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| Information already introduced into a discourse and therefore presumed to be at the forefront of a hearer's mind; also called 'old information.' |
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| A language variety used for communication among groups of people who do not otherwise share a common language. E.g. English is the lingua franca of the international scientific community. |
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| The ability to produce and assign meaning to grammatical sentences is called grammatical competence. |
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| A term used to characterize an expression that can be interpreted in more than one way as a consequence of having more than one constituent structure or more than one referential meaning. |
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| In lexical semantics, denotes opposite meanings; word pairs with opposite meanings are said to be antonymous. |
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| Complementary distribution |
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| A pattern of distribution of two or more sounds that do not occur in the same position within words in a given language. E.g. in English [p^h] does not occur where [p] occurs and vice versa. |
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| The meaning that an expression has by virtue of its ability to refer to an entity; referential meaning is contrasted with social meaning and affected meaning and is sometimes called 'denotation.' |
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| A class of sounds, including consonants [m] and [n], produced by lowering the velum and allowing the air to pass out through the nasal cavity. |
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| A sentence consisting of a matrix clause and at least one embedded clause. |
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| The process through which a speech community adopts another speech community's language as its own modifies the structure of that new language, thus developing a new dialect that becomes characteristic of the adopting community. |
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| A regular sound change that occurs only in a specific environment, but not in all environments in which the sound appears. E.g. in Southern America English, the merger of 'pen' and 'pin' occurs only before nasals, 'pet' and 'pit' are distinguished, but not 'him' and 'hem.' |
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| The set of forms constituting the inflectional variants of a particular verb. Similar to a 'paradigm', but only for verbs. |
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| Appropriateness conditions |
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| Conventions that regulate the intentions under which an utterance serves as a particular speech act, such as a question, promise, or invitation. |
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| A closed class of words that link clauses or phrases. |
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| a sound produced when one articulator approaches another, but the vocal tract is no sufficiently narrowed to create the audible friction that typically characterizes a consonant. In English, the sounds: [w], [j] [r] and [l] are approximants. |
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| A speech sound produced by partial or complete closure of part of the vocal tract, thus obstructing the airflow and creating audible friction. Described in terms of voice, place of articulation, and manner of articulation. Abbreviated "C" |
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| A set of speech sounds that can all be characterized by one of a few phonetic features and that includes all he sounds of a given language that are characterized by those phonetic features. |
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| A phonological unit consisting of one or more sounds, including a peak (or nucleus) that is usually a vowel or diphthong; frequent syllable types are CV and CVC |
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| The term used in semantics to refer to words or sentences that mean the same thing. |
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| The elements of a lexical field with a less basic meaning. Usually, more marked elements have more precise meanings than less marked elements, and can be described in terms of less marked elements, and are less frequent in natural speech: e.g. "Cocker Spaniel" is more marked than "dog." |
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| The structure of sentences and the study of sentence structure. |
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| The senses and referents of expressions. |
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| A category of the verb that marks time reference, for example past, or present. |
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| The linear and hierarchical organization of the words of a sentence into syntactic units. |
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| A syntactic unit that functions as part of a larger unit within the sentence; typical types are the verb phrase, noun phrase, and clause. |
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| A word whose primary function is to describe entities, ideas, qualities, and states of being in the world; nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are content words, as opposed to function words. |
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| One of three main elements (with 'expression' and 'meaning') in a speech situation. Context typically refers to those aspects of a speech situation that affect the expression and enable an interpretation of the context. |
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| A language family whose members are descendant of an ancestral language called Proto-Indo-European, spoken probably in central Asia about 5000 years ago. |
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| A place of articulation involving both lips; a sound produced there. |
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| The marking of the orientation or position of entities and situations with respect to certain points of reference such as the place (here/there) and the time (no/then) of the utterance. |
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| The state of having competence, both grammatical and communicative, in more than one languages. |
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| A lexical category of words that function syntactically as heads of noun phrases and semantically a referring expressions; nouns can be characterized morphologically by certain inflections and syntactically by their distribution in phrases and clauses; in traditional terms, a noun is defined semantically as the name of a person, place, or thing. |
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| A linguistic pattern at play in all languages of the world without exception. e.g. "any language with voiced stops also has voiceless stops." |
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| A morpheme that serves to derive a word of one class or meaning from a word of another class or meaning. |
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| A language variety characteristic of a particular social group; dialect can be characteristic of regional, ethnic, socioeconomic, or gender groups. |
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