A

accent Features of pronunciation that identify the speaker with a particular national, regional or social group (e.g., all the ways in which different groups say the words ‘Good morning’; see 1.3.1).

acceptable Those usages which are recognised as ‘well-formed’ and ‘normal’ by a particular group (e.g., ‘She wants’ in Standard British English; ‘she want’ in many Black Englishes and dialects; see 5.4.6 d).

active 1 Of verbal constructions where the grammatical subject controls the verbal action (e.g., ‘Iraqi soldiers march . . . ’), as opposed to *passive verbs where the grammati­cal subject is controlled by the verbal action (e.g., ‘Iraqi POWs are marched . . . ’) (see 5.2.6). 2 Of language competence in general, distinguishing words which peo­ple actively use in their own speech and writing, and the larger range of words which they passively recognise in listening and reading.

addresser–addressee The roles and relations obtaining between speakers and listeners, writers and readers, presenters and viewers (e.g., me and you).

adjective A structurally optional class of word which modifies the meaning of a noun (e.g., ‘That beautiful tabby cat’). Items such as ‘a’, ‘the’ and ‘that’ also modify the meaning of the noun but are usually distinguished as *articles and, along with adjectives, come under the larger category of *modifiers.

adverb A structurally optional class of word which modifies the meaning of a verb, usually by supplying a sense of *circumstance (e.g., ‘She writes beautifully). An adverbial phrase could be much bigger but occupy the same structural position (e.g., ‘She writes beautifully / in the morning / at home’). Here the / distinguishes between adverbs of, respectively, manner, time and place.

agent 1 In functional *grammar, the person or thing responsible for a dynamic process involving an affected body (e.g., ‘He / The car hit the wall’). 2 Generally, agency refers to the perceived causation or determined motivation of an event (see subject).

alliteration Words beginning with the same sound (e.g., ‘You great galloping goon!’). Alliteration can also function as a large-scale structural principle in poetry, usually reinforced by patterns of stress (e.g., Ol English, 5.1.1; Hopkins 5.1.2). Along with assonance and consonance (the repetition of, respectively, *vowels and *consonants within words), alliteration is frequently used for localised effects in poetry, advertising and speech.

animate One of the primary *selectional features identified in traditional *semantics, conventionally braced against its binary opposite inanimate. Thus ‘man’ and ‘cat’ are animate, whereas ‘rock’ and ‘earth’ are inanimate. However, a crude animate/ inanimate distinction breaks down (as do many others) if we operate in a cultural frame other than that of Western objectivist science (e.g., the earth is animate in Aboriginal and many other world-views; see ‘Passage’, 5.4.2). The in/animacy distinction is also dissolved or challenged in much myth and poetry, as in *metaphorical usage generally (e.g., ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’).

antonym See *synonym.

apostrophe 1 A mark of punctuation which signals the omission of a letter (e.g., ‘don’t’) or signals a possessive/genitive noun (e.g., ‘This woman’s bag’, ‘Sasha’s bag’ (see *punctuation). 2 A rhetorical figure whereby an inanimate object, idea or absent person is addressed (e.g., odes beginning ‘O wild West Wind . . . ’, ‘Time, blunt thou . . . !’(see Shakespeare, 5.4.4).

apposition A series of items, often nouns or noun phrases, which have the same gram­matical status (e.g., a shopping list, a reference to ‘Nathalie, the teacher’, and the sequence ‘Squinting. Blinking. Crying’ in 5.4.4).

archaism An old word or phrase no longer in common use, often added for period flavour (and perhaps humour) or belonging to some fossilised usage such as legal termin­ology (e.g., ‘ “Gadzooks!”, cried Billy Bunter’ or ‘The plaintiff’).

articles (also called pre-determiners) Distinguished as definite (‘the’), indefinite (‘a, some’) and demonstrative (‘this, these’, ‘that, those’). Like *adjectives, these are items which pre-modify the meaning of nouns, in this case signalling kinds of specificity and gen­erality, or proximity and remoteness (hence the difference between ‘The / a / that man appeared’).

auxiliary verb A secondary *verb used to support the main verb with respect to tense or *modality. (In ‘She will / ought to / mustn’t do that’ – all the italicised verbs are auxiliary.)

B

bilingual, multilingual A person or speech community which uses, respectively, two or many languages. In some sense all persons and communities are bi- or multilingual in that we constantly switch amongst registers and language varieties according to situation and topic.

binary oppositions Seeing and saying things in terms of extreme oppositions and ‘either/or’ (digital) logic: on or off, black or white, masculine or feminine, up or down, internal or external, subject or object, this or that, now or then, here or there, etc.

C

choice and combination The two major axes of LANGUAGE structure and of *sign-systems in general; also called, respectively, paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. Everything from traffic lights to words, and from fashion to cityscapes can be described as systems in which items are chosen and combined. Conversely, by negation, we can consider what has not been chosen and how else things might have been combined.

circumstance items Along with *participants and *processes, one of the three basic structural categories of functional *grammar. Circumstance items are typically *adverbs or adverbial phrases. They are often optional in terms of grammatical struc­ture but fundamentally affect our sense of context. Thus in ‘They will probably arrive tomorrow from Cardiff’ all the highlighted items fill out our understanding of the circumstances. Remove them and we’re left with a basic participant–process structure (here pronoun– verb) which can stand alone, but which tells us much less about the manner, time and place of the event: merely that ‘They will arrive’.

clause A structural unit in a sentence, usually distinguished as either main clause (the central structure which could stand on its own) or dependent clause (which cannot). Thus in ‘The fool who lives on the hill has arrived’ the main clause is ‘The fool . . . has arrived’; the dependent clause is ‘who lives on the hill’. The latter is also called a *subordinate clause.

closed set A part of speech or word class composed of a limited number of items (e.g., pronouns, articles, conjunctions), as distinct from an open set which can be virtually infinite (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives). Notice, however, that, historically, even ‘closed’ sets change and are in that sense ‘ajar’ if not quite ‘open’. Thus the second person singular pronouns ‘thou/thee/thine’ were common in earlier English and now remain only in some dialects. Meanwhile, ‘s/he’ (usually said ‘he or she’) is becoming current in contemporary English.

code A system of signs for transmitting messages, now usually called *sign-system. Code-switching refers to a speaker’s or writer’s movement between varieties or languages.

cognitive linguistics A branch of language study concerned with the relation between, on the one hand, mental representations and perceptual categories and, on the other, verbal items and textual structures. In cognitive linguistics there is much attention to the nature of *metaphor and *schemata as the reader builds up a more or less coherent ‘text world’, even when the text may appear to lack formal *cohesion. Characteristically, the perception of the latter depends upon readers’ *inferences as much as *implicatures in the text.

cohesion Everything which helps to hold a text together and thereby encourages us to perceive it as, in some sense, ‘a whole’. Factors contributing to cohesion span the whole range from visual layout or *intonation patterns, through logical and spatio­temporal *connectors (e.g., ‘However, . . . therefore, . . . Here, then, . . . ’), *parallelism and *collocations, to overarching matters of discourse, genre, intertex­tuality and context. Cohesion is the formal counterpart of coherence (i.e. what makes sense). Both are not simply intrinsic properties of the text but also a product of the reader’s, audience’s or viewer’s *cognitive perception of that text in some context.

collocations Those items which commonly occur close to or in the company of one another (e.g., leaf with branch, tree, green, grow, roots, breeze; compact disc with stereo, cassette, hi-fi, insert, HMV shop). Notice that nearly all words have multiple collo­cations and can be sited in more than one *semantic field (e.g., leaf also with loose, paper and gold, turning over a new leaf; disc also with moon, computer, records, a slipped – ).

competence An internalised sense of a particular language and, by extension, culture. This is realised concretely through specific performances.

connectors A general term for all those items we use to forge explicit logical and spatio­temporal links between one sentence or part of a sentence and another. These include coordinators (‘and’, ‘but’, ‘or’), which signal basic operations of addition, nega­tion and choice and often join elements of equivalent grammatical status, and conjuncts (‘because’, ‘therefore’, ‘however’, ‘thus’ ‘moreover, . . . ’, ‘in other words, . . . ’, etc.), which signal more complex kinds of causality, often with grammatical dependence. Connectors are crucial to textual *cohesion.

connotation See *denotation.

consonants Those sounds which frame *vowels and establish *syllable boundaries (e.g., president, where ‘pr’ and ‘nt’ also represent consonant clusters).

context-sensitive words (also called ‘shifters’ and ‘deictics’, from Greek deixis, meaning ‘pointing’) These are words and phrases which are especially dependent on context to fix their meaning. They include personal *pronouns (‘I, me, mine, my’; ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘s/he’, ‘they’, ‘it’, etc.); demonstrative *adjectives and pronouns (‘this/these’, ‘that/those’, etc); relative pronouns (‘who’, ‘which’, ‘where’, ‘when’) and *adverbs and adverbial groups such as ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘yesterday’, ‘the day after tomorrow’, ‘abroad’, etc. Thus the sentence ‘I’m here now’ (which contains three heavily context-sensitive words) may be said by many different people in different places at different times. By contrast, the sentence ‘Rob Pope is in Oxford, Wednesday 5 September 2001’ (which contains mainly proper nouns) is relatively context-free. Notice, however, that all words are to some extent context-sensitive. The precise meaning of that last example still depends upon what different people understand by ‘Oxford’ and ‘Rob Pope’!

cooperative principle A view of COMMUNICATION, especially conversation, premised on the notion that people aim to cooperate (i.e. work together) to understand one another. Grice proposes four maxims which must be observed for such cooperation to take place. Speakers should: (1) give adequate information – neither too little nor too much (quantity); (2) not tell lies (quality); (3) be relevant (relation); (4) avoid obscurity (manner). Leech adds a fifth, politeness principle: (5) be polite. Accidental failure to observe these maxims ‘violates’ the cooperative principle. Deliberate violations ‘flout’ them. Grice’s and Leech’s models can be aligned with a consensus model of communication and, by implication, society. In this view misunderstanding is basically the result of ‘a failure to communicate’; the desire or need not to cooperate is treated as abnormal or *deviant. However, this emphasis can only be maintained if the persistently unequal power relations in actual societies are treated as abnormal. In a conflict model of language and society ‘misunderstanding’ is the systemic result of fundamental differences of interest. ‘Breakdowns in communication’ are the symptoms not the causes. It is therefore also necessary to recognise a kind of ‘non-cooperative’ (or, perhaps better, ‘assertiveness’) principle. This occasions some supplementary maxims: (1a) ask for more or different information; (2a) don’t expect to be told ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’; (3a) ask ‘relevant to whom?’, whose interests are being served? (4a) look for the loose ends which must have been tied up or snipped off to achieve total clarity; (5a) be forthright and assertive – if not exactly ‘impolite’!

coordination See *sentences.

creole A more fully developed and self-sufficient form of language than pidgin, from which creoles in part derive. Pidgins are limited forms of secondary, supporting language used for minimal functional understanding in such areas as work, trade and religion and are often tied to specific master–slave and slave–slave relations. Pidgins have no native speakers. Creoles, however, have developed all the major features and functions of a language and do have native speakers. Many Afro-Caribbean Englishes are creoles (e.g., Collins 5.1.5 c), and these often carry traces of other languages of empire such as Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch as well as of many native, non-European languages. Creoles are languages palpably in the making, much as the European vernaculars formed after the Roman Empire.

D

declarative A statement; also see *sentences and *speech acts.

defamiliarisation Also called de-automatisation (translating Russian ostraneniye). A FORMALIST term designating techniques for refreshing familiar perceptions, compar­able to Brecht’s more politically charged notion of ‘making strange’ (Verfemdung). *Cognitively, both these processes bear comparison with Cook’s *schema refreshment; linguistically, they entail concerted foregrounding of aspects of language, and perhaps kinds of *deviation.

deictics See *context-sensitive words.

denotation What appears to be the core meaning or primary *reference of a word, as distinct from general cultural connotations and personal associations. For instance, ‘nourishment’, ‘food’, ‘grub’ and ‘yummies’ all have something in common. They all refer to ‘things to eat’. That is their shared denotation. Similarly, ‘senior citizen’, ‘the elderly’, ‘OAP (old-age pensioner)’, ‘old fogey’ and ‘wrinkly’ all have overlapping denotations but markedly different connotations.

deviation Narrowly, any localised twist or turn of the language away from what is expected (e.g., ‘I got up at the crack of lunchtime’ (expecting ‘dawn’); ‘lipsmackinthirst­quenchinacetastin . . . ’ (expecting breaks between words)). Broadly, any way in which expected norms or rules are bent or extended. In the sense that we all constantly make more or less unique utterances, we are bending and extending the language all the time. Thus, paradoxically, some degree of ‘deviance’ is normal. Poets are especially prone to verbal ‘deviance’. See foregrounding.

diachronic (from Greek dia-chronos – ‘across-time’) To do with language change; a historical approach to language. Conversely, a synchronic approach (from Greek syn­chronos – ‘together/same-time’) concentrates on language at a given point in time (e.g., now, or across the fourteenth century). A diachronic perspective focuses on variation; a synchronic perspective focuses on variety. Each offers a different view of the same thing.

dialect The distinctive vocabulary choices, syntactic combinations and accent identified with a particular region within a national language. Some approaches distinguish variety according to user (dialect) and use (register). Idiolect is the particular and to some extent peculiar mix of varieties associated with a single person, her or his ‘linguistic fingerprint’.

diaspora Greek for ‘dispersal’, this was initially applied to the dispersal of the ancient Greek nations and the tribes of Israel, and was subsequently extended to the dispersal of any linguistic community or ethnic group. For instance, the Afro-Caribbean diaspora includes all those with roots in – or regular routes through – those parts of the world. Linguistically, diasporic communities are often distinguished by wide variation and, at later stages, by a number of standards; in earlier stages they may be characterised by *pidgins and *creoles.

diction Archaic word for vocabulary or word-choice usually associated with RHETORIC and poetry.

direct and indirect speech The difference between, respectively, a supposedly accurate tran/script and an approximate report of what someone has said. Thus ‘I’m coming,’ he said records direct speech, while He said that he was coming reports through indirect speech. Direct speech usually entails quotation marks, a separate phrase attributing the speech, and some differences in pronouns and tenses. Indirect speech usually entails the absence of quotation marks, a grammatically integrated attributing phrase, and a uniform consistency of pronouns and tenses. Free direct speech would simply be I’m coming (with no framing attribution). Free indirect speech occurs where the distinction between speaker and reporter is blurred and there is an inexplicit conflation of personal references and temporal perspectives – when we cannot be sure whose words are being represented (e.g., Coming, yes. Going when?, where who is perceived as saying or thinking these words would depend on context). All these ways of representing speech can be applied to and to some extent overlap with ways of representing thought and other perceptions (e.g., hearing and seeing). Simply substi­tute analogous structures using ‘thinks/thought that’, ‘sees/saw that’, ‘hears/heard that’, etc.

discourse Several meanings are currently available: 1 a formal speech or treatise (archaic); 2 conversation in particular or dialogue in general; 3 stretches of text above the level of the sentence, including context and intertextuality; 4 COMMUNICATIVE practices expressing the interests of a particular socio-historical group or institution. Discourse analysis engages with the last three in varying permutations.

E

ellipsis Omission of items implicitly understood from the context (e.g., ‘See you tomorrow!’, which omits ‘I/we’ll’). Ellipsis is especially common in speech.

etymology The history or derivation of words and its study.

euphemism (Greek for ‘well-speaking’) Words and phrases which cover or obscure culturally taboo subjects, often associated with birth, death, war, sex, defecation and, in some contexts, money, religion and politics. Dysphemisms (Greek ‘bad-speaking’) are words emphasising unpleasantness. Most euphemisms and dysphemisms are culture-specific and express a culture’s symptomatic fears and anxieties. The famous Monty Python ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch is constructed almost wholly of euphemisms: ‘rest in peace’, ‘gone to meet its maker’, ‘pushing up the daisies’, joined the choir invisible’, etc. Such materials are common in comedy and carnival generally.

F

figurative Language composed of *metaphors, metonyms and similes (see imagery) and not perceived to be ‘literal’. However, all language is in some sense figurative in that even the most literal word turns out to have a metaphorical aspect. For instance, the word ‘literal’ itself derives from littera, the Latin word for ‘letter’, and that in turn relates to a word for ‘shore’, ‘margin’ or ‘boundary’ – and so on.

finite and non-finite See *verbs.
foregrounding Any linguistic feature or strategy which draws attention to itself against an assumed background in the text and/or the language at large. Sound patterning, visual presentation, word choice (e.g., metaphor) and syntax may all be foregrounded in this way. So may genres and MEDIA when there is a marked shift or switch from one to another (e.g., a sudden shift into prose during a poem, or into song during a nat­uralistic play).

form 1 Outward appearance or structure of words as *signifiers, usually considered without reference to meaning and function as *signifieds. 2 Formal language tends to be precise, impersonal and self-consciously ‘proper’, and to be associated with public occasions. Informal language tends to be looser, more personal and relaxed. 3 FORMALISM (‘Russian’) was the name given to an early structuralist movement by its detractors (see 2.4).

fronting In grammar, moving a feature from the middle or end to prominence at the front (e.g., ‘Slowly, she turned the page’).

function 1 Language in use – what words do to us and what we do with them (cf. *form and *grammar – functional). 2 FUNCTIONALISM (‘Czech’) was a socially and historically aware development of FORMALISM (see 3.3).

G

grammar Broadly, structures of LANGUAGE and their study. More narrowly and usually, grammar is synonymous with syntax (including *morphology), one of the three main categories of linguistic analysis (the other two being *phonology and *semantics). Grammar/syntax thus conceived is concerned with the formal rules for structuring stretches of language, chiefly at the level of the *clause and the *sentence. The kind of grammar linguists are primarily concerned with is descriptive (describing what people actually do with language) rather than prescriptive or proscriptive (telling people what they should or shouldn’t do measured against some normative notion of correctness). In the teaching of a particular language, ‘Grammars’ are text-books designed to guide learners in well-formed and *acceptable structuring of that language. There are two main contemporary models of grammar:

1. generative-transformational grammar, which concentrates upon the mentalistic notion of a universal, inbuilt language *competence and language as the generation of infinite ‘surface’ structures from finite ‘deep’ structures (primarily associated with Chomsky);
2. functional grammar, which concentrates upon how language choice and com­bination relate to what people actually do with language in society and history, primarily associated with Halliday (see *participants and processes and *circumstance).

graphology visible verbal marks on or in some material such as wood, stone, paper, plastic, or a TV screen; also the study of those marks. Graphology includes *spelling, *punc­tuation, visual layout and all aspects of visible design.

H

hedges, hedging Ways of playing down or weakening the impact of an utterance (e.g., by adding ‘well, . . . ’, ‘a sort of a’, ‘kind of’, ‘perhaps’, ‘a little’, ‘in a way’, etc.). Ways of playing up or strengthening the impact of an utterance include such intensifiers as ‘certainly’, ‘absolutely’, ‘in every respect’, ‘always’. All are aspects of *modality.

heteroglossia (‘varied-tonguedness’, the usual translation of Bahktin’s raznorechie)The fact that any supposedly unitary national language (e.g., ENGLISH) is actually made up of many colliding and coalescing varieties and is therefore inherently heteroglossic a hybrid. For Bakhtin, every language is ceaselessly subject to centrifugal forces (tending to fragment it) and centripetal forces (tending to unify it). Because these forces are never equal, LANGUAGE has a constant tendency towards variation and change, even to the point of one language turning into another. Polyglossia refers to the ‘external’ interaction of notionally discrete national languages. Ultimately, hetero­glossia and polyglossia interrelate. Monoglossia is the notion of a single, unitary language.
 
hyperbole Emphatic exaggeration, e.g., ‘There was tons to eat.’ ‘You’re an absolute star!’.

hypotaxis The use of dependent, subordinated *clauses; cf. *parataxis.

I

idiolect See dialect.

idiom See *morphology.

imperative A form of command or direction (e.g., ‘Go!’); see *sentences and *speech acts.

implicature In *speech acts, those subtle, indirect meanings which go beyond or even subvert a speaker’s apparently literal, direct meanings. For instance, depending on the situation, ‘Have you done the washing up yet?’ can be intended as (1) a reproach; (2) an offer to do it oneself; (3) an invitation to come to bed; (4) any other plausibly ‘indirect’ meaning you come up with. Cf. *locutions.

inference The sense-making activity of listeners, readers and viewers: how we actually go about constructing meaning out of the materials we are given, most obviously through ‘gap-filling’. Thus we may be told ‘A man lived in a house’; but the precise kind of ‘man’ and ‘house’ we imagine will depend on inference. Addressers may imply – or indirectly implicate – particular meanings; but it is still up to addressees to make their own inferences. See *cognitive linguistics and *pragmatics; also *locations.

information structure The organisation of verbal or other information. The basic questions are: 1 What item of information is introduced first (the theme)? 2 What item is held over till later (the rheme)? 3 What knowledge and attitudes are being assumed (the ‘given’ premises)? 4 What knowledge and attitudes are being offered as additional or supplementary (the ‘new’)? For instance, the headlines ‘10 shot in Afghanistan’ and ‘Taliban insurgents (or Allied forces) shoot ten Western soldiers (or local residents) in Helmland province.’ have different information structures. This is not only a matter of word-choice and phrasing, significant though these are. It is also a matter of grammatical structure and the construction of agency and causality. These two sentences y begin and close with different information (here using, respectively, *passive and *active verbal structures); they make varying assumptions about and demands upon the reader’s existing knowledge; and they offer (or omit) to supplement that knowl­edge in different ways.

intensifiers See *hedges. interrogative Questioning; see *sentences and *speech acts.

intonation A crucial *paralinguistic aspect of speech-sound embracing pitch (relative height of voice), *stress (relative force), and voice quality (husky, whispered, etc.). Intonation in English may be broadly distinguished in so far as it is rising (suggesting a question, exclamation or general excitement); even (suggesting a statement); or falling (suggesting an emphatic statement or disappointment). Many permutations are possible.

L

lexical item A precise, if cumbersome, alternative to ‘word or phrase’. For instance, consider the alternatives in ‘she loves/adores/has a liking for/is fond of ice cream’. Even though the number of *words in each verb phrase varies from one to four, there is just one structurally corresponding lexical item in each case.

literacy See *oral, orality.

locutions All *speech acts can be broken down analytically into three components: the illocution (what the speaker intends or indirectly *implicates); the locution (the material of the message itself); and the perlocution (what the listener actually *infers and understands).

M

meta-A Greek-derived prefix meaning ‘above’ or ‘over’ much favoured in contemporary criticism. Metalanguage is a comment on language in language: any way in which the act of verbal communication itself is drawn attention to. Hence the metalinguistic function of the highlighted words in the following: ‘You might say it’s a catastrophe, in a sense’. ‘My reading of this is that . . . ’. All the terms in this glossary also offer a technical metalanguage, words describing and defining words. By extension, texts which foreground the actual process of composition and draw attention to their own ‘made’ status are termed metatextual.

metaphor Talking of one thing in terms of another by implicit substitution or compression. For instance, take Walcott’s densely packed lines: ‘The world’s green age then was a rotting lime/whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text.’ Here a number of usually discrete concepts and words are conflated so as to be seen in terms of one another: the world + green + age; charnel + galleon + text. However, a great deal of routine language use is also metaphorical in its tendency to colour one kind of experience with another (e.g., ‘Where in hell (or heaven) is that screwdriver? I’d dig it out for you, but I’m not thinking straight this morning’). These are fairly dead metaphors, though even then not wholly without signs of rhetorical colour. Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy opens with a number of extended metaphors, which may also be considered ‘mixed’ or ‘compounded’, depending how successfully integrated you reckon them to be. Explicit comparison signalled by such words as ‘like’, ‘as’, ‘compare’, ‘looks/seems like’ is called *simile. See*figurative.

metonymy Talking of one thing in terms of some physically connected part of it; e.g., ‘There was a motion from the floor, so the chair called for a seconder.’ Cf. ‘farm hands’ (i.e. manual workers, who work with their hands) and ‘a motor’ (i.e. car).

modality Those features of language which most obviously express the ‘angling’ of events in terms of possibility, probability, conditionality and obligation. All the highlighted alternatives in the following contribute to modality: ‘I must/may/could/ ought to say, I certainly/really do rather/quite/perhaps like this very much/a little/ sometimes’. (A much more simply modalised version would be ‘I say I like this’.) Typically, then, it is the *auxiliary verbs and the *adverbs (including *hedges and intensifiers) which contribute most obviously to modality.

modification, pre- and post-See *noun groups.

monoglossia See heteroglossia.

morphology The internal structure of words; also its study. For instance, ‘reactive’ consists of the morphemes re + act + -ive.

• ‘re-’ is a bound prefix because it cannot appear on its own and is attached to the front of the word;
• ‘act’ is a free stem because it could stand on its own and is here the core around which the word is built;
• ‘-ive’ is a bound suffix in that it cannot stand on its own and is attached to the end of the word.

Other ways of word-building, aside from basically adding morphemes, include:

• mutation, changing the shape of the root (e.g., ‘mouse’ plural ‘mice’– not ‘mouses’; ‘run’ past tense ‘ran – not ‘runned’);
• compounds, a word made of two or more words which combine to produce a new word with a specialised meaning; thus a ‘hotdog’ is not a ‘hot dog’; a ‘greenhouse’ is not a ‘green house’;
• idioms, which are similar to compounds in that they combine a number of words to make a larger unit with a specialised sense; thus ‘to put your foot in it’ or ‘throw up’.

Word-building is going on all the time. Witness this tiny sample from the hundreds of thousands of the past twenty years: ‘sell-by date’, ‘privatise’, ‘prioritise’, ‘bio­degradable’, ‘trekkie’, ‘cyber-punk’. And then there is always the possibility of making words just for the hell and heaven  of it, as does Lewis Carroll in  ‘Jabberwocky’ (@ 5.1.3). 

multifunctionality The fact that the same word often has more than one grammatical function and can operate in various *word-classes. Thus ‘light’ can function as noun, verb and adjective: ‘Have you a light?’ (noun); ‘Light my fire!’ (verb); ‘What a light, airy room’ (adjective). In fact the great majority of words are grammatically multifunctional. ‘Table’, ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘gender’, ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘race’, ‘book’, for instance, can all be used as nouns or verbs or adjectives.

multilingual See *bilingual.

N

nominalisation The realisation of an event as a *noun (and, by implication, a fixed ‘thing’ or product) rather than as a *verb (and, by implication, an action, state or process). For instance, ‘recession’ is an abstract noun which nominalises what might otherwise be expressed verbally as ‘the process whereby employment, wages, output and profits are constantly driven downwards’ or (using an active rather than a passive verb) ‘the process whereby certain people constantly drive employment, wages, output and profits downwards’. Notice that ‘employment’, ‘wages’, ‘output’ and ‘profits’ are also, in turn, nominalisations; as, indeed, are ‘process’ and ‘people’. Try realising each of these nouns through a definition which involves a verb and you will see that this automatically entails a sense of process and change as well as, perhaps, responsibility and agency.

nouns   A *word-class (or ‘part of speech’) distinguished from and braced against other word-classes such as verb, adjective and adverb. For instance, only nouns would be likely to fill the slot marked ‘X’ in ‘X fell suddenly’ (where X might be ‘Rain’, ‘Constantinople’, ‘He’). And only similar kinds of item would fill the ‘Y’ slot in ‘Falling towards Y’ (where Y might be ‘home’, ‘happiness’, ‘them’, ‘England’). Nouns may be distinguished as:

• common nouns, which refer to types or categories of phenomena – e.g., ‘table’, ‘atmosphere’, ‘truth’, ‘democracy’ – which may themselves be further distinguished as concrete (e.g., ‘table’) or abstract (e.g., ‘truth’), as well as count (e.g., ‘pea/peas’) or non-count (e.g., ‘cosmos’ but not ‘cosmoses’);
• proper nouns, which name specific persons, places and events (e.g., ‘England’, ‘Tom Paine’, ‘St Petersburg’, your own name and address);
• pronouns, which are a special kind of *context-sensitive word in that they ‘stand in’ for a noun (hence ‘pro-’ noun) and can also be further distinguished, namely: the personal pronouns ‘I, me, my, mine’, ‘we, us’, ‘you’, ‘s/he’, ‘they’, ‘it’; the interrogative pronouns ‘who?’, ‘whom?’, ‘what?’, ‘which?’, ‘where?’, ‘when?’, ‘how?’ and ‘why?’; the relative pronouns, which are similar to the latter except that they occur in relative or dependent *clauses (e.g., ‘I’ll tell you what, the man who . . . ’; also ‘that’ as in ‘the man that arrived’); and the demonstrative pronouns, which distinguish ‘this/these’ from ‘that/those’ (e.g., ‘This is it’). See *noun groups.

noun groups   A structure built around a *noun. This structure is best understood in terms of *modification. Pre- and post-modifiers are items placed, respectively, before and after a noun (which is then called the head of the noun group). Traditionally, most modifiers are called *adjectives and adjectival phrases. However, distinguishing pre- and post-modification has the advantage of allowing us to be precise about placement and also to embrace dependent phrases and *clauses of all kinds. (*Articles/predeterminers are pre-modifiers that are usually distinguished separately.) We thus have an overall analytical scheme like this:

pre-modifiers		head		post-modification
Those (pre-det.) magnificent	young	men	in	their flying          machines
				(pre-mod)           (head)

(Notice that the post-modifying phrase is itself composed of a noun group with ‘machines’ as the head and ‘their’ and ‘flying’ as pre-modifiers; ‘in’ is a preposition.) Thus, grammatically, we have a noun group within a noun group; while, perceptually, we have a hierarchical layering of one perception within another. Modification has a prodigious effect on the way we see what is represented by the noun. Here, for instance, is a completely stripped-down, unmodified version of the above noun group: ‘men’!

O

object, direct and indirect See *sentences.

open set See *closed set.

oral, orality The ‘speaking’ side of speech (the ‘listening’ side is strictly aural). Oracy – by analogy with *literacy – refers to basics skills in speaking and listening. ‘Oratorical’ skills are their more highly developed counterpart, as are ‘literary’ skills relative to basic literacy.

Orature is sometimes used to designate especially prized and valued oral performance, again as distinct from ‘literature’.

orthography Letter-forms and *spelling; also their study.

P

paradigm   See *choice and combination.

Paralinguistic features  Those aspects of speech-sound which tend to get left out or crudely registered in the transition to writing: *intonation, *stress, pitch (relative height of voice), and voice quality (tense, relaxed, whispered, husky, etc.). Along with *body language, such features are often fundamental to the precise meaning and effect of speech.

parallelism   Repetition with variation: the most common form of textual patterning. Parallelism can be a larger structural feature of texts (e.g., repetition of the same verse form but using different words; mirroring of main plot and sub-plot; recurrence of similar motifs); or it can be highly localised (e.g., ‘I am the way, the life and the truth’, which has a parallel structure of definite article plus different nouns).

parataxis   The use of coordinated *clauses; cf. *hypotaxis.

part of speech   An archaic name for *word-class.

participants and processes   Two of the three basic structural categories in functional *grammar, the other being *circumstances (see Halliday and Mathiessen 2004).  Typically, participants are expressed by *nouns, processes by *verbs, and circumstances by *adverbs. For instance, the two following sentences have the sameraw structure at a primary level of analysis:

(1)	The car	hit	he wall	at high speed
(2)	I	shall love	you	for ever
	participant 1	process	participant 2	circumstance
	(noun)	(verb)	(noun)	(adverb)

In each case we are left with a sense of participants (‘persons’ or ‘things’) being brought into specific relations by processes in specific circumstances.

There are many kinds of participant–process–circumstance structure in language, and each one corresponds to a particular way of verbalising experience. The main ones are:

• material, in which something is physically done or acted upon and a change is effected. Typical participants are agent and affected, e.g., ‘The army / exploded / the bomb’ (agent – *transitive process – affected) and ‘The bomb / exploded’ (affected – *intransitive process);
• mental-perceptual, in which participants do not so much act on materials as sense and express awareness of them through the processes ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘believe’, ‘know’, etc. Typical participants are senser and phenomenon, e.g., ‘They / know / the truth’ and ‘She / loves / you’ (both senser – process – phenomenon);
• relational, in which one participant is defined by or relates to another through the processes ‘to be’ (‘is’, ‘was’, etc.), ‘become’, ‘seem’, as well as ‘have’, ‘own’, etc. Typical participants are, respectively, identified and identifier or possessor and possessed, e.g., ‘Roses / are / red’ (identified – process – identifier) and ‘Fred / has / a whippet’ (possessor – process – possessed);
• verbalising, in which the linguistic processes of ‘saying’, ‘writing’, ‘reading’, ‘telling’, ‘informing’, ‘advising’, etc. are themselves what the participants are engaged in. Typical participants are addresser and addressee (e.g., ‘I / am writing / this / for you’ (addresser – *transitive process – address – addressee) and ‘I / am writing’ (addresser / *intransitive process).

participles   See *verbs.

passive  See *active and *verbs.

performative     An utterance that overtly performs an action or constitutes a transaction (e.g., ‘I hereby swear . . . ’, ‘I declare you man and wife’, ‘I name this building . . . ’, ‘I promise to pay . . . ’). *Pragmatics extends this insight to all *speech acts.

phatic   Language which maintains social contact and checks that communication channels are open (for example, through tags such as ‘ . . . , you know’, ‘ . . . , isn’t it?’)

phoneme   See *phonology.

phonetics    The study of the physical production and reception of speech sound. Much attention is paid to the articulatory mechanisms whereby speech is produced, for example those which articulate a difference between ‘voiced’ sounds (where there is vibration in the glottis) and ‘unvoiced’ sounds (where there isn’t). Thus, just as a distinct contrast in sound is essential if we are to recognise different phonemes (see *phonology), so there has to be a distinct contrast in the way the sounds are produced. (See Appendix B for an alphabet of English speech sounds.) For instance,

• vocal cords vibrate or they don’t: /b/ contrasts with /p/; /d/ contrasts with /t/; /v/ contrasts with /f/; /z/ contrasts with /s/. Each of these pairs of sounds is produced similarly, except that in each case the first item is voiced and the second is unvoiced. (All vowels and diphthongs involve vibration of the cords in the glottis and are therefore voiced.)
• air is released suddenly or continuously, thus resulting in a distinction between sudden, plosive sounds: e.g., /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/ and continuous, fricative sounds: e.g., /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/. These last three (/s/, /ʃ/ and /z/) are all present, respectively, in the sounds of the word ‘sessions’; these are also called ‘hissing sounds’ or *sibilants.
• the nasal cavity is used or it isn’t: /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/ all sound in the nasal cavity. All are present, in that order, in the word managing.

phonology   The sound-system of a particular language; also its study. A basic concept of phonology is the phoneme. Phonemes are the minimum distinctive differences of sound routinely recognised in a particular language. For instance, each of the following words, when spoken, begins with a different sound: ‘bin’, ‘din’, ‘sin’, ‘shin’, ‘thin’, ‘tin’. Each of these sounds is an *acceptable English phoneme at the beginning of a word. The sounds corresponding to ‘ngin’ or ‘zdgin’, however, are not acceptable in such a position and therefore not a part of routine English phonology. However, if we go on to include the phonological characteristics of the many varieties of English, including regional dialects and the various national standards (American, Caribbean, Australian, etc.), the potential sound system of the language is much more extensive and flexible. Cf. phonetics. See Appendix B for a standard Phonetic Alphabet of British and American English.

phrase A cluster of words grammatically simpler than a *clause, often taking the form of a *noun group or *adverbial phrase (e.g., ‘those amazing women’, ‘up the road’).

pidgin   See *creole.

plosive See *phonetics.

poetics The study of forms and structures in LITERATURE in general and poetry in particular; the root sense is ‘making’ of all kinds (from Greek poiesis). Primarily associated with FORMALISM and STRUCTURALISM, and drawing on the technical resources of *stylistics, poetics has also been developed with *functional, *pragmatic and RHETORICAL dimensions.

polyglossia    See *heteroglossia.

pragmatics    Broadly, study of the practical conditions relating LANGUAGE to context. More narrowly, systematic study of the premises, assumptions, expectations, predictions and review processes which underpin successful interaction in language. The most immediately useful work in pragmatics concentrates on ‘real world’ language, especially conversation (rather than made-up examples) and is supported by a wide range of techniques and models concerned with *dialogue, *speech acts, genre and discourse. Pragmatic studies draw attention to the ways in which people do and do not *cooperate in producing meaning, including the interplay between an addresser’s *implicature and an addressee’s *inference. See *cognitive linguistics.

pre- and post-modification    See *noun groups.

prepositions (also called particles)     Items that typically precede nouns and noun groups and also occur in phrasal verbs, assisting in orienting and interrelating them (e.g., ‘up’ and ‘down’ in ‘up/down the road’ and ‘to get up/down’).

processes    See *participants and *verbs.

progressive and non-progressive    See *verbs: aspect.

pronouns    See *nouns and *context-sensitive words.

pronunciation   See accent and *intonation.

punctuation    A system of graphic notation developed to point up grammatical, logical or rhythmic structures in writing and print. The basic range of punctuation current in written and printed modern English is:

,   comma – dash ; semi-colon : colon . full stop

...   suspension dots ( ) brackets ‘ ’ single inverted commas “ ” double inverted commas

?   question mark ! exclamation mark

’   apostrophe - hyphen Capitalisation, s p a c i n g , paragraphing

indentation, * asterisks, numbering and lettering 1 2 3 . . . a b c . . . (sub- and superscript), specialised symbols ($ £ % & @ etc.).

Many of these punctuation marks have become relatively standardised since the development of printing. However, like any linguistic system, that of punctuation is constantly changing and evolving to meet new needs. Ostensibly the same items also develop new functions. For instance, in the Middle Ages the punctus (.) was widely used to signal pauses, the length of pause being indicated by its height above the line. The punctus may look like a full stop but it did not, as now, signal the end of sentences. That function was signalled by spacing or another symbol that has now disappeared. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries Nouns were commonly highlighted by the use of initial Capitals (as here, and in modern German). Meanwhile, in contemporary written English there are signs of a marked decrease in the use of the semi-colon (;) – which came in during the fifteenth century – and an increase in the use of commas and dashes. The history of the dash (–) is particularly interesting. Though now sometimes associated with informal writing (e.g., postcards and notes) and stigmatised as casual, the dash was widely used in writing of all kinds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was also a very common item of punctuation in the verse of, for instance, Byron (see 5.1.3) and Dickinson (5.4.5). Apostrophes, meanwhile, are hovering on the brink of dissolution and probably eventual extinction. The fact that they signal missing letters is still obvious with, say, ‘can’t’ (i.e. ‘can(no)t’ and ‘it’s’ (i.e. ‘it (i)s’); but it’s hardly obvious with the possessive usage that records a form lost since the fifteenth century (e.g., ‘man’s’ from earlier ‘man(ne)s’). Meanwhile, other symbols are becoming unexpectedly current. The mark @ , for instance, was previously an accounting symbol meaning ‘so many X @ (at a rate of) $Y’. But now @ has had a new lease of life and is widely recognised as meaning ‘at the e-mail site of’.

R

reference   The capacity of language to ‘name’ and thereby categorise phenomena in the extra-linguistic world. What is referred to is called the referent.

register   A traditional term for language variety as it relates to use (medium, situation and purpose) as distinct from user (see dialect). Typical questions on register are: Is this language written, printed or otherwise recorded (e.g., electronically)? Is it for use in formal or informal, public or private situations? Is it for technical or non-technical purposes?

reported speech   See *direct and indirect speech.

rhythm   Perceived regularities of *stress in speech, poetry and song.

S

schema (plural schemata); also variously called a frame, script or scenario (see Stockwell 2002).   A mental representation of some abstract category or recurrent and recognisable activity which may be invoked when making sense of a particular text or situation (e.g., a shopping encounter, an interview, an exam, an essay). Schema refreshment whenever a particular instance is so constructed or framed as to prompt a revised understanding of the initial schema (e.g., playfully saying ‘Do you come here often?’ to a colleague or friend you frequently see there, thereby ‘refreshing’ the informal schema of polite chit-chat; cf. *defamiliarisation). Schema reinforcement involves saying and doing what most people expect in the circumstances. The activities of reinforcing and refreshing schemata are crucial to the recognition and transformation of genre (kinds of text and utterance) and discourse (types of languagein- action).

selectional features   The attempt in traditional *semantics to describe word-meaning through an array of *binary oppositions: + or _ *animate; + or _ human; + or _ female; + or _ edible ; + or _ concrete, etc. Thus the word ‘man’ can be described as ‘+ human _ female’; while ‘bitch’ (i.e. female dog) is ‘_ human + female’. The main problem is that the great bulk of language use turns out to be figurative, idiomatic or both. *Metaphor, for instance, is a routine – not an exceptional – dimension of language (e.g., the spatio-temporal metaphor ‘dimension’ in this very sentence). A more flexible and powerful approach to meaning is offered by *pragmatics and the study of discourse in social and historical context.

semantics    Verbal meanings and their study. Along with *phonology and *syntax, semantics is one of the three main areas of traditional language study. (The ‘sem-’ part derives from Greek semeion meaning sign, a root semantics shares with *semiotics, the study of sign-systems in general.) Many current approaches stress the relation between meaning, context and *function. Cf. discourse and *pragmatics.

sentences Several traditional definitions of ‘the sentence’ are current:

1. a series of words which expresses a complete thought;
2. a series of words beginning with a capital letter and ending with a full stop;
3. a grammatical structure containing, at least, a subject and main verb.

Whatever their value as rough rule-of-thumb guides, none of these definitions proves infallible as an analytical tool. After all, what is ‘a complete thought’? Is ‘Eeeee’ a sentence? And isn’t ‘A packet of cigs, please’ a passable sentence – even though there’s no verb and it’s hard to say whether ‘a packet of cigs’ is grammatically subject or object? In fact, it proves extremely difficult to describe or define the concept ‘sentence’ so as to cover all or perhaps even the majority of cases. For the fact remains that the majority of language use is still predominantly *oral and *conversational. It is rooted in *dialogic ‘give and take’ and substantially shared or exchanged structures. Indeed, in conversation the nearest equivalent to the concept ‘sentence’ is probably the ‘move’. Theoretically, then, it proves unproductive to try to define the sentence, as though it were a single, uniform entity. Of much more practical use is some sense of the various types of sentence. These are:

•  major sentences, which contain a main verb and grammatical subject and are the favoured type in formal writing and speech (e.g., ‘The cat sat on the mat’);
• minor sentences, which don’t contain a main verb and are the favoured type in conversation, as well as many types of short text such as headlines, titles and captions (e.g., ‘Over there’, ‘If you like’, ‘Some time in the future . . . maybe?’, ‘A PLJ day’ (advert), ‘Miners sympathy strike’ (headline));
• simple, single-clause sentences (e.g., ‘The boy’s here. He brought his dog’) and complex multi-clause sentences, which may be *coordinated (e.g., ‘The boy’s here and he brought his dog’), *subordinated (e.g., ‘The boy who brought his dog is here’) or both (e..g. ‘The boy who brought his dog was here and now he’s gone’);
• declarative (stating); interrogative (questioning); imperative / directive (commanding or instructing); exclamative (expressing surprise).

Sentences may be traditionally analysed (or ‘parsed’) in terms of subject, verb, objects (direct and indirect), complement and adjunct/adverbial. Thus:

(1)	She	wrote	a letter	to me	in the morning
	subject	verb	direct object	indirect object	adjunct
(2)	The late train	probably	will be	an overnight sleeper
	subject	adjunct	verb	complement

Traditionally speaking, the subject governs or controls the verb and is typically a *noun or noun group. The *verb (including the verb group) is a ‘doing’, ‘being’ or ‘relating’ word and expresses actions, states or relations amongst the other items. The direct object is the object, focus or result of the activity and is typically a noun or noun group. The indirect object (also typically a noun or noun group) is the person or thing to or for whom the activity relates. The adjunct supplies information on the circumstances or conditions of the activity and is typically an *adverb or adverbial group. The complement is an extension of the subject introduced by parts of such verbs as ‘to be’, ‘seem’, ‘appear’, etc. All these structures can be analysed in finer detail, at another level of ‘delicacy’, in terms of their constituent noun, verb and adverbial (group) structures, including *prepositions / particles. For structural analysis of sentences in terms of functional *grammar, see *participants and processes and *circumstances.

sibilants, sibilance  The ‘hissing’ fricative sounds /s/, /ʃ/ and /z/; e.g., in that order, in ‘sessions’ .

sign, signifier, signified Fundamental terms in *semiotics, the study of sign-systems (including language). A sign consists of a signifier (the material which does thesignifying; e.g., the sounds in air or marks on paper of the English word ‘tree’) anda signified (the concept or category of experience that is signified: whatever weunderstand ‘tree’ to mean). Signifier and signified combine to make a sign. However,there is no necessary and fixed relation between signifier and signified, as witnessedby the simple fact that corresponding words in other languages are said and writtendifferently and may refer to somewhat different things (e.g., French arbre, German Baum and Russian djerevo). There is thus an ultimate instability in the constructionof verbal signs. Following Peirce, we may also distinguish three major kinds of sign:

1. indexical, where there is a physical connection between signifier and signified (e.g., smoke indicates that there is combustion);
2. iconic, where there is a physical resemblance between signifier and signified (e.g., all kinds of representational painting, statuary, photography and film which depict recognisable phenomena);
3. symbolic, where there is a purely arbitrary, learned relation between signifier and signified (e.g., traffic lights, chess, Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) and most verbal LANGUAGE).

simile     An explicitly marked comparison of one thing with another, typically involving such linking words as ‘like’, ‘as’, ‘seemed’, ‘appeared’, ‘in the manner of’ (e.g., ‘like a bat out of hell’, ‘as happy as the day is long’). Cf. *metaphor.

sociolect   A linguistic variety defined socially in terms of, say, class, gender, ethnicity and occupation rather than by regional or national accent and dialect alone. Cf. *register.

speech acts    What we actually do with speech and, by extension LANGUAGE and discourse in general; a part of *pragmatics. Narrowly conceived, speech acts are *performatives, whereby the person using certain words is deemed to be performing an action (e.g., ‘I hereby name this ship . . . ’; ‘I hereby declare you man and wife’; ‘We the undersigned witness this document’, ‘I promise to pay the bearer . . . ’, etc.). But the notion of ‘doing things with words’ can be much extended. For instance, all instances of language-use (spoken or written) can be sorted into four broad categories:

• declaratives, which state (e.g., ‘I am’);
• interrogatives, which question (‘Am I?’, ‘Who am I?’);
• directives / imperatives, which command or instruct (‘Be good’, ‘Do it’);
• exclamatives, which express excitement (‘I am!’ ‘Good grief!!’).

Each of these four basic types can readily be combined with one or more of the others (‘Am I?!’ ‘I am!’). But there are many other things we do with language along with the business of declaring, interrogating, directing and exclaiming. We also threaten, promise, cajole, swear, wheedle, whinge, cringe, complain, protest, submit, assert, etc., etc. In fact, the list is as endless as the number, variety and permutations of social relations in which people engage.

spelling   The spelling system of English is only in part *phonetic and therefore initially vexing for those learning to write it and read it out loud. More positively, the sheer diversity of English spellings is a living record of the many different languages (e.g., Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin and Greek) that have gone into the making of the language. Complications have arisen because these languages often brought their spellings with them; also because spoken English uses over forty *phonemes whereas there are only twenty-six letters in the written alphabet. In addition, since the fifteenth century, printing has tended to fix the norms of writing whereas the forms of speech , especially *pronunciation, have continued to change. Text-message usages commonly involve modified – usually abbreviated – spelling as well as ‘emoticons’ such as smilies. 

stress    A *syllable given stronger emphasis than those immediately surrounding it (usually through a stronger pulse of air). There are three kinds of stress:

• word stress, where every word of two or more syllables has at least one syllable which is emphasised (e.g., orchestra, orchestral and orchestration);
• utterance stress, where speakers routinely have the option of deliberately stressing one word or phrase rather than others. (Thus the words ‘What are you doing here?’ may mean at least five different things depending which word is stressed: ‘What are you doing here?’; ‘What are you doing here?’; ‘What are you doing here?’, etc.);
• rhythmic stress, which is the pattern of stresses (usually involving *parallelism) that occurs in a relatively dispersed fashion in casual speech; becomes more marked in formal speeches (e.g., lectures, political speeches, sermons); and is most marked in poetry and song (see versification).

stylistics    The study of language variety and variation, now usually prefaced by the epithets ‘literary’ or discourse, depending on the primary focus (see LINGUISTICS, STYLISTICS . . . @ 3)

subject                   The grammatical subject is what controls the verb: ‘She saw it’ and ‘The man ran’ have the subjects ‘She’ and ‘The man’. Also see subject @ 4. 

subordination   See *sentences.

syllable                 A single pulse of speech-sound, typically built round a vowel; e.g., monosyllabic/ single-syllable ‘tip’, ‘pipe’, ‘Mum’; di-syllabic/two-syllable ‘tipper’, ‘pipe-smoke’, ‘mother’; and so on. We can also distinguish long and short syllables (e.g., ‘pip’ – ‘pipe’; ‘sell’ – ‘seal’). Analytically, we may represent raw syllable structure thus (c = consonant or consonant cluster; v = vowel or diphthong): ‘library’ = cvcvcv; ‘junk food’ = cvc-cvc. Cf. *alliteration, *stress.

synchronic    See *diachronic.

synonym   A word that may be substituted for another word and, in context, has broadly the same meaning (e.g., ‘food’, ‘nutriment’, ‘grub’, ‘nosh’, etc.). However, even though the basic *denotations or *references of synonyms may be similar, the *connotations and *registers may be vastly different. There are therefore no exact synonyms. Antonyms are words which in some respects are ‘opposites’ (e.g., ‘good/bad’, ‘up/down’, ‘run/walk’); though in many other respects such words must necessarily be similar for the contrast to hold; also see *binary oppositions.

syntagmatic    See *choice and combination.

syntax See *grammar.

T

tense See *verbs.

theme (linguistic) See *information structure.

topics The various subject matters treated over the course of a conversation or text, typi­cally involving development, shifting or switching of topic. See *information structure.

transitivity The *process of ‘carry-over’ or ‘extension’ whereby one *participant is held to affect or in some way relate to another (e.g., ‘Pilots fly aeroplanes’; ‘Writers write texts’). *Intransitivity is a process which does not ‘carry over’ to something else but remains focused on the process itself (e.g., ‘Pilots (or aeroplanes) fly’; ‘Writers write’). Many *verbs may be used transitively or intransitively (e.g., ‘grow’, ‘press’, ‘reach’, ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘read’, ‘write’, etc.). This makes a huge difference to how we perceive the processes and participants in play: the difference between, say, ‘writing and reading something’ (transitively, with the emphasis on the object or product) and simply ‘writing and reading’ (intransitively, with the emphasis on the process). See writing and reading.

U

utterance General term for a stretch of spoken language or a *speech act.

V

variety A capacious term embracing the many kinds of LANGUAGE according to use (see *register) and user (see dialect). Notions of variety – and more dynamically of variation, the process of varying – are often braced against notions of a standard unitary language. Cf. *heteroglossia.

verbs    That class of words in which experience is most obviously conceived as *processes, as distinct from nouns where experience is conceived in terms of relatively stable ‘things’, ‘persons’ or participants. Verbs are highly complex in form and subtle in function. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify the basic form and function of a verb at any one time using the following criteria: tense; aspect; modality; active or passive; non/finite; in/transitive; dynamic or stative. Here all these options are illustrated with the verb ‘to win’:

• tense, the basic temporal dimension (‘when’); e.g., present, ‘she wins’; future, ‘she will win’; simple past, ‘she won’. All these tenses may be further modified in terms of aspect.
• aspect, the temporal dimension of duration or frequency (‘how long or how often’); e.g., instantaneous ‘dramatic’ present, ‘She wins!’ (i.e. now); generalising ‘state’ present, ‘She wins at games’ (i.e. all the time); progressive, continuous present, ‘She’s winning as she comes round the bend’. Taken together, the tense and aspect dimensions of the verb always result in a complex spatio-temporal orientation. This overlaps with modality.
• modality, the most obviously ‘attitudinal’ dimensions of the verb (including various degrees of possibility, probability, condition, concession, obligation and capacity); e.g., ‘she can win’, ‘she must win’ (‘may’, ‘should’, ‘ought to’ and ‘did’, etc.). (Notice that modality is not limited to verbs; see *modality above.)
• active and passive, respectively, the ‘doing’ or ‘done to’ dimensions of the verb; e.g., ‘They won the war’ (active) and ‘The war was won’ (passive). The former specifies a human *agent as the grammatical *subject (‘They’); the latter deletes or delays the agent and focuses on the result as the grammatical subject.
• finite and non-finite, respectively, the ‘specific’ and ‘non-specific’ dimensions of the verb: ‘She won’ and ‘They are winning’ are both finite in that they are marked for tense, person and number. However, ‘To win, or not to win’ (the infinitive) and ‘winning, winning, won!’ (the unattached present and past participles) are both non-finite in that we are not sure precisely who, what or when they apply to.
• *transitive and *intransitive, respectively, verbs that do or do not ‘carry over’ or ‘extend’ from one participant to another: thus ‘She won the race’ is transitive in that it has a participant–process–participant structure: there is ‘carry-over’. However, ‘She won’ and ‘She is winning’ are both intransitive in that they simply have participant–process structure: there is no ‘carry-over’.
• dynamic and stative, respectively, the ‘doing’ and ‘being/having’ dimensions of the verb. Thus ‘The car hit the wall’ is dynamic and involves some material action; but ‘The car is a wreck’ is stative in that we are presented with a state of being: no change, it just is wrecked. For a general overview of the main types of verbal process in functional grammar (material, relational, perceptual, etc.), see *participants and processes.

verbal group   Any phrase organised round a *verb; as distinct from a noun group. A complex verbal group commonly consists of *auxiliary verb plus secondary verb plus main verb(s), perhaps with *adverbs attached; e.g.,

She	has	Already	missed	the train.
	aux. v.	Adv.	main v.
She	has been	Trying	to buy	a ticket.
	aux. v	sec. v.	main v.

Particularly common in modern English and a tricky problem for both language learners and analysts alike are the phrasal or multi-word verbs (e.g., ‘to go up the wall’; ‘ to take out a plate’ (or ‘ to take a plate out’); ‘She threw her hands up’). These have a verb + preposition structure and there is often a choice as to where the *preposition is put.

voice Three quite distinct senses are current: 1 the difference between active and passive forms (‘voices’) of the *verb; 2 the characteristic speech behaviour of a person,technically equivalent to idiolect (see dialect) or loosely equivalent to a person’s ‘verbalidentity’; 3 the articulatory or vocal mechanisms whereby speech is produced (see*phonetics).

vowels See *syllable.

W

word The general term for items that are separated by spaces in writing and, at least potentially, by pauses in speech; cf. *lexical item.
word-class Sets of words which share formal properties and fulfil the same grammatical functions (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs); archaically termed ‘parts of speech’.

And that brings us, for the moment, to

(NOT) THE END

As mentioned at the outset, this brief glossary is merely a beginning. Extend the entries and add other terms which you find particularly useful. The references at the beginning will help in seeing what has already been  identified by other people.