Questions tagged [terminology]
Words, phrases, and acronyms specific to the study of linguistics.
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Is “actual” both a false friend and a cognate?
English definition of “actual”:
existing in fact; typically as contrasted with what was intended, expected, or believed.
Spanish definition of “actual”:
current, present, contemporary
These are ...
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What is Double Zero Grade?
The double zero grade *ǵʰi-m- is preserved in the compounds with numerals.
(de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin 2013: hiems)
E.g. *dwi-ǵʰim-os “two years old”, literally “of two winters” (en....
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Examples of ‘kangaroo etymologies’ that actually happened
There’s an urban legend that the word kangaroo is from an Aboriginal phrase that means, “I don’t know.” This is not true: the word is actually from a Guugu Yimithirr word for a particular species of ...
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Is the head function also called nucleus, or is nucleus a subtype of head?
In this visual representation of syntactic functions from Wikipedia, nucleus is given as a subtype of head.
But the Head article appears to treat the two terms as synonyms. The first sentence reads:
...
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Contemporary words used in a cultural text set in another era
Is there a term to describe the situation in which a character uses words/ expressions from other literary era eg. the story is set in 18th century and the character talks about writing a fanficton?
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What subdiscipline of linguistics studies the relationship between writing and pronunciation?
Most European languages use some variation of the Latin alphabet. However, while most of them seem to broadly agree on what sounds most of the individual letters represent (with some minor differences,...
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Marking TAM without an explicit TAM marker
There's this concept related to how Semitic verbs conjugation - not the vocalic templates, more a logical consequence of them - that I think is really interesting. How they manage to communicate TAM ...
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To what extent can Jakobson's communicative functions be applied to an analysis of written texts?
As a tutor of teachers in Spain taking the state entrance exam for English I am often confronted with the typical exam question 'identify the communciative fuctions' for text analysis. The teachers ...
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I am trying to remember the name of a tool I used in college for a phonetics project
I asked a native speaker of an unfamiliar language to say, in his native language, each of about 250 words so that I could transcribe them phonetically. Theoretically,this specific list of words would ...
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What is a psych verb?
As mentioned in this comment by John Lawler to this question I asked yesterday, know is not a psych verb.
What is a psych verb? I've heard this term before and vaguely guessed that it was a word ...
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What's it called when you refer to a member of a group by a modified version of the group name?
Is there a term for words like Amazonian, Googler, Harvardian -- monikers that mean "member of this group" that are just derivations of the group name? They seem to usually end in "-ian&...
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What is the reason for learning vocabulary without understanding the concept behind it
I've recently had a discussion with a friend who said that he believes that putting labels on things kills understanding. Meaning if a person learns a name for something before they learn what it ...
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coreferentiality: what is a 'reference', exactly?
I would like to understand what is meant in a grammar discussion when someone uses the word "coreferential". I understand it to mean that two or more constituents (e.g. a noun and a noun ...
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Help sought with understanding an aspect of genitive/possessive
In English, we can use the possessive in such a way that the noun being described is omitted, chiefly in cases where it has already been introduced. For example; "This chair is mine, and that is ...
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Why aren't Phonetic Components in Chinese called PHONOLOGICAL Components?
Why Phonetic, not Phonological, Components? What is wrong about calling Phonetic Components Phonological Components instead?
I perused all these posts, but they don't answer my question.
What's ...
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What is the difference between traditional and modern IPA?
I have recently come across this while researching the phonetic spelling for "love", and I have come across a website (the website) that had both traditional and modern IPA spellings (with ...
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Is there a descriptive term for the demonstrative pronoun "that" which conveys the underlying notion of pointing to something *out there*?
I have read (somewhere) that the demonstrative pronoun describes something outside or away from the observer and that this has a descriptive term, philosophically not as a grammar term. That out there....
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What is the term for the phones or phonemes after a synchronic or diachronic sound change or allophony rule?
If you have a sound change or allophony rule such as:
X -> Y / _Z
Is there a common term for X and Y?
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What is the term for a thing instantiated by saying it?
A promise comes into existence merely by saying it. What is the term for a thing, or property of a thing, that is instantiated by saying or naming it?
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Word for difference between "in" and "into"
I was wondering whether there are words for the two types of prepositions, or a word for the distinction between them. I understand that the difference between them is that one is a "static" ...
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Emphasis through capitalizing the first letters of words
I've begun to see this style of emphasis used more frequently, like in the following passage:
People whose careers depend on the great stuff working as advertised may decide instead that they Simply ...
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What is the difference between a phrasal affix, an affix, and a clitic?
I've heard people claim ‘phrasal affix’ is a synonym for ‘clitic’, and heard others who disagree. I have also seen titles of papers which say,
Some Language Feature as a Phrasal Affix / Affix / ...
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Linguistic Term for the Opposite/Converse of an Apocopic Form?
When you have an apocopic form (e.g. radio (the device) is an apocopic form of radiorreceptor in Spanish), is there a converse term that can be used to say, using the example above, that ...
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What is the term for how a colon is used as a key value separator in English, and are there other similar characters in other languages?
In English we often use colons as an informal term: definition separator or a key: value separator - like
Birthdate: some date
Is there a term for this form of usage, and are there other characters ...
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What does information-status mean in linguistics?
The phrase information-status is used repdeatly in the article "Definiteness and Information-status in Hindi", Baldridge, 1996, but what does it mean? Could someone explain it simply/ say ...
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Looking for a linguistic term
I'm trying to pinpoint a linguistic concept that may or may not exist.
Let's say you have a complete set of "units" (i.e., sounds/letters/moras) in a language. This can be many things, ...
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Is there a term for words differing in stress (only)?
That is words that is pronunced equally except the stress pattern differs. For example "digest /daɪˈdʒɛst/" (verb) and "digest /ˈdaɪdʒɛst/" (noun). Or even the case where the ...
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Is there a term for mixed gender in plural pronouns (as opposed to masculine, feminine, or neuter)?
In English, there is only one third person plural pronoun to refer to groups of any gender or genders. Multiple "he"s becomes they, multiple "she"s becomes they, multiple "it&...
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Technical term for words that are almost completely pejorated
My question is to some extent similar to this one. Unlike the infamous n-word, the word Negro was originally not so objectionable as it is nowadays, but nowadays it is considered acceptable only in ...
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Technical term for terms never used naturally by native speakers?
Apparently, there are some terms that are never used naturally by native speakers. They may only appear under extremely peculiar circumstances (e.g. in some translations of foreign-language texts). A ...
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Is there a technical term for the process of a dialectal word being accepted as part of the standard variety?
For example, the word pet appeared originally in Scottish and northern England dialect, but it is no longer felt as specific to certain regions. I have not discovered any appropriate term for such ...
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Is there a technical term for words that seek attention?
In many languages there are words or sounds that function as attention-seeker.
For example you might say hey yo,
And this causes people to turn their heads towards you.
In Persian there is آهای as ...
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Isn't it misleading to call written representations of spoken languages as written languages?
In the following sentences I would refer to anything that can be used to denote something as a symbol.
Any language uses some kind of symbol to denote different things. I presume that any language ...
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is there a name for a language with very few roots?
It appears to me that German is a language whose vocabulary is strongly based on combining a few lexemes with a variety of prefixes, or just yuxtaposing. By contrast, romance languages seem to use far ...
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What are the normalized entries called on the table of contents of thefreedictionary?
For example, these multi-word expressions or lexical units can be listed in their very basic forms on thefreedictionary.com:
leave one's mark
leave mark on
develop from
develop from someone
develop
...
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What's the difference between nominative and absolutive case?
Why do both these cases need to exist?
They are both subjects
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Are inflectional morphemes considered affixes in English?
From what I remember to have learned in SPANISH, which is my mother tongue, affixes just refer to derivational morphemes such as suffixes and prefixes which can change the meaning of words when added ...
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What is the name for the phenomenon where an English verb that takes a clausal complement either does or does not mark the infinitive with "to"?
Let them go home.
*Let them to go home.
*Allow them go home.
Allow them to go home.
Make them go home.
*Make them to go home.
*Force them go home.
Force them to go home.
What is the reason that &...
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What is the name for this phenomenon, and what are some other examples of it?
Sorry if this is a duplicate, but I couldn't figure out how to search for this, especially since my only example involves two function words.
In English, we can say "I have not eaten." "...
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Tone vs Intonation in English -- does English use tones in any situation to convey meaning?
I took some Mandarin in college and I believe (IIRC) the concept of tones was introduced to us English speakers by showing how we use "rising tone" for questions.
But a comment to a recent ...
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What is the term for the duration ratio between the vowel and the coda?
A syllable consists of three parts: The onset, the nucleus (which is usually a vowel), and the coda. The onset and the coda are optional, or may come in consonant clusters, but for the purpose of this ...
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What is this type of ambiguity called?
There are a number of sentences that create a paradoxical-seeming ambiguity. I'm not sure what the name for this phenomenon is, and it'd be great if someone could help me out.
Examples include:
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Technical word for cross-lingual pronunciation that causes bad meaning
In Arabic, کونی is the imperative second person feminine of "be". But the same word in Persian means a faggot (slang).
The one who found the heleocentrism is called Copernicus, bet the last ...
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Shouldn’t “person” be called “self”, “direct” and “indirect” “orientation”? [closed]
The widely used conventional terms “first”, “second” and “third” “person” are highly arbitrary names. They imply that these three ways a person can refer to a person have an ordering; well, they do ...
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Ways a word can be used
Does anyone know if there is a name to refer to the way a word is used in a sentence to either stand for its meaning or to refer to the word itself in some manner. For example:
Orange
I ate an orange....
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Is there a term for "if" statements not intended as conditions, like "if you want"
I might say, "There is food in the fridge, if you want, Fred."
I do not mean that food in the fridge will only exist if Fred wants it to exist.
I mean, "There is food in the fridge, [...
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Connections between how unrelated words derived from the same root meaning
From re: constructions
The word "martyr" comes originally from the ancient Greek legal term
for "witness", for someone who gives testimony or evidence in a court
of law.
In ...
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Conditional followed by imperative
In English, we have often sentences like so:
If you are interested, send me a message
WHEN you are ready to do it, start with the laundry
To my understanding these are a conditional followed by an ...
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What do you call a transliteration that has gone native?
I'm looking for a word for transliterations that have gone on to become native words apart from their origins. For example, zombie, sarong, besuboru, Kalikimaka. The meanings may differ from the ...
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What do you call it when you write the next word in a sequence twice instead of the current and next word?
I'm not sure how to phrase it, but I'll give an example.
Let's say I want to type "Think this will be the last instruction?"
While typing this out, I recite the phrase in my head, but I type ...
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