(sociolinguistics) The practical concerns of running a nation, especially seen as divorced from emotional beliefs about national identity.


hyperbaton

hyperbaton (plural hyperbatons or hyperbata)

George Lucas
Lawrence Kasdan
pity this busy monster, manunkind

Borrowed from Latin hyperbaton, itself a borrowing from Ancient Greek ὑπερβατόν (huperbatón, “overstepping”), from ὑπερβαίνω (huperbaínō), from ὑπέρ (hupér) + βαίνω (baínō, “walk”).

der

In real life we often see a man under the influence of rage, or fear, […] begin a sentence, and then swerve aside into some inconsequent parenthesis, and then again double back to his original statement […]Now the figure hyperbaton is the means which is employed by the best writers to imitate these signs of natural emotion.

c. 100, Longinus, chapter XXII, in H. L. Havell, transl., On the Sublime, published 1890:

(grammar) An inversion of the usual or logical order of words or phrases, for emphasis or poetic effect.


complementizer

"That" is a complementizer in the sentence "Mary believes that it is raining".

However, what is of particular interest to us here is the fact that the presence of the Complementiser whether in (37) (b) above excludes the possibility of having an inverted Auxiliary in pre-subject position, as we see from the ungrammaticality of (38) below:
 (38) *John wondered whether would he get a degree
 Why should this be? The answer we propose here is that this is because both Complementisers and inverted Auxiliaries occupy the pre-subject C position: hence, when (as in (38) above) the C position is already filled by the Complementiser whether, inversion of the Auxiliary is not possible, on the assumption that once a given position is filled by one constituent, it cannot be filled by another (i.e. we can only have one constituent occupying any given position).

1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 6, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 299:

subordinating conjunction
subordinating conjunction

(linguistics) A subordinating conjunction that can convert a clause into a complement clause, i.e. one that completes a grammatical construction in the predicate and that describes or is identified with the subject or object.


keyword

(linguistics) Any word that occurs in a text more often than normal.


ethic dative

(grammar) Alternative form of ethical dative


implosive

LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-implosive.wav

(phonetics) An implosive sound; an implodent.


SOV

(linguistics) Initialism of subject-object-verb: a language is SOV if a typical sentence has a subject, followed by the object, followed by the verb.


loc

en-noun

loc (countable and uncountable, plural locs)

software engineering
software engineering

(software engineering, translation studies) Clipping of localization.


diathesis

diathesis (countable and uncountable, plural diatheses)

/daɪˈæθəsɪs/

Borrowed from New Latin diathesis, from Ancient Greek διάθεσις (diáthesis, “state, condition”), from διατίθημι (diatíthēmi, “to arrange”).


projective

Formed by the suffixation of prōiect- (the perfect passive participial stem of the Classical Latin prōiciō, whence the English verb project) with the English -ive, forming project + -ive; however, compare the post-Classical Latin prōiectīvus (“relating to purging”).

cog

There was no basis for expecting differences in the frequency of projectives or turnabouts as a function of partner.

1995, Keith E. Nelson, Zita Reger, Children's Language - Volume 8, →ISBN:

The volitive moods (also called volitives, volitional forms, modals, or projectives) are the imperative, jussive, and cohortative.

2007, Ronald James Williams, John C. Beckman, Williams' Hebrew Syntax, →ISBN, page 78:

This implies they contain more information than projectives. For if language is a code, then every element of that code – here, every word, every form of a word – would register a distinct semantic ingredient.

2012, Jean Curthoys, Victor Dudman, Victor Dudman's Grammar and Semantics, →ISBN, page 74:

(linguistics) A statement about a conditional or potential state of affairs, as opposed to one about a situation that actually exists or existed.


Singlish

(Singapore, linguistics) A highly colloquial or basilectal variety of Singapore English incorporating much Hokkien and Malay lexis.


Singlish

Blend of Sinhala + English, or, Sri Lanka + English

(Sri Lanka, linguistics) Any of various varieties of English spoken in Sri Lanka.


psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain: i.e., the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, comprehend, produce and use language.

Psycholinguistics began with attempts to test the empirical validity of various formal linguistic concepts.

1975, [Lawrence Erlbaum], Sam Glucksberg, Joseph H. Danks, Experimental Psycholinguistics: An Introduction, Psychology Press, published 2014, page xi:

2006, Nobuhiro Furuyama, 44: Language and gesture as a single communicative system, Mineharu Nakayama, Reiko Mazuka, Yasuhiro Shirai, Ping Li (editors), The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics, Volume 2: Japanese, Cambridge University Press, page 333,
Speech-gesture research is one of the emerging fields in psycholinguistics that, by referring to speech-accompanying gestures, attempts to elucidate the underlying process in which qualitatively different types of thinking, e.g. imagistic thinking and linguistic thinking, become coordinated with one another.

The seeds for work on processing have their roots in early L2 research, but the psycholinguistics of SLA didn't really take off until the 1990s.

2014, Jill Jegerski, Bill VanPatten, Research Methods in Second Language Psycholinguistics, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), page ix:

(linguistics) The interdisciplinary field of study which concerns the acquisition, comprehension and production of language in its spoken, written and signed forms, using concepts and approaches from linguistics, psychology and cognitive science.

psixolinqvistika

field of study concerning the comprehension and production of language


vogue word

(linguistics) A neologism that gains sudden popularity but is forgotten after a relatively short time.


heteronomous

en-adj

heteronomous (comparative more heteronomous, superlative most heteronomous)

more heteronomous (comparative)
most heteronomous (superlative)

/ˌhɛtəˈɹɒnəməs/

(linguistics, of a language) Being a dialect of an autonomous language.


fronting

en-noun

fronting (countable and uncountable, plural frontings)

(phonetics, phonology) A process whereby a vowel or a consonant is pronounced farther to the front of the vocal tract than some reference point.

(phonology) A phonological relationship where a front vowel is found in place of a relative back vowel in an inflected form of a word.

(linguistics) An analogous relationship between the vowel sounds in a dialect of a language relative to the language standard or an earlier form of the language.


contour

Borrowed from French contour, from contourner, equivalent to con- + tour.

(linguistics) a speech sound which behaves as a single segment, but which makes an internal transition from one quality, place, or manner to another.


distributive

en-adj

distributive (comparative more distributive, superlative most distributive)

more distributive (comparative)
most distributive (superlative)

a distributive adjective or pronoun, such as "each", "either", or "every"

a distributive numeral, such as Latin "bini" (two by two)

(grammar) Expressing separation; denoting a taking singly, not collectively.


distributive

(grammar) A distributive adjective or pronoun.


Bungu

(linguistics) An African language of the Niger-Congo language family.


conative

From Latin conatio (“an act of attempting”).

The conative, as opposed to the cognitive or affective, relates to purposeful, but not necessarily ultimately rational, action.

(grammar) An utterance that implies striving.


coordinator

→ Japanese: コーディネーター (kōdinētā)

(grammar) A member of a lexical class of words that joins two or more items (such as words, phrases, or clauses) of equal syntactic importance.

conjunción coordinante

lexical class of words — see also coordinating conjunction


intransitively

The verb 'die' is used intransitively.

(grammar) In an intransitive manner; without an object following.


mutually intelligible

This language, or mutually intelligible forms of it, is spoken by the coast-dwellers over an extensive area

1860, Alfred R. Wallace, Notes of a Voyage to New Guinea, in Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Vol. 30

Another important point is that Homer recognises that the speech of Trojans and Greeks was mutually intelligible.

1917, F. W. H. Migeod, The Racial Elements Concerned in the First Siege of Troy, in Man, Vol. 17

(linguistics) Of two or more speech varieties, able to be understood by one another's speakers.

互通

of a speech variety, able to be understood by speakers of another variety


placename

With a complex site, different site elements may not be terminologically distinguished, or else a generic term may be optionally added to the placename to distinguish a site element, such as a hill, well, or claypan at the location.

2012, Nick Thieberger, The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork, page 401:

The name of a place; a word or phrase which indicates a particular location or region.


tag question

(grammar) A question inviting the listener to indicate agreement, formed by adding a “tag” word or expression to a statement. For example “You love me, don’t you?”.


mother-in-law style

(linguistics, anthropology) The style of speech and manners which are to be observed between an Australian aboriginal man and his mother-in-law (i.e. wife's mother). Depending on the particular people, this can go so as far as an entirely separate vocabulary of words.


zoic

zoic (comparative more zoic, superlative most zoic)

more zoic (comparative)
most zoic (superlative)

Borrowed from Ancient Greek ζωϊκός (zōïkós), from ζῷον (zôion, “animal”).


parallelism

en-noun

parallelism (countable and uncountable, plural parallelisms)

From parallel + -ism and from Late Latin parallelismus.

(rhetoric, grammar) The juxtaposition of two or more identical or equivalent syntactic constructions, especially those expressing the same sentiment with slight modifications, introduced for rhetorical effect.


middle voice

(grammar) A voice that is neither active nor passive, because the subject of the verb cannot be unambiguously categorized as either agent or patient, having elements of both.


apologetic apostrophe

apologetic apostrophe (plural apologetic apostrophes)

While not all agreements were carried out as planned, what this attempt at consistency achieved in Smith's case was to give his poetry the appearance of a distinctive literary language, related to English, but having its own identity and forms, and without the distraction for the reader of the apologetic apostrophes.

2009, Margery Palmer McCulloch, Scottish Modernism and Its Contexts 1918-1959:

(sociolinguistics, orthography) An apostrophe added to a Scots word in order to give the appearance that it is a contraction of an English word.


NHG

(linguistics) Initialism of New High German.


optative

From Middle French optatif, from Late Latin optātīvus, a calque of Ancient Greek εὐκτική (euktikḗ, “related to wishing”), from Latin optātus, past participle of optāre.

cog

(grammar) Related or pertaining to the optative mood.


optative

(grammar) A mood of verbs found in some languages (e.g. Sanskrit, Old Prussian, and Ancient Greek, but not English), used to express a wish.

(grammar) A verb or expression in the optative mood.


Italianization

/ɪˌtæljənəˈzeɪʃən/

(linguistics) The process of adapting lexical elements from a foreign language to the Italian linguistic system.


restrictive

From Middle French restrictif.
Morphologically restrict + -ive.

[…] a couple of further differences between restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses: (1) in contrast with restrictives, the wh-phrase in non-restrictives cannot be ellipted; […]

2013, Noel Burton-Roberts, Analysing Sentences, page 210:

(grammar) A clause that narrows the meaning of a noun or noun phrase.


nobiliary particle

en-noun

nobiliary particle (plural nobiliary particles)

(grammar) A preposition found in names, indicating nobility.


borrowing

borrowing (countable and uncountable, plural borrowings)

(linguistics) A borrowed word, adopted from a foreign language; loanword.


metathesize

en-verb

metathesize (third-person singular simple present metathesizes, present participle metathesizing, simple past and past participle metathesized)

metathesizes (present singular third-person)
metathesizing (participle present)
metathesized (participle past)
metathesized (past)

Cases like mu·yh : mu·hyut may be accounted for under a rule that clusters of h plus sonorant metathesize in word-final position.

1939, Morris Swadesh & C. F. Voegelin, A Problem in Phonological Alternation, in Language, Vol. 15, No. 1

The significance of noticing the existence of this adjective tharf by the side of the metathesized form thraf is of course apparent

1888, James W. Bright, Thraf-Caik, in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 3, No. 3

If the first of two identical consonants in sequence is postconsonantal and the second intervocalic, metathesize the first with the following vowel (geminate roots only).

1962, Gene M. Schramm, An Outline of Classical Arabic Verb Structure, in Language, Vol. 38, No. 4

(linguistics) To undergo or to subject to metathesis; of sounds, to switch positions in a word.


volitional

en-adj

volitional (comparative more volitional, superlative most volitional)

more volitional (comparative)
most volitional (superlative)

/vɒˈlɪʃənəl/

[vɒˈlɪʃn̩l̩]

(grammar, not comparable, of an inflectional class or inflected form) Expressing intention, hortation, supposition, or inclusive invitation.


adverbial participle

en-noun

adverbial participle (plural adverbial participles)

(grammar) A participle that modifies a verb in the same sentence and is equivalent to an adverbial clause in English. Adverbial participles may denote time, condition, cause, concession, manner, means, purpose, or attendant circumstance.


exaptation

exaptation (countable and uncountable, plural exaptations)

Elisabeth Vrba
Stephen Jay Gould
exaptation

Blend of ex- + adaptation. Coined 1982 by palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba to avoid the perceived teleological baggage of the existing term preadaptation.

The process Haiman focuses on is exaptation, which he defines as "the promotion of meaningless or redundant material so that it does new grammatical (morphosyntactic or phonological) or semantic work" (p52).

2017, Eric Haeberli, Review of Ledgeway & Roberts (eds.) (2017), Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, Journal of Historical Syntax, Volume 3, Article 4, 2019, PDF edition page 2

(linguistics, by extension) The promotion of meaningless or redundant material so that it does new grammatical (morphosyntactic or phonological) or semantic work.


misconstruction

misconstruction (countable and uncountable, plural misconstructions)


Sumerian

/səˈmɪə.ɹɪ.ən/

(linguistics) The ancient language spoken in Sumer, a language isolate.


Monic

(linguistics) Belonging to the branch of the Austroasiatic language family that includes the Mon language.


morphemics

(linguistics) The study of morphemes, or of the morphemic structure of a language.


morphemic

(linguistics) Of or relating to morphemics or to a morpheme.

morphémique

of or relating to morphemics or to a morpheme


polarity

polarity (countable and uncountable, plural polarities)

polaritat

chemistry: dipole-dipole intermolecular force

(grammar) The grammatical category of the affirmative and the negative. ᵂᵖ


LFG

lexical functional grammar
w:lexical functional grammar

(linguistics) Initialism of lexical functional grammar.


crasis

crasis (countable and uncountable, plural crases)

From Ancient Greek κρᾶσις (krâsis, “mixture”).

uder

When in a crasis, a lene consonant […] is combined with an aspirated vowel, the lene is always changed (except in the Ionic dialect) into the corresponding aspirate […]

(linguistics) External vowel sandhi; contraction of a vowel or diphthong at the end of a word with a vowel or diphthong at the start of the following word.

krasis

contraction of a vowel at the end of a word with the start of the next word


REST

w:Generative grammar#Revised extended standard theory (1973–1976)

(linguistics) Acronym of Revised Extended Standard Theory.


unpack

en-verb

unpack (third-person singular simple present unpacks, present participle unpacking, simple past and past participle unpacked)

unpacks (present singular third-person)
unpacking (participle present)
unpacked (participle past)
unpacked (past)

From Middle English unpakken, equivalent to un- + pack. Compare Saterland Frisian uutpakje (“to unpack”), West Frisian útpakke (“to unpack”), Dutch uitpakken (“to unpack”), German auspacken (“to unpack”).

cog

The rounded vowels [y] and [œ/ə] in Russian seem to unpack as glide-vowel sequences in words borrowed from French and German, […]

2000, Language, volume 76, numbers 1-2, page 337:

Whereas the high vowels /ʏ, y/ unpack, the mid vowels /œ, ø/ are adapted as single segments in these languages (see examples in (36) for Vietnamese (Barker 1969) and (37) for Fon (Gbeto 2000)). […]
French /y/ → Vietnamese /wi/
accu [a'ky] → ac-quy [ak kwi]

2008, Katrin Dohlus, The Role of Phonology and Phonetics in Loanword Adaptation, page 73:

The objective of these corpora was to check whether vowels other than nasal vowels systematically unpack in L1s that do not allow them.

2011, John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, Alan C. L. Yu, editors, The Handbook of Phonological Theory:

(linguistics, intransitive, of a segment such as a vowel) To undergo separation of its features into distinct segments.


participial

From Latin participiālis, from participium (“participle”).

(grammar) of, relating to, or being a participle


double possessive

en-noun

double possessive (plural double possessives)

(grammar) Two or more consecutive nouns in the possessive case, as with "St. Paul's Cathedral's vergers"; discouraged on grounds of style.


singulare tantum

singulare tantum (plural singularia tantum)

From Latin singulāre tantum (“singular as such; singular only”), from singulāre + tantum.

bor

(grammar) A noun (in any specific sense) that has no plural form and is only used with singular verbs. Frequently for mass nouns.

singulatiivi

grammar, noun having the singular form only

mxolobit ricxvši mdgomi arsebiti saxelebi

მხოლობით რიცხვში მდგომი არსებითი სახელები


abjad

From Arabic أبجد (ʔabjad), the term for the traditional ordering of the Arabic script (from the first four letters: أ (ʔ), ب (b), ج (j), د (d)). Compare English ABC and alphabet.
Linguistics sense coined by Peter T. Daniels.

consonantary

writing system with a glyph for each consonant

Languages that use abjads include Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu. Abjads differ from syllabaries (such as the Japanese hiragana) in that the vowel quality of each letter is left unspecified, and must be inferred from context and grammar.

(linguistics) Any writing system in which glyphs are used to represent consonants or consonantal phonemes, but not vowels.


free state

From free + state, probably a calque of German Freistaat.

indeterminate state
indeterminate state#English

determinate state
determinate state#English

(grammar) A noun form in Afroasiatic languages contrasting with the construct state by the noun not being dependent (more commonly called absolute state, or indeterminate state if the specific language contrasts a determinate state with the construct state).


isolating

en-adj

isolating (comparative more isolating, superlative most isolating)

more isolating (comparative)
most isolating (superlative)

(linguistics, of languages) having low morpheme per word ratio and no inflectional morphemes


signified

Here things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open, and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifiers and signifieds.

2001, Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections:

In Peircean terms, topics are interpretants: signifieds that become new signifiers in the endless semiotic chain of interpretations.

2012, Esti Sheinberg, Music Semiotics, page 9:

(linguistics, semiotics, philosophy) The concept, object or person that is referred to by a sign or signifier.


metrical foot

(prosody) The basic unit of the underlying rhythm of verse.


ergative

From Ancient Greek ἐργᾰ́της (ergátēs, “labourer, worker”) + English -ive (suffix meaning ‘belong or relating to; of the nature of; serving to; tending to’ forming adjectives).

der

The case systems of ergative languages are counter-intuitive to speakers of Indo-European languages.

The most common situation is for nouns to inflect according to a nominative-ergative pattern, while pronouns at least superficially follow a nominative-accusative pattern. That is, nouns have a single case (nominative) marking intransitive subject and transitive object functions, and another case (ergative) for transitive subject function.

1972, R[obert] M[alcolm] W[ard] Dixon, “Australian Languages”, in The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics; 9), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: University Press, →ISBN, page 4:

For Podopa, the actor of most transitive verbs (and of some intransitive verbs as well) may occur with or without the ergative case suffix, but with a semantic difference. The ergative suffix indicates that the actor is acting independently, is self-motivated, and exerts his personal control over the situation; while its lack indicates that the actor is performing according to his set social obligations, not according to his own independent will, and does not assert his personal control over the situation.

1986, William A[uguste] Foley, “Nominals”, in The Papuan Languages of New Guinea (Cambridge Language Surveys), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, published 1999, →ISBN, page 108:

The ergative case marks the agent of a transitive verb. The ergative suffix is -le/-re/-lle/-ʔille. The form of the ergative suffix is /-le/ for the indefinite and /-ʔille/ for the definite after the consonants /ʔ/, /k/, /t/, /p/, /b/, /ŋ/, /n/ and /m/.

1987, George van Driem, “Nominal Morphology”, in A Grammar of Limbu (Mouton Grammar Library; 4), Berlin, New York, N.Y.: Mouton de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 39:

In Section 1 I will discuss the existence of a class of ergative adjectives in Dutch[…]. It will be demonstrated that there are a number of arguments supporting the claim that the class of adjectives should be divided into ergative and unergative adjectives. A large number of adjectives that are unergative according to the tests provided in Section 2 appear to be ergative with respect to their argument structure.

2000, Hans Bennis, “Adjectives and Argument Structure”, in Peter Coopmans, Martin Everaert, Jane Grimshaw, editors, Lexical Specification and Insertion (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory; 197), Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Pa.: John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, →ISSN, pages 27–28:

Another difference between C. Barwar and Kurdish is the fact that in C. Barwar the compound perfect construction is not ergative. […] In Kurdish, on the other hand, the corresponding compound construction, which appears to have been the model for the NENA [North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic] construction, is ergative in form when the verb is transitive. The loss of the ergative inflection in C. Barwar and most other NENA dialects is again a development internal to NENA. The original ergative type of construction has survived only in a few Jewish dialects on the eastern periphery.

2008, Geoffrey Khan, “Introduction”, in HdO: The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Barwar (Handbook of Oriental Studies; Section 1 (The Near and Middle East); 96), volume 1 (Grammar), Leiden, Boston, Mass.: Brill, →ISBN, →ISSN, page 22:

(grammar) With the subject of a transitive construction having grammatical cases or thematic relations different from those of an intransitive construction.

ergatief

with the subjects of transitive constructions having grammatical cases or thematic relations different from those of from intransitive constructions


ergative

Samoan, for example, differs from the usual pattern displayed by split ergative languages in that the appearance of the ergative is grounded in sociolinguistic factors as well as syntactic ones. The more formal register of Samoan requires the ergative on all postverbal transitive subjects. The less formal register allows the ergative not to be expressed at all.

2006, Miriam Butt, “The Ergative Dragon”, in Theories of Case (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 178:

(grammar) Ellipsis of ergative case (“a grammatical case used to indicate the agent of a transitive verb in ergative-absolutive languages”).

ergative case

Unlike those with subjectivized ergatives, such locative clauses naturally do not allow for imperatives (*Contain the apples).

1971, John M[athieson] Anderson, “Locative”, in The Grammar of Case: Towards a Localistic Theory (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics; 4), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, published 1976, →ISBN, part III (Locative and Ablative), page 90:

Woodbury (1975) does argue, however, that absolutives are more relativisable in Greenlandic than are ergatives, on the grounds that (1) RCs [Relative Clauses] formed on ergatives are somewhat more restricted in the distribution in matrix clauses (p. 21) than are those formed on absolutives, and (2) for certain verb classes ergatives cannot be relativised out of the active participle (p. 27).

1987, Edward L. Keenan, Bernard Comrie, “Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar”, in Edward L. Keenan, Universal Grammar: 15 Essays (Croom Helm Linguistics Series), Beckenham, Kent, North Ryde, N.S.W.: Croom Helm, →ISBN, part 1 (Cross Language Variation), page 26:

Ergatives share close similarities with agentless passives: Both are intransitive, both lack an agent, while the patient appears in the subject position. As the acquisition data show, learners seem to treat ergatives like passives.

1994, Virginia Yip, “Grammatical Consciousness-raising and Learnability”, in Terence Odlin, editor, Perspectives on Pedagogical Grammar (Cambridge Applied Linguistics), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 128:

Combining two ergatives in one clause is not always ungrammatical in Agul; but one of the ergatives must be used in a non-agentive function, e.g. instrumental or temporal.

2012, Michael A. Daniel, Timur A. Maisak, Solmaz R. Merdanova, “Causatives in Agul”, in Pirkko Suihkonen, Bernard Comrie, Valery D. Solovyev, editors, Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations: A Crosslinguistic Typology (Studies in Language Companion Series; 126), Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Pa.: John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, →ISSN, page 66:

(grammar) An ergative verb or other expression.


simple future

(grammar) Describing the tense which describes a future action. In English this uses forms of will, shall or be going to.


amphibrach

From Latin amphibrachys, from Ancient Greek ἀμφίβραχυς (amphíbrakhus, “short at both ends”), from ἀμφί (amphí) + βραχύς (brakhús, “short”).

uder

(prosody) A metrical foot in ancient Greek or Latin consisting of two short syllables surrounding one long one (e.g. amāta).

Then Banoffsky launched into Glinka's great amphibrachs [...]: Subside, agitation of passion!

1969, Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor, Penguin 2011, page 322:

(prosody) A metrical foot in modern prosody, consisting of three syllables, the middle one of which is stressed (e.g. Jamaica).


footed

en-adj

footed (comparative more footed, superlative most footed)

more footed (comparative)
most footed (superlative)

From Middle English foted, i-foted, equivalent to foot + -ed.

2003, Tony K. Stewart, Introduction to Rabindranath Tagore, The Lover of God, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, p. 12,
As for the strict forms in which the original poems were written, it seemed an empty exercise to force English into those particular strictures, which in Bengali literary tradition are richly associative but which in English are not. The familiar fourteen-syllable payār couplet with its aa bb cc rhymes and the more intricate three-footed tripadi of variable length and rhyme were the first casualties of the process.

each six-footed line of the verse

(prosody, usually in combination) Consisting of, or having been put into, metrical feet (of a specified character or number).


moon letter

Calque of Arabic حَرْف قَمَرِيّ (ḥarf qamariyy).

calque

حَرْف قَمَرِيّ

القُرْآن القرآن#Arabic

(linguistics) One of fourteen Arabic letters that do not affect the pronunciation of the "L" of a preceding definite article (ال- (al--)). The "L" in the Arabic definite article is pronounced "L" when followed by a moon letter: e.g., القُرْآن (al-qurʔān). The fourteen moon letters are: ء (ʔ), ب (b), ج (j), ح (ḥ), خ (ḵ), ع (ʕ), غ (ḡ), ف (f), ق (q), ك (k), م (m), ه (h), و (w), ي (y)


sun letter

Calque of Arabic حَرْف شَمْسِيّ (ḥarf šamsiyy).

حَرْف شَمْسِيّ

الصِّين الصين#Arabic

(linguistics) One of fourteen Arabic letters that cause the "L" of a preceding definite article اَل (al-) to be assimilated in pronunciation. The sun letter suppresses the sound of the "L" and then geminates: al + ṣīn = aṣ-ṣīn. The effect of the sun letter is limited to pronunciation and does not affect the spelling, except that a shadda may be written over the sun letter and in the fully vocalised spelling lām lacks any diacritics: الصِّين (aṣ-ṣīn). The fourteen sun letters are ت (t), ث (ṯ), د (d), ذ (ḏ), ر (r), ز (z), س (s), ش (š), ص (ṣ), ض (ḍ), ط (ṭ), ظ (ẓ), ل (l), ن (n). Phonetically, they represent coronal consonants.


running speech

(linguistics) The continuous sound of spoken dialogue from which the listener is able to distinguish individual words and sentences.


verbal communication

(linguistics) The process of sending and receiving messages with words, including writing and sign language.


intension

From Latin intēnsiō (“straining, effort; intensifying”), from intēnsus (“stretched”), perfect passive participle of intendō (“strain or stretch toward”).

uder

This law is, that the intension of our knowledge is in the inverse ratio of its extension.

1859–1860, William Hamilton, edited by H[enry] L[ongueville] Mansel and John Veitch, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC:

(logic, semantics) Any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase or other symbol, contrasted with actual instances in the real world to which the term applies.


endocentric

The noun "houseboat" is endocentric because "boat" is also a noun.

(grammar, of a phrase or compound word) fulfilling the same grammatical role as one of its constituents.


prevocalic

The word "an" is the prevocalic form of the word "a".

(phonetics) Immediately preceding a vowel or vowel sound


ă

(lexicography) A dictionary transcription for the TRAP vowel


enjambed

(grammar, of two syntactic units) continued without a pause


naturalize

en-verb

naturalize (third-person singular simple present naturalizes, present participle naturalizing, simple past and past participle naturalized)

naturalizes (present singular third-person)
naturalizing (participle present)
naturalized (participle past)
naturalized (past)

/ˈnæt͡ʃəɹəˌlaɪz/

/ˈnæt͡ʃɹəˌlaɪz/

From Middle French naturaliser. By surface analysis, natural + -ize.

In English, foreign words are typically written in italics until they are naturalized.

English speakers have naturalized the French word "café".

English orthography often (but not invariably) drops the diacritics from words that it has naturalized from other languages.

(linguistics, transitive) To make (a word) a natural part of the language, using the native homologue of each phoneme (and often for each morpheme) of the imported word (e.g., native inflections).

заимствам

linguistics: to make a natural part of a language


relativize

relativize (third-person singular simple present relativizes, present participle relativizing, simple past and past participle relativized)

relativizes (present singular third-person)
relativizing (participle present)
relativized (participle past)
relativized (past)

to relativize indirect objects


anarthrous

From an- + arthrous, from Ancient Greek ἄρθρον (árthron, “joint; grammatical article”).

uder

We have concluded that Paul does not distinguish between the arthrous and anarthrous use of nomos.

1989, Brice L. Martin, Christ and the Law in Paul, Brill Archive, →ISBN, page 68:

Proper names are usually anarthrous (since they need no article to be definite), except in cases of anaphora

2009, Daniel B. Wallace, Granville Sharp's Canon and Its Kin: Semantics and Significance, →ISBN, page 252:

(linguistics) Not having an article (especially of Greek nouns).

Nouns indicating status often appear in anarthrous noun phrases, ie, as bare nouns.

Meigret (1888), treats French P-D contractions as simple prepositions governing anarthrous objects. Associating determiners with NP, Abeillé et al. consider the determinerless objects to be instances of N'.

2007, Michael T. Wescoat, “Preposition-determiner contractions: an analysis in optimality-theoretic lexical-functional grammar with lexical sharing”, in Proceedings of LFG07, retrieved 2013-10-10:


mussitation

en-noun

mussitation (countable and uncountable, plural mussitations)

Learned borrowing from Latin mussitātiō (“soft noise made by dogs, or (Late Latin) people”) + English -ion (suffix denoting a condition or state). Mussitātiō is derived from mussitātus (“kept quiet; having been kept quiet; murmured, muttered; having been muttered”) (see further at mussitate) + -iō (suffix forming abstract nouns from verbs).

lbor

The mussitation of the crowd dropped instantly.

1989, Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel:

(chiefly archaic or obsolete) Speech conducted in a hushed manner, akin to a murmur or a whisper.


verbalize

en-verb

verbalize (third-person singular simple present verbalizes, present participle verbalizing, simple past and past participle verbalized)

verbalizes (present singular third-person)
verbalizing (participle present)
verbalized (participle past)
verbalized (past)

/ˈvəːbəlʌɪz/

Partly from Middle French verbaliser and partly from verbal + -ize.

(transitive, grammar) To adapt (a word of another part of speech) as a verb.


snowclone

Blend of snow cone + clone, after the popular idea that the Inuit have a large number of words for different types of snow; coined by Glen Whitman in response to Geoffrey Pullum on the blog Language Log.

"To fry or not to fry" is a snowclone of the famous quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "To be or not to be".

I stumbled upon the site the other day, when I was looking up the origins of the "Im not an X, but I play one on TV" snowclone.

2005 November 5, auuV, “Some articles that I like. They are about language,”, in alt.running.out.of.newsgroup.names (Usenet):

Suddenly snowclone hunters were documenting media usages suggesting that, in space, no one can hear you belch, bitch, blog, speak, squeak or suck.

2005 December 3, David Rowan, “"Snowclone" journalism”, Trendsurfing, in The Times, archived from the original on 2006-09-06:

Regular readers learned there first about snowclones, the basic building blocks of cliches, like "X is the new Y" or "you don't need a degree in A to do B."

2006 June 20, Michael Erard, “Analyzing Eggcorns and Snowclones, and Challenging Strunk and White”, in The New York Times, page F4:

If so, you're being snowed under by snowclones — a category of fill-in-the-blank cliché identified by linguists.

2006 July, Mark Peters, “Not Your Father's Cliché”, in Columbia Journalism Review, volume 45, number 2, page 14:

2006 Nov 18, unknown author, "Snowclone", in New Scientist 192(2578), page 80

When you read phrases like these in a newspaper, you've stumbled across a particular type of cliché: the snowclone.

(grammar, linguistics) A type of cliché which uses an old idiom formulaically placed in a new context.


eggcorn

Suggested by British-American linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum following a discussion on the Language Log website on September 23, 2003, by American linguist Mark Liberman, about a woman who had long believed the word acorn to be egg corn.

coin

update (9/30/2003): Geoff Pullum suggests that if no suitable term already exists for cases like this, we should call them "egg corns", in the metonymic tradition of "mondegreen", since the eponymous solution of "malapropism" and "spoonerism" is not appropriate.

2003 September 30, Mark Liberman, “Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???”, in Language Log, archived from the original on 2016-03-25:

The Language Loggers have argued that it's useful to distinguish eggcorns from classic malapropisms (e.g., "allegory" for "alligator", "oracular" for "vernacular", "fortuitous" for "fortunate"), in which a word is replaced by one with a vague similarity of sound. An eggcorn relies on a substitution that is phonologically very similar (even homophonous), and the result is one that is semantically justifiable (even if the justification is far-fetched).

2005, Ben[jamin] Zimmer, “Eggcorn Database”, in alt.usage.english (Usenet):

What is also required of eggcorns is phonetic closeness -- they should do better than "electrocution" for "elocution" or "allegory" for "alligator". This is something they have in common with mondegreens, but the similarity ends there. Mondegreens are errors of perception, not of production, and they are related to specific auditory material: […]

2005 November 5, Chris Waigl, “The Eggcornin' Bob Dylan”, in alt.usage.english (Usenet):

Far from being simple goofs, an eggcorn provides a glimpse into everyday thought processes. Eggcorns do not signify ignorance but rather the opposite, […]

2006 March 1, Mark Peters, “Word watch: The eggcorn: A funny little poem and symptom of human intelligence and creativity”, in Psychology Today, archived from the original on 2016-05-24:

An eggcorn is a term that is misunderstood and mangled, like ‘give up the goat’ or ‘hone in on’.

2006 October, Kerry Webb, “Lost? Misquoted? We want better communication!”, in inCite, volume 27, number 10, Australian Library and Information Association, archived from the original on 2016-04-04:

Our report of a relative who, as a child, thought the classic version of the Lord's Prayer began "Our father, a chart in heaven, Harold be thy name" stated that this type of mistake is known as an eggcorn. A number of readers have suggested that instances like this in which a whole phrase rather than just a word is misheard, should be called mondegreens rather than eggcorns.

2006 November 18, “Feedback”, in New Scientist, archived from the original on 2016-05-24, page 218:

[M]ost eggcorns remain individual idiosyncrasies […] But something like "pus jewel" (for "pustule") — which is an eggcorn […]

2007, Michael Erard, Um ...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books, →ISBN, page 211:

(linguistics) A word or phrase that sounds like and is mistakenly used in a seemingly logical or plausible way for another word or phrase either on its own or as part of a set expression


vehicular

vehicular language

English is used as a vehicular language in many business settings.

Latin was a vehicular language for natural philosophers and others from the late Renaissance to the late 18th century.

(linguistics, of a language) That is used between two groups who do not share a common native tongue nor a common culture.


monometer

(poetry) A line of verse containing a single metrical foot.


feng

(linguistics) The Latin-script letter ʩ, used to transcribe a voiceless velopharyngeal fricative in the context of disordered speech.


substandard

en-adj

substandard (comparative more substandard, superlative most substandard)

more substandard (comparative)
most substandard (superlative)

(linguistics, dated) Not conforming to the standard variety; nonstandard.


ameliorative

ameliorative (comparative more ameliorative, superlative most ameliorative)

more ameliorative (comparative)
most ameliorative (superlative)

[…]personal nicknames can generally be divided into positively marked (ameliorative) ones, usually given by family members and friends as a sign of affection and acceptance, and those negatively marked (pejorative or derogatory), whose aim is to mock or ridicule a person[…]

2016, Olga Panić Kavgić, “Linguistic Creativity at Work: Nicknames of Women Tennis Players”, in English Studies Today, archived from the original on 2018-08-20:

(linguistics) Suggesting or relating to a positive or approving evaluation.


ameliorative

Moreover, diminutives, augmentatives, pejoratives and amelioratives have always been analysed as independent categories, neglecting the possible interrelations among them.

2015, Nicola Grandi, Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology, page 4:

(linguistics, rare) A linguistic unit (such as a word, morpheme) that implies a positive or approving evaluation.


relational

relational (comparative more relational, superlative most relational)

more relational (comparative)
most relational (superlative)

From relation + -al. The database sense is from the definition of relation as a set of ordered tuples.

relational adjective
relational adjective

(linguistics) Pertaining to a relational adjective, i.e. an adjective that relates what it modifies to a noun rather than qualifying it.

роднински

concerning the way in which two or more people or things are connected


deixis

en-noun

deixis (countable and uncountable, plural deixes)

From Ancient Greek δεῖξις (deîxis, “pointing, indicating, reference”), from δείκνυμι (deíknumi, “I show”).

der

Deixis allows for economy of speech but introduces ambiguity when that speech is recorded.

Deixis is a technical term (from Greek) for one of the most basic things we do with utterances. It means 'pointing' via language. Any linguistic form used to accomplish this 'pointing' is called a deictic expression. When you notice a strange object and ask, 'What's that?', you are using a deictic expression ('that') to indicate something in the immediate context. Deictic expressions are also sometimes called indexicals. They are among the first forms to be spoken by very young children and […]

1996, George Yule, Pragmatics, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 9:

For those who treat language as a generative system for objectively describing the world, deixis is a big black fly in the ointment. Deixis introduces subjective, attentional, intentional and, of course, context-dependent properties into natural languages.

2006, Stephen C. Levinson, "Dexis", chapter 5 of The Handbook of Pragmatics, Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell, page 97

(linguistics) The use of a word, such as a pronoun, to refer to something that must be identified from the wider context; a word used in such a way.


superordinate

en-adj

superordinate (comparative more superordinate, superlative most superordinate)

more superordinate (comparative)
most superordinate (superlative)

subordinate

antonym(s) of “lower in rank or position”

(linguistics, of a word or phrase) hypernymic


functionalism

en-noun

functionalism (countable and uncountable, plural functionalisms)

/ˈfʌŋkʃənəlɪzəm/

functional linguistics
functional linguistics#English

(linguistics) Synonym of functional linguistics


elliptic

From Ancient Greek ἐλλειπτικός (elleiptikós), from ἐλλείπω (elleípō, “I leave out, omit”). By surface analysis, ellipse + -tic.

The message, which is elliptic, could be spelled out as: (Hello) Olive. This is Julian. I am here until you want to ring me.

2007, Karin Aijmer, “Idiomaticity in a cultural and activity type perspective: The conventionalization of routine phrases in answering-machine messages”, in Phraseology and Culture in English, page 331:

(linguistics) Of, or showing ellipsis; having a word or words omitted; elliptical.


privative

en-adj

privative (comparative more privative, superlative most privative)

more privative (comparative)
most privative (superlative)

(grammar) indicating the absence of something


reciprocal pronoun

en-noun

reciprocal pronoun (plural reciprocal pronouns)

The English reciprocal pronouns are each other and one another.

(grammar) A pronoun referring to an antecedent in the plural, and expressing a mutual relation.


copular

a copular verb

(grammar) Being or relating to a copula.


vocalization

vocalization (countable and uncountable, plural vocalizations)

vowelization

supplying vowels/diacritics to Arabic and Hebrew words/texts

(orthography, phonology) The addition of these diacritics and the respective phonemes to a word; the spoken form the word thereby receives.

(phonology) The change in pronunciation of historically or variably consonant (typically sonorant) sounds as vowels. For example, the syllabic /l/ in words like people or the coda one in words like cold or coal are variably realized as a high back vowel or glide—[ʊ], [u], [ɤ] or [o]—in many dialects of English in the US, UK, and the Southern Hemisphere. For example, in African American Vernacular English, one common pronunciation of the words "people", "cold", and "coal" is [pʰipʊ], [kʰoɤd], or [kʰoɤ] respectively.

magánhangzósítás

phonology: the change in pronunciation of historically or variably consonant (typically sonorant) sounds as vowels


asper

From Middle English aspre, from Old French aspre (modern French âpre), from Latin asper (“rough”).

(phonetics, obsolete) Rough breathing; a mark (#) indicating that part of a word is aspirated, or pronounced with h before it.


nasalize

en-verb

nasalize (third-person singular simple present nasalizes, present participle nasalizing, simple past and past participle nasalized)

nasalizes (present singular third-person)
nasalizing (participle present)
nasalized (participle past)
nasalized (past)

(phonetics) To lower the soft palate so that air flows through the nose during the articulation of a speech sound.

nasaliser

allow air to flow through the nose during the articulation of a speech sound


nasalization

en-noun

nasalization (countable and uncountable, plural nasalizations)

(phonetics, uncountable) the articulation of a vowel or continuant consonant in such a way that air flows through the nose at the same time as it flows through the mouth

غُنَّة

articulation such that air flows through the nose and mouth


scansion

scansion (countable and uncountable, plural scansions)

From Late Latin scansiōnem, accusative singular of scansiō (“the act of climbing”), from scandō (“I climb”).

The act of analysing the meter of poetry.


constate

en-verb

constate (third-person singular simple present constates, present participle constating, simple past and past participle constated)

constates (present singular third-person)
constating (participle present)
constated (participle past)
constated (past)

(linguistics) To relay information in a statement and say whether it is true or false.


hybridism

en-noun

hybridism (countable and uncountable, plural hybridisms)

(linguistics) The formation of a hybrid, a word from elements of different languages.


iambus

Borrowed from Latin iambus (“a certain poetic meter”), from Ancient Greek ἴαμβος (íambos).


nested

The "Terms" number is the total number of words and lexical phrases, including sub-headwords and other nested lexical items, but exclusive of variants.

2012, James Lambert, “Beyond Hobson-Jobson: A new lexicography for Indian English”, in World Englishes, page 297:

(lexicography) (Of a lexical item) contained within a dictionary entry as a subordinate term of the main headword.


segment

From Latin segmentum (“a piece cut off, a strip, segment of the earth, a strip of tinsel”), from secāre (“to cut”).

der

(phonology) A discrete unit of speech: a consonant or a vowel.


Proto-Japonic

From proto- + Japonic; compare Proto-Indo-European, etc.

(linguistics) The hypothetical ancestral language of both modern Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages.

proto-japonique

the hypothetical ancestral language of both modern Japanese and the Ryukyuan languages


Proto-Japonic

mentu is a Proto-Japonic word that means water.

(linguistics) Of or relating to the Proto-Japonic language.


occlusive

(phonetics) A phoneme produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract, but not necessarily in the nasal tract.


substantivise

en-verb

substantivise (third-person singular simple present substantivises, present participle substantivising, simple past and past participle substantivised)

substantivises (present singular third-person)
substantivising (participle present)
substantivised (participle past)
substantivised (past)

From substantive (noun and adjective) + -ise.

(grammar) To use as or convert into a substantive (noun).


amphiboly

en-noun

amphiboly (countable and uncountable, plural amphibolies)

From Old French amphibolie, from Latin amphibolia, from Ancient Greek ἀμφιβολία (amphibolía, “ambiguity”).

der

1781, Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason," from John Meiklejohn 1855 translation
Without this reflection I should make a very unsafe use of these conceptions, and construct pretended synthetical propositions which critical reason cannot acknowledge and which are based solely upon a transcendental amphiboly, that is, upon a substitution of an object of pure understanding for a phenomenon.

By logical errors I mean such simple things as Equivocation, Amphiboly, and Begging the Question.

1931, Adrian Coates, “Philosophy as Criticism and Point of View,”, in Philosophy, volume 6, number 23, page 339:

The language might be fraught with word ambiguity or sentence amphiboly.

1987, Jeffrey Buechner, “Radically Misinterpreting Radical Interpretation,”, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, volume 45, number 4, page 410:

(grammar) An ambiguous grammatical construction.


antonymy

en-noun

antonymy (countable and uncountable, plural antonymies)

(semantics) The semantic relation between antonyms; the quality of being antonymous.


Wanderwort

Wanderwort (plural Wanderwörter or Wanderworte or Wanderworts)

Wanderwörter (plural)
Wanderworte (plural)
Wanderworts (plural)

Borrowed from German Wanderwort, from wandern (“to wander”) + Wort (“word”). Wandern is ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European *wendʰ- (“to turn, to wind”), and Wort from Proto-Indo-European *werh₁- (“to say, speak”). The plural forms Wanderworte and Wanderwörter are also borrowed from German Wanderworte and Wanderwörter.

der

Mrs. [Agnes Smith] Lewis has correctly observed that many corrections in the old papyri (things which no doubt the διορωτής corrected) were misinterpreted by the ancients (hence what [Adalbert] Merx calls "Wanderwörte").

1914, H[erman] C[harles] Hoskier, “B in St. Luke’s Gospel”, in Codex B and Its Allies: A Study and an Indictment, part I, London: Bernard Quaritch, →OCLC, page 25:

Hittite t/dapar- "leiten, verwalten, regieren" (and also with the Glossenkeil) is connected and we are in the presence of a Wanderwort that ultimately derives from the above Capp[adocian] *labar- "herrschen".

1966, Yoël L. Arbeitman, quoting Heinz Kronasser, “Iranian ‘Scribe’, Anatolian ‘Ruler’, or Neither: A City’s Rare Chances for ‘Leadership’”, in Yoël L. Arbeitman, editor, Fucus: A Semitic/Afrasian Gathering in Remembrance of Albert Ehrman (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science; series IV; Current Issues in Linguistic Theory; 58), Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Pa.: John Benjamins Publishing Company, published 1988, →ISBN, →ISSN, page 77:

[Diedrich Hermann] Westermann (1927) in his pioneering identification of "West Sudanic" common lexemes (Niger-Congo in modern terms) also identified Wanderworte, "wander-words" that show up in widely differing language families in similar form.

2008, Roger M[arsh] Blench, “The Problem of Pan-African roots”, in John D. Bengtson, editor, In Hot Pursuit of Language in Prehistory: Essays in the Four Fields of Anthropology in Honor of Harold Crane Fleming, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Pa.: John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, page 190:

Some of the vocabulary can be classed as Wanderwörter – items that have diffused widely and whose ultimate source is sometimes hard to discover. […] While 'crocodile' is an animal with exceptional properties which may lead to it being a common topic in interethnic conversations, the same reasons cannot be adduced for the other items above or many other Wanderwörter in this region, at least not given the cultural configuration of the recent past.

2009, Patrick McConvell, “Loanwords in Gurindji, a Pama-Nyungan Language of Australia”, in Martin Haspelmath, Uri Tadmor, editors, Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, →ISBN, section 4.4.3 (Wanderwörter), page 800:

In an earlier paper, however, I suggested—without, I confess, having noticed the Slavic forms—that ασβὀς is a very old word indeed, reflecting directly *azgṷ-o-, the thematization of *azgu-, a form of the Wanderwort for "mole" (cf. Greek σκάλοψ and (ἀ)σπάλαξ, Sanskrit ākhú- "mole-like rat," and Hittite āšku- "mole (?)") that travels in concert with *tasku- "badger" and gets confused with it also in Galatian […] and Basque (azkoin "badger").

2015, Joshua T. Katz, “Aristotle’s Badger”, in Brooke Holmes, Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Emilio Capettini, editors, The Frontiers of Ancient Science: Essays in Honour of Heinrich von Staden, Berlin, Munich: De Gruyter, →ISBN, →ISSN, pages 280–281:

Affinal terms, designating spouses and in-laws, appear to be among the most highly borrowed kinship terms in Australia, following the worldwide trend identified by Matras[…]. Some of these are notable Wanderwörter 'travelling words' that are borrowed successively into languages of different groups and families across long distances[…]. In the case of two such affinal Wanderwörter in northern Australia, I have argued that changes in distribution and meaning which accompany diffusion tell a story of the diffusion of new marriage patterns and which kin controlled the betrothal of women, mothers-in-laws or fathers-in-laws[…].

2016, Patrick McConvell, “Kinship Loanwords in Indigenous Australia, before and after Colonisation”, in Felicity Meakins, Carmel O’Shannessy, editors, Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages since Colonisation (Language Contact and Bilingualism), Boston, Mass., Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, →ISBN, →ISSN, section 3.1 (Affinal Wanderwörter):

(linguistics) A loanword that has spread to many different languages, often through trade or the adoption of foreign cultural practices.


familiarly

en-adv

familiarly (comparative more familiarly, superlative most familiarly)

more familiarly (comparative)
most familiarly (superlative)

The giant panda, familiarly known as a "panda bear", is not actually a bear at all.

(linguistics) colloquially; of common or vernacular speech, as opposed to scholarly language.


NSM

natural semantic metalanguage
w:natural semantic metalanguage

(linguistics) Initialism of natural semantic metalanguage.


polyseme

(semantics) A word or phrase that has multiple meanings, or, more specifically, multiple etymologically related meanings.


polyvalent

en-adj

polyvalent (comparative more polyvalent, superlative most polyvalent)

more polyvalent (comparative)
most polyvalent (superlative)

The approximately 1000 different cuneiform signs form a complex script system in which practically every symbol is polyvalent, i.e., having multiple phonemic and/or semantic realizations.

2004, Jonathan Cohen et. al, “iClay: Digitizing Cuneiform”, in The 5th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage:

(linguistics) Having several different syllabic or semantic meanings depending on the context.


polysemous

From Medieval Latin polysēmus, from Ancient Greek πολύσημος (polúsēmos), from πολύς (polús, “many”) + σημαίνω (sēmaínō, “I signify, mean”).

But just how are the meanings associated with a polysemous word related? A look at the entries for polysemous words in different dictionaries shows that lexicographers cannot agree on how to divide up the semantic space […]

2000, Yael Ravin, Claudia Leacock, Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches, Oxford: OUP, →ISBN, page 52:


polymorphemic

(linguistics) Made up of multiple morphemes.


assonant

assonant (comparative more assonant, superlative most assonant)

more assonant (comparative)
most assonant (superlative)

From Latin assonāns, present participle of assonō.

(prosody) Characterized by assonance; having successive similar vowel sounds.


antecedence

en-noun

antecedence (countable and uncountable, plural antecedences)

From Latin antecēdentia from Latin antecēdēns (“preceding”), from antecēdō (“go before”).

Sometimes this defect amounts to a blundering obliviousness of all antecedence. The following tearful reproof was given by a judge of the State of New York to a prisoner just convicted: “[…] nature has endowed you with a good education and respectable family connections, instead of which you go around the country stealing ducks.”

1895, Austin Phelps, Henry Allyn Frink, chapter 13, in Rhetoric: Its Theory and Practice, New York: Scribner, page 109:

The pronouns who and which and what, used interrogatively, […] may refer to a word or to words in the answer to a question, but their antecedence may be indefinite or unrevealed, even after the answer is given.

1941, John B. Opdycke, Harper’s English Grammar, New York: Popular Library, published 1965, Part 1, Chapter 2, p. 52:

(grammar) The relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent.


cranberry morpheme

cranberry morpheme (plural cranberry morphemes)

From the cran- of cranberry as an archetype. Cran- is from Low German Kraan (“crane”), but is now a bound morpheme, hence an example of a cranberry morpheme.

(linguistic morphology) A bound morpheme within a complex word that is a fossil and whose meaning is opaque to the present speakers of the language.


native speaker

Native speakers of English get paid much more than locals in the schools.

In the past, secondary classrooms have perhaps been seen as largely native speaker environments, but this is certainly no longer the case and secondary teachers are fully aware they need pedagogies and materials that support the different language backgrounds and proficiencies of contemporary classrooms.

2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects”, in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 35, →DOI, page 106:

(linguistics) A person who grew up with a particular language as their mother tongue.


frequentative

From Late Latin frequentativus, from Latin frequentāre (“to do or use often”). Morphologically as if frequent + -ative. Akin to frequent.

der

"Crackle" is an English frequentative verb derived from "crack".

(grammar) Serving to express repetition of an action.

բազմապատկական

serving to express the frequent repetition of an action


frequentative

(grammar) Any of a subclass of imperfective verbs that denote a repeated action, no longer productive in English, but found in e.g. Finnish, Latin, Russian, and Turkish.

բազմապատկական

subclass of imperfective verbs that denotes a continuously repeated action


verbid

(grammar) A nonfinite verb form, such as, in English, an infinitive, participle, or gerund.


disharmonic

en-adj

disharmonic (comparative more disharmonic, superlative most disharmonic)

more disharmonic (comparative)
most disharmonic (superlative)

1979, Barry J. Blake & R. M. W. Dixon, The Handbook of Australian Languages
A person is 'harmonic' with respect to his own generation and all even-numbered generations counting away from his own, and 'disharmonic' with respect to odd-numbered generations. Thus a man is disharmonic with respect to his father and his son but harmonic with respect to his grandfather and his grandson.

1995, Alan Dench, Martuthunira: A Language of the Pilbara Region of Western Australia
[…] there is also a special set of (non-singular first person) pronoun forms for use with disharmonic kin: those in the opposite generation set. […] The two disharmonic pronouns are used as polite forms when the addressee and speaker are in different alternate generation sets.

(Australianist linguistics) Of or relating to a generation that is an odd number of generations distant from a particular person.


instructive case

en-noun

instructive case (plural instructive cases)

(grammar): noun case used to indicate means. It answers the question "how?", and in English, this is usually expressed by the prepositional phrase by means of, as in "by means of the house". Languages that use the instructive case include Finnish and (rarely) Estonian.


bound morpheme

(linguistic morphology) A morpheme that can only occur when bound to a root morpheme. For example: cran- (as in cranberry), -ed, -ing, -ly.


comitative case

comitative case (plural comitative cases)

(grammar) Noun case used to denote companionship. In English, this is usually expressed by the prepositional phrase in company with, together with or with, as in "with the house." Languages that use the comitative case include Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Inari Sami, Northern Sami, Skolt Sami, and Quechua. It is also found in many Australian Aboriginal languages, where it is commonly used to form names of places and languages.


Westphalian

(linguistics) Of or pertaining to Westphalian Low German.


Proto-Polynesian

(linguistics, uncountable) The hypothetical ancestor language or protolanguage of most Polynesian languages.

Próta-Pholainéisis

ancestor language of most Polynesian languages


Proto-Polynesian

(linguistics, anthropology) Of or pertaining to the Proto-Polynesian language, or the people who spoke it.

Próta-Pholainéiseach

of or pertaining to the Proto-Polynesian language, or the people who spoke it


praenomen

praenomen (plural praenomens or praenomina)

From Latin praenōmen, from prae- (“pre-: before”) + nōmen (“name, family name”).

Julius Caesar's praenomen was Gaius.

(historical) An Ancient Roman given name.


perfect passive participle

perfect passive participle (plural perfect passive participles)

(grammar) A participle, prominent in some languages (e.g. Latin, Greek) but less common in English, describing something that happened to a noun (the subject) in the past.


anthroponym

From anthrop- + -onym or anthropo- + -nym. First attested in 1955.

The name of a person, especially a surname.


anthroponymy

/ænθɹəʊˈpɒnɪmɪ/

English anthrop- (“person, human”) + Ancient Greek ὠνυμία (ōnumía) (from ὄνομα (ónoma, “name”)); By surface analysis, anthrop- + -onymy = anthropo- + -nymy.


bracketing

(linguistics) A technique used to display the internal structure of a string of elements, in a similar manner to that used in mathematics and symbolic logic.


coining

coining (countable and uncountable, plural coinings)

Poetry admits of greater latitude than proſe, which with reſpect to coining, or, at leaſt, new-compounding words; yet, even here, this liberty ſhould be uſed with a ſparing hand.

1783, Hugh Blair, edited by George Edward Griffiths, The Monthly Review, volume 68, Art. V. Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres., page 499:

Once we move into the Patristic period, there is undoubted evidence for new coinings of words (particularly compounds) as a response to the needs of the theological debates which occurred.

1989, G.H.R. Horsley, “The Greek Documentary Evidence and NT Lexical Study: Some Soundings”, in New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, volume 5, →ISBN, page 77:

Coinings or neologisms are words that have recently been created. […] True coinings, which are completely new words, are rather rare relative to the vast number of words we create by means of the other word formation processes.

2009, Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck, “Morphological Typology and Word Formation”, in Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction, →ISBN, page 194:

(countable, linguistics) A created word or phrase.


leveling

leveling (countable and uncountable, plural levelings)

paradigm leveling
paradigm leveling#English

(linguistics) Ellipsis of paradigm leveling, the replacement of irregular forms by regular forms.


interpreting

interpreting (countable and uncountable, plural interpretings)

The scholarship supporting translation and interpreting education necessarily entails discussions of assessment and there has been some encouraging work in this area.

2003, Gunilla M. Anderman, Margaret Rogers, Translation Today: Trends and Perspectives, Multilingual Matters, →ISBN, page 205:

Is there a theory of interpreting, or a set of distinct theories of interpreting?

2013, Carmen Millán, Francesca Bartrina, The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, Routledge, →ISBN, page 66:

An orphan among its peers, consecutive interpreting appears to have a short life and little if any luster.

2017, Alexander V. Kozin, Consecutive Interpreting: An Interdisciplinary Study, Springer, →ISBN, page 1:

(uncountable, linguistics, translation studies) Synonym of interpretation (the discipline or study of translating one spoken or signed language into another)


telic

en-adj

telic (comparative more telic, superlative most telic)

more telic (comparative)
most telic (superlative)

From the Ancient Greek τελῐκός (telikós, “final”), from τέλος (télos, “end”).

uder

1995, Michela Cennamo, Patterns of 'Active' Syntax in Late Latin Pleonastic Reflexives, John Charles Smith, Delia Bentley (editors), Historical Linguistics 1995: Selected Papers from the 12th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Volume 1: General Issues and Non-Germanic Languages, page 39,
In this framework, verbs denoting directed change of location, such as Italian andare 'go', instantiate Core Unaccusativity, in that they have a Theme subject and are the most telic, concrete, dynamic.

Similarly, verb forms that can govern either transitive or middle-case marking (cf. 2.1.3.1.2(c)) are more telic in their transitive manifestations.

2000, Niko Besnier, Tuvaluan: A Polynesian Language of the Central Pacific, published 2002, page 495:

Moreover, let us remember that some verbs can be telic and agentive at the same time: if one looks at the ASH category n°1 (change of location), i.e. the verbs considered the most telic, like FF arriver (arrive), partir (leave), venir (come), revenir (come back) (Sorace 2000:256), old Spanish huir (run away) and escapar (escape) (Legendre 2007), do they not bear an agentive component?

2015, Pierre-Don Giancarli, “Auxiliary selection with intransitive and reflexive verbs: the limits of gradience and scalarity, followed by a proposal”, in Rolf Kailuweit, Malte Rosemeyer, editors, Auxiliary Selection Revisited: Gradience and Gradualness, page 82:

(grammar) That expresses an end or purpose.

(linguistics) That expresses the perfective aspect.


unpacking

en-noun

unpacking (countable and uncountable, plural unpackings)

(linguistics) The separation of the features of a segment, such as a nasal vowel or palatal consonant, into distinct segments.


lengthening

/ˈlɛŋ(k)θənɪŋ/

/ˈlɛŋ(k)θənɪŋ/

(phonology) a type of sound change when a sound (especially a vowel) lengthens


affixed

en-adj

affixed (comparative more affixed, superlative most affixed)

more affixed (comparative)
most affixed (superlative)


soft mutation

en-noun

soft mutation (countable and uncountable, plural soft mutations)

(linguistics) An alteration of the initial consonant of a word which occurs in certain Celtic languages under particular linguistic circumstances; lenition.


spirant

From Latin spirans, present participle of spīrō (“I blow”). Compare inspire, expire, respiration, etc.

Spirant consonants are those in which the mouth passage is simply narrowed without any actual contact.

1888, Joseph Wright, An Old High German Primer:

The raising of the stem indicated the opening of the consonant to a ‘spirant’ […]

1955, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix E:

(linguistics, dated) A non-sibilant fricative.


strophe

Borrowed from Latin stropha, itself a borrowing from Ancient Greek στροφή (strophḗ, “a turn, bend, twist”). Compare strap and strop.

der

(prosody) A turn in verse, as from one metrical foot to another, or from one side of a chorus to the other.

(prosody) The section of an ode that the chorus chants as it moves from right to left across the stage.

(prosody) A pair of stanzas of alternating form on which the structure of a given poem is based.


definiens

From Latin, substantive use of dēfīniēns (“[a] defining”), present active participle of dēfīniō.

Yet such predicates will not in general even be interpreted over the domain of objects over which the definientia range.

1977, Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance, 3rd edition, D. Reidel, →ISBN, page XLIV:

In these definitions, then, there is only one part of the definiens, the form (e.g. being a human soul), which is prior to the kind and its matter.

2011, Michail Peramatzis, Priority in Aristotle's Metaphysics, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 196:

(semantics) The word or phrase that defines the definiendum in a definition.


definiendum

Borrowed from Latin dēfīniendum, gerund of dēfīniō.

However, most advocates of the importance of real definition have limited the definiendum to certain kinds of things: usually an abstract entity or a concept.

1991, William Thomas Parry, Edward A. Hacker, Aristotelian Logic, SUNY Press, →ISBN, page 84:

The objects themselves are the definienda of the definition. The first set of properties through which the definienda are collected together to form a group is called ‘the limiting properties of being the definienda of the definition’.

2013, Edward Craig, editor, Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge, →ISBN, page 198:

(semantics) The term (word or phrase) defined in a definition (whether inside a sentence, as a dictionary entry, or otherwise).


matronym

/ˈmætɹəʊnɪm/


metronym

/ˈmɛtɹəʊnɪm/

From Ancient Greek μήτηρ (mḗtēr, “mother”) + ὄνυμα (ónuma, “name”).


imperfect subjunctive

en-noun

imperfect subjunctive (plural imperfect subjunctives)

For quotations using this term, see Citations:imperfect subjunctive.

(grammar) The imperfect tense in the subjunctive mood.


present subjunctive

present subjunctive (plural present subjunctives)

(grammar) The present tense in the subjunctive mood.


î

(lexicography) An orthographic ⟨i⟩ with a diacritic that marks it as being the FLEECE vowel, as in the word "machine".

(lexicography) An element of the digraph îr, a dictionary transcription for the NEAR vowel


patronym

/ˈpætɹəʊnɪm/

From Ancient Greek πατήρ (patḗr, “father”) + ὄνυμα (ónuma, “name”). Equivalent to patri- + -onym.


retracted tongue root

retracted tongue root (plural retracted tongue roots)

Coordinate term: advanced tongue root

The high back retracted tongue root vowel is always further back than its counterpart, rather than further forward, as is the case for the traditional lax back vowels.

1996, Peter Ladefoged, Ian Maddieson, The Sounds of the World's Languages:

/ʕ/ is typically realized as an epiglottal stop, gliding as a pharyngeal approximant into a following retracted-tongue-root vowel, as in [ʡˤʊ̙maː] ‘water flowing from a spout’.

2001, Barry F. Carlson, John H. Esling, Katie Fraser, “Nuuchahnulth”, in Journal of the International Phonetic Association, volume 31, number 2:

(linguistics, often attributive) An articulation involving retraction of the tongue root.

arrel de la llengua endarrerit

an articulation involving retraction of the tongue root


interlinguistics

international auxiliary language
international auxiliary language

(linguistics) The study of international communication, focused especially on planned international auxiliary languages and having e.g. Esperanto and Interlingua as a chief applied product.


grammatically

en-adv

grammatically (comparative more grammatically, superlative most grammatically)

more grammatically (comparative)
most grammatically (superlative)


â

(lexicography) An element of the digraph âr, a dictionary transcription for the SQUARE vowel


alpha privative

en-noun

alpha privative (plural alpha privatives)

(grammar) The prefix a- (or an- when prefixing a root which begins with a vowel) found in some English words of Greek derivation. It expresses negation or absence. The prefix has cognates in other Indo-European languages, including in- in Latin and un- in English, all traceable back to Proto-Indo-European *n̥-.

privatieve a

the prefix a- expressing negation or absence

(grammar) Either the aforementioned privative a or the Greek ἀ- (a-) itself (from which the English descendant derives).

(grammar) A word formed using such prefixes.


pro-sentence

(grammar) A function word or expression that substitutes for a whole sentence whose content is recoverable from the context.


relative superlative

relative superlative (plural relative superlatives)

degree of comparison
degree of comparison

(grammar) the superlative (a degree of comparison) when it is used to express the highest degree of something in relation to something else

Ο χειρότερος is the relative superlative form of κακός.

degrees of comparison
degrees of comparison

comparative superlative
comparative superlative

absolute superlative
absolute superlative

(grammar) In Greek: one of the degrees of comparison of an adjective, the equivalent in English of the superlative, similar to the comparative superlative used in Spanish. Compare with absolute superlative.


ablative absolute

ablative absolute (plural ablatives absolute or ablative absolutes)

ablatives absolute (plural)
ablative absolutes (plural)

(grammar) A construction in Latin and other sister languages in which an independent phrase with a noun in the ablative case has a participle, adjective, or noun, expressed or implied, which agrees with it in gender, number and case – both words forming a clause grammatically unconnected with the rest of the sentence.


cardinal numeral

cardinal numeral (plural cardinal numerals)

Cardinal Numerals, are thoſe which expreſs the Number of things, as One, Two, Three, Four; [...]

1706, Edward Phillips, compiler, J[ohn] K[ersey the younger], “Numerals”, in The New World of Words: Or, Universal English Dictionary. […], 6th edition, London: […] J. Phillips, […]; N. Rhodes, […]; and J. Taylor, […], →OCLC, column 1:

Numbers may be considered under their divisions — Cardinal, Ordinal, and Indefinite Numerals.

1872, Richard Morris, Historical outlines of English accidence, page 110:

The cardinal numeral ‘one’ occurs in the singular and is declined like bogàt.

1993, William W. Derbyshire, A Basic Reference Grammar of Slovene, Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, Inc., page 56:

Numerals cut across the division between syntax and morphology: cardinal numerals expressing numbers below 100 are single words, while those expressing higher numbers are syntactically composite.

2002, Laurie Bauer, Rodney Huddleston, “Lexical word-formation”, in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, page 1716:

In Latin most cardinal numerals through 100 are indeclinable adjectives.

2005 — F. M. Wheelock, Wheelock’s Latin, 6th ed. revised (New York: Harper Resources, 2005), p.97

(grammar) A word used to represent a cardinal number.

hooftelwoord

grammar: word used to represent a cardinal number


paralepsis

(rhetoric, linguistics) Alternative spelling of paraleipsis


paraleipsis

paraleipsis (countable and uncountable, plural paraleipses)

(rhetoric, linguistics) Alternative form of paralipsis


substantival

(grammar) Of or pertaining to a substantive.


ĕ

(lexicography) A dictionary transcription for the DRESS vowel


multivalent

en-adj

multivalent (comparative more multivalent, superlative most multivalent)

more multivalent (comparative)
most multivalent (superlative)

This procedure can be justified by considering the difficult word or compound as a separate part of a sentence of which the (verbal) adjective is the multivalent predicate, i.e. able to bind more than one part of speech.

1993, Vienna Journal of South Asian Studies - Volume 37, page 83:

In general terms, each of the causative suffixes derives a multivalent verb having the meaning 'to cause/make to V', where V is a variable standing for the verbal action of the base.

2016, Chris Rogers, The Use and Development of the Xinkan Languages, →ISBN, page 125:

(grammar) Able to bind to different parts of speech.


speech pathologist

en-noun

speech pathologist (plural speech pathologists)

A therapist who treats disorders of speech, language, swallowing, or voice; a specialist in speech pathology.


lexical semantics

(linguistics) The study of how the words of a language denote either things in the real world or concepts.


ō

(lexicography) A dictionary transcription for the GOAT vowel


glossa

From the Ancient Greek γλῶσσᾰ (glôssa, “tongue”). Doublet of gloss.

This pattern does not hold in the glossas we have examined: [th] occurs where we expect [], as in the “word” kita in our sample text, and [] occurs freely in other American glossas as an independent sound unit,[…]

1968, William J. Samarin, The Linguiticality of Glossolalia, page 64:

I have analysed a total of 24 prophetic glossas in this way, and 10 passages of the more easily intelligible prayer specimens of glossolalia. These glossas emanate from a total of 15 persons.

Although Samarin has examples of glossas from people who are not adherents to Christianity he does feel that occurences^([sic]) of glossolalia apart from Christian influences are rare.

Thus significant differences exist between the glossas of different individuals: indeed, one person may have more than one distinctive glossa. And there are differences between the glossas of people of different linguistic backgrounds which correspond with the differences between their mother tongues, allowing for the influence of other languages which they may know to some extent.

2008, B. Ward Powers, “Excursus 4: Tongues-Speaking Today: A Comment”, in First Corinthians: An Exegetical and Explanatory Commentary; A Consideration of Some Views Ancient and Modern in the Light of a Verse-by-Verse Look at What the Text Actually Says; A Somewhat Traditional Interpretation Plus Contemporary Application, Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, →ISBN, page 409:

(phonology) Unintelligible ecstatic speech.


back channel

(linguistics) A gesture or short prompt by which a listener invites a speaker to continue.


backchannel

en-verb

backchannel (third-person singular simple present backchannels, present participle backchanneling or backchannelling, simple past and past participle backchanneled or backchannelled)

backchannels (present singular third-person)
backchanneling (participle present)
backchannelling (participle present)
backchanneled (participle past)
backchanneled (past)
backchannelled (participle past)
backchannelled (past)

(linguistics) To employ non-verbal (oral and visual) means to influence a speaker without interruption.


noun clause

(grammar) a subordinate clause which functions as a subject or object of the main clause


polylectic

en-adj

polylectic (comparative more polylectic, superlative most polylectic)

more polylectic (comparative)
most polylectic (superlative)

From Ancient Greek πολύς (polús, “a lot of, much”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *polh₁ús (“many, much”), from the root *pleh₁- (“to fill”)) + λέγειν (légein), from λέγω (légō, “to arrange, choose, gather; to count, reckon”) (from Proto-Indo-European *leǵ- (“to gather”)) + -ic.

der

A polylectic term is a multi-word term, as opposed to a monolectic term which is a one-word term.

(grammar) Of or relating to a term consisting of more than one word.


PDE

(linguistics) Initialism of present-day English.


tonetic

(linguistics) Relating to tones described in a phonetic, rather than phonemic, way.


verb phrase

(linguistics) A construction in a clause consisting of a verb and its internal complements, or modifiers.

(grammar) A phrase that functions syntactically as a verb, consisting of a main verb and any auxiliaries.

sintagma verbal

Phrase that functions syntactically as a verb


phonetic symbol

en-noun

phonetic symbol (plural phonetic symbols)

(phonetics) A written symbol used systematically for denoting a phoneme or any other phonetic quality in utterance.


xenolalia

The ability to speak in a language which the individual has not learned.


dangling participle

dangling participle (plural dangling participles)

(grammar) Any participle used as a dangling modifier.


Arabist

(anthropology, linguistics) A scholar who studies Arab or Arabic culture, politics, or language.

arabista

a scholar who studies Arab or Arabic culture, politics, or language


agentive

(grammar) Indicating an agent or agency (as -er in lexicographer).

(grammar) Pertaining to a grammatical agent that performs the action of the verb.


agentive

(linguistics) A word having an agentive construction.


polyword

(linguistics) A phrase that acts like a single word.


pluterperfect

en-adj

pluterperfect (comparative more pluterperfect, superlative most pluterperfect)

more pluterperfect (comparative)
most pluterperfect (superlative)

The first pluterperfect will have none of them, but take quand, when, quand j'aurois eu, when I should have had.

1673, Claude Mauger, Claudius Mauger's French Grammar, page 182:

Sometimes a writer will establish the set-back by a brief use of the pluterperfect, and then slide undetected, he hopes— into the past again.

1964, Herbert Best, Writing for children, page 99:

...and renders all the present, and this present past, a more ancient and pluterperfect past than the Valley of the Kings, sir.

1975, Sol Yurick, An Island Death, page 31:

(grammar) Pertaining to action completed before or at a specific time.


predicable

(grammar, of an adjective) That may be used in the predicate of a sentence, especially following a form of the verb "to be".


subordinator

(grammar) Any of a lexical class of words that join clauses at a subordinate syntactic level.


modal case

(grammar) case to express ability, intention, necessity, obligation, permission, possibility, etc.

a modal auxiliary--example of the modal case in English


prolative case

(grammar) A declension, in some languages, of a noun or pronoun that has the basic meaning of "by way of".


prolative

prolative (comparative more prolative, superlative most prolative)

more prolative (comparative)
most prolative (superlative)

(grammar) extending or completing a predication


surtitle

From French sur (“over, above”), from Latin super, + title, from Latin titulum.

A translation of a segment of the libretto or other text or sometimes a brief summary of the plot projected onto a screen above the stage during a performance of an opera or other similar performance sung in a foreign language; a supertitle.


disyllabic

Borrowed from French dissyllabique, from Latin disyllabus.


Skraeling

After Old Norse skrælingi (of disputed etymology), the Norse name for the native inhabitants of Greenland and continental North America (Eastern Canada).

(linguistics) A little-known language once spoken by the now extinct Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland (also called Beothuk or Red Indian).