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Words, phrases, and acronyms specific to the study of linguistics.

3 votes

What is the proper term for this part of a statement?

Otavio is right. These are demonstrative pronouns. More importantly, this and that are Deictic Expressions, having meaning only in the contexts of the actual speech act. They're only a small fractio …
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3 votes
Accepted

All usage of the term fossilization in Linguistics and applied linguistics

Fossilization is a metaphor. What it means in paleontology (the source context) is the very rare gradual replacement of normally degradable biological material with non-degrading material. Typical is …
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4 votes
Accepted

What are some of the difficulties that linguists face in defining the notion of "word"?

Word is a popular term, which means that everybody has their own idea about what it means, aided or hobbled by whatever education they may have encountered that claimed to deal with language or langu …
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3 votes
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What is a group of determiners called?

The constituent containing determiners that precedes prenominal adjectives is then simply, in X-Bar terminology, a Dʹ. In general, an NP will contain a Dʹ. …
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0 votes

What's the term for changing a word's part of speech while maintaining the root?

You're talking about changing the word by adding morphemes to the root. This is called Affixation, because it adds affixes. An affix is added either at the beginning of a word (where it's called a pre …
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5 votes
Accepted

Name of assertions in sentences where negation of the whole sentence doesn't negate the asse...

Technically speaking, these are not assertions. The technical term is presupposition. Assertions are propositions that one can negate, like The moon is made of green cheese. whose negation is The …
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14 votes
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What is the difference between native language, first language, mother tongue and L1?

OK, the fact of the matter is that everybody learns their own languages, in their own ways, in their own times, places, and circumstances. It is normal for kids to have several languages at home, and …
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8 votes
Accepted

Can the term "gerund" be linguistically defined?

No. Gerund is one of those terms, as you suggested, that we inherited from Classical languages and grammarians. As such, it's always available as a crutch term to mean "this construction/inflection …
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2 votes
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What's this structure called? (prepositional relative clauses)

This is an optional rule that applies only in a minority of relative clauses where the relative pronoun is not a subject or object, but rather the object of a preposition. Optionally, to avoid stran …
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6 votes
Accepted

What does the term "ontology" mean vis a vis the study of natural language?

Yes, but the term "ontology" is not always used; it's pretty general, after all, just the Greek for "words about things". In the case of philosophy or science, it means "questions about 'things' -- i. …
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1 vote

diphthong vs. digraph (English)

Diphthongs are actually somewhat complicated in English. There are phonemic diphthongs /ay aw oy/ (to use Kenyon and Knott's American phonemic system), as in buy bough boy, which are definitely pho …
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5 votes
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Is the term "ambitransitive" controversial?

Ambitransitive is likely to have a meaning only in certain theories that make certain assumptions, like the assumption that transitivity is a property of verbs (instead of constructions), for instance …
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9 votes
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Relationship between "see" and "look"

See and look are Sense Verbs. They are, in fact, the two distinct English sense verbs for vision. There are three varieties of English sense verbs, following the pattern of hear, listen, sound (only …
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3 votes

stem classes and the terms "fusional" / "inflectional"

The traditional way to tell the story goes like this: There are two parts of Grammar: Syntax and Morphology There are two kinds of Morphology: Derivational Morphology and Inflectional Morphology Th …
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3 votes

What is a word?

Word, as noted, is not a clearly-defined term. In fact, P.H. Mathews, in his classic text Morphology, distinguishes three quite distinct usages of word: the Lexeme (the root, essentially the general …
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