Ablative The case form characteristicallyused to mark a noun indicating the pointaway from which there is movement.Ablaut A vowel alternation that marks agrammatical contrast (e.g., mouse/mice).Absolute universals Patterns or traitsthat occur in all languages.Absolutive In some languages, the caseassociated with both the direct object of atransitive verb and the subject of an intransi-tive verb.Abstract Hypothetical, not phoneticallyrealized. See Underlying.Abstract Case Case that need not beexpressed as inflection.Abstract clause A type of narrative utter-ance that sometimes appears at the begin-ning of a narrative to provide a generalsummary of the story to be told.Abstract representation A phonologicaldescription that is to a greater or lesserdegree distinct from its phonetic realization.Accent Phonetic qualities of a languagevariety that identify it to speakers of othervarieties as different from their own.Accidental gaps Nonoccurring but possi-ble forms of a language (e.g., in English, blork).Accommodation The modification ofspeech patterns according to the speech ofother participants in a discourse.Accuracy Second language production inwhich the structures are nativelike.Accusative The case form characteristi-cally used to mark a direct object.Acoustic phonetics An approach to pho-netics that is concerned with measuring andanalyzing the physical properties of soundwaves produced when we speak.Acquired dysgraphia The impairment ofwriting ability in patients who previouslypossessed normal writing ability (also calledacquired agraphia).Acquired dyslexia The impairment ofreading ability in patients who previouslypossessed normal reading ability (also calledacquired alexia).Acrolect A creole variety that is relativelysimilar to the standard language from whichit arose. (See also Basilect and Mesolect.)

Acronym A word that is formed by takingthe initial letters of (some or all) of thewords in a phrase or title and pronouncingthem as a word (e.g., NATO for North AtlanticTreaty Organization).

Acrophonic principle The representa-tion of sounds by pictures of objects whosepronunciation begins with the sound to berepresented (e.g., the sound [b] might be rep-resented by a picture of a bird).

Active (sentence) A sentence in whichthe NP in the subject position is the agent(the doer) of the action (e.g., Helen paintedthe room).

Address terms The various forms that areused to address people, indicating somethingof one’s relationship to the individualaddressed (e.g., in English, Ms. Callaghan,Professor Van Haar, Jake).

Adjacency pair An ordered pair of utter-ances spoken by two different participants ina conversation.

Adjective (A) A lexical category thatdesignates a property that is applicable to theentities named by nouns, can often takecomparative and superlative endings inEnglish, and functions as the head of anadjective phrase (e.g., red, obese, hearty).

Adjunct See Modifier.

Adjunct Island Condition Prohibitionagainst moving an element such as a wh-word out of a modifier.

Adstratum influence The mutual influ-ence of two equally dominant languages oneach other (e.g., the influence of English andFrench on each other in Montreal).

Adverb (Adv) A lexical category thattypically names properties that can beapplied to the actions designated by verbs(e.g., quickly, fearfully). May also occur in the specifier position for verbs (e.g., neversurrender).

Affective factors Feelings or attitudesthat can affect the success of second lan-guage acquisition (e.g., motivation).

Affix (Af) A bound morpheme that modi-fies the meaning and/or syntactic (sub)cate-gory of the stem in some way (e.g., un- and -able in unreadable).

GLOSSARY

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Affixation The process that attaches anaffix to a base.

Affricates Noncontinuant consonantsthat show a slow release of the closure (e.g.,[tʃ, d�]).

Affrication A process in which stopsbecome affricates.

African American Vernacular English(AAVE) A cover term describing distinctivevarieties of English spoken by Americans ofAfrican descent.

Age-grading The correlation of a particu-lar linguistic variant with social situationsthat are closely associated with a particularage group.

Agent The thematic role of the doer of an action (e.g., Marilyn in Marilyn fed the dolphin).

Agent-patient pattern Sentence patternin which the agent role is assigned to thesubject of an intransitive verb and theagent of a transitive verb; the patientrole is assigned to the object of a transitiveverb or the subject of a state.

Agglutinating languages Languages inwhich words typically contain several mor-phemes, of which usually only one is a lexi-cal category. The others are clearlyidentifiable affixes, each of which typicallyencodes a single grammatical contrast.

Agrammatism An aphasic disturbancecharacterized by the omission of functionwords and inflectional affixes and by syntac-tic comprehension deficits.

Agraphia See Acquired dysgraphia.

Agreement The result of one categorybeing inflected to mark properties of another(e.g., the verb marked for the person and/orthe number of the subject).

Alexia See Acquired dyslexia.

Allomorphs Variants of a morpheme(e.g., [-s], [-z], and [-əz] are allomorphs of theEnglish plural morpheme).

Allophones Variants of a phoneme, usu-ally in complementary distribution andphonetically similar (e.g., voiced and voice-less l in English).

Allophonic distribution The set of dis-tinct phonetic environments in which vari-ants of a phoneme occur.

Alpha notation In stating phonologicalrules, the use of a conventional formula in

which variables (�, �, etc.) are introduced torepresent the value of distinctive features.

Alpha rules Phonological rules stated in aconventional formula in which variables (�,�, etc.) are introduced for the value of dis-tinctive features.

Alphabetic writing A type of writing inwhich symbols represent consonant and/orvowel segments.

Alveolar ridge The small ridge justbehind the upper front teeth.

Alveopalatal (area) The area just behindthe alveolar ridge where the roof of the mouthrises sharply (also called palatoalveolar).

Ambisyllabicity The simultaneous pres-ence of a segment in two adjoining syllables.

Amelioration The process in which themeaning of a word becomes more favorable(e.g., pretty used to mean “tricky, sly, cunning”).

Amerind The group into which all theNative American languages (except for Na-Dené and Eskimo-Aleut stocks) have beenplaced, according to one controversial classi-fication system.

Amerindian languages Languages spo-ken by the aboriginal peoples of North, South,and Central America.

Analogy A source of language change thatinvolves the generalization of a regularitybased on the inference that if elements arealike in some respects, they should be alikein others as well (e.g., bring becoming brungby analogy with ring/rung).

Analytic languages See Isolating languages.

Anaphoric reference The use of a pro-noun that refers to an NP earlier in the dis-course (e.g., her in Hilary ate her dinner).

Angular gyrus An area of the brain thatplays an important role in reading.

Animacy See Animate.

Animate In some languages, a class con-sisting of nouns, most of which have livingreferents.

Antecedent The element that determinesthe interpretation of a pronoun (e.g., Jeremyin Jeremy looked at himself in the mirror).

Anterior A place feature that characterizessounds articulated in front of the alveopala-tal region.

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Antonyms Words or phrases that areopposites with respect to some componentof their meaning (e.g., big and small).Aphasia A language deficit caused bydamage to the brain.Apocope The deletion of a word-finalvowel (e.g., name used to be pronouncedwith a word-final schwa).Application The use to which a computerprogram is put.A-prefixing A relic form in AppalachianEnglish in which a- may be attached to thefront of verbs in the progressive aspect (She’sa-coming) or the front of adverbial comple-ments to the verb (He sat there a-thinking).Arbitrariness A property of communica-tion whereby there is no natural or inherentconnection between a sign and its referent.Areal classification An approach to lan-guage classification that identifies character-istics shared by languages that are in thesame geographical area.Arguments Grammatical dependentsrequired by a verb (e.g., the verb hit requirestwo arguments, namely a hitter as subjectand a person or thing being hit as object).Articulatory phonetics An approach tophonetics that studies the physiologicalmechanisms of speech production.Articulatory processes Adjustments inarticulation that can occur during the pro-duction of speech (e.g., deletion, epenthe-sis, assimilation).Articulatory simplification A processthat facilitates acquisition (e.g., by deleting aconsonant in a complex cluster or inserting avowel to break up a cluster).Arytenoids Two small cartilages in thelarynx that are attached to the vocalfolds, enabling the vocal folds to be drawntogether or apart.Aspect In syntax and morphology, an in-flectional category indicating the manner inwhich an action or event takes place, in par-ticular its duration in time (punctual, repeti-tive, etc.).Aspiration The lag in the onset of vocalicvoicing—accompanied by the release of air—that is heard after the release of certain stops inEnglish (e.g., the first sound of top is aspirated).Assimilation The influence of one seg-ment on another, resulting in a soundbecoming more like a nearby sound in terms

of one or more of its phonetic characteristics(e.g., in English, vowels become nasal if fol-lowed by a nasal consonant).Association line A line linking a symbolthat represents a sound segment with a sym-bol that represents a tone or feature.Atlas survey A linguistic survey that sam-ples speakers according to regional speechcommunities.Automatic summarization An appli-cation of computational linguistics inwhich a computer uses key ideas to create anabstract of an article or set of articles.Autopsy studies Studies based on a post-mortem examination.Autosegmental notation The type ofnotation in phonology that links segmentswith tones or individual features by associa-tion lines.Autosegmental principles Rules thataccount for phonological processes, includingrules that associate features to segmentsand segments to features, and rules that pro-hibit the crossing of association lines.Autosegmental representation A meansof illustrating how phonological features areorganized and how they change as a result ofphonological processes. (See also Autoseg-mental (notation) and Autosegments.)Autosegments Phonological features (suchas manner features and place features)that operate more or less autonomously.Auxiliary verb (Aux) A verb that mustoccur with a main verb and that can undergoinversion (e.g., was in was walking; will inwill win).

Babbling Speech-like sounds produced asbabies acquire and exercise articulatory skills.Back A feature of sounds articulatedbehind the palatal region in the oral cavity.Back (of the tongue) The part of thetongue that is hindmost but still lies in themouth.Back vowel A vowel that is made withthe tongue positioned in the back of themouth (e.g., the vowel sounds in hoot andboard).Backformation A word-formationprocess that creates a new word by removinga real or supposed affix from another wordin the language (e.g., edit came from editorthrough the removal of -or).

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Base The form to which an affix is added(e.g., book is the base for the affix -s in books,modernize is the base for the affix -ed in modernized).Basilect A creole variety that shows theleast influence from the standard languagefrom which it arose. (See also Acrolect andMesolect.)Bilabial Involving both lips (e.g., p, b, andm are all bilabial consonants).Bilingual education An educational pro-gram that involves the use of two languagesin instruction in content areas such as math,science, reading.Bilingualism The state of possessingknowledge of two languages; the disciplinedevoted to the study of the simultaneousacquisition of two languages by children.Binary feature A phonetic or phonologi-cal feature that can have one of only twovalues (e.g., + or − voice).(Bird) call See Call.(Bird)song See Song.Blade (of the tongue) The area of thetongue just behind the tip.Blend A word that is created from parts oftwo already existing items (e.g., brunch frombreakfast and lunch).Blissymbolics A contemporary develop-ment of pictographic writing that uses anumber of recombinable symbols represent-ing basic units of meaning; primarily usedfor nonspeaking individuals.Body (of the tongue) The main mass ofthe tongue.Borrowing A source of language changethat involves adopting aspects of one lan-guage into another.Bottom-up parsing A method of speechanalysis that starts with individual words andbuilds structures upward in successivelylarger units.Bottom-up processing A type of mentalprocessing in which more complex represen-tations (e.g., words) are accessed throughsimpler constituent representations (e.g.,phonemes).Bound morpheme A morpheme thatmust be attached to another element (e.g.,the past tense marker -ed).Boustrophedon The practice of reversingthe direction of writing at the end of each

line, which was typical of many old writingsystems.

Breathy voice See murmur.

Broad transcription Phonetic transcrip-tion that uses a relatively simple set of symbolsto represent contrasting segments. (Comparenarrow transcription.)

Broca’s aphasia A nonfluent aphasiain which speech is very halting, there arenumerous phonemic errors, and there is alack of intonation.

Broca’s area The area in the lower rearportion of the left frontal lobe of the brainthat plays an important role in language production.

Bundles of isoglosses See Isogloss bundle.

Call In avian communication, a short burstof sound or simple patterns of notes, typicallyused as warnings or other group-related signals.

Canadian raising Allophonic variation insome dialects of English in which the [a] in thesounds [aj] and [aw] is raised to [�] before avoiceless consonant (e.g., house [haws] becomes[h�ws] in this dialect).

Canonical Sentence Strategy A process-ing strategy that leads children to expect thefirst NP in a sentence to bear the agent roleand the second NP to bear the theme role.

Caregiver speech See Motherese.

Case A morphological category that en-codes information about an element’s gram-matical role (subject, direct object, and soon) (e.g., the contrast between he and him).See also (Abstract) Case.

Case Filter, The The requirement thatevery NP in a grammatical sentence beassigned a case feature.

Cataphoric reference The use of a pro-noun that refers to an NP later in the dis-course (e.g., she in When she heard the news,Ann smiled).

Categorical (rules) Rules that always apply.

Categorical perception Ability to per-ceive the distinctions between phonemes inhuman language and to ignore phonetic dif-ferences that are not phonemic.

Category change A change in the part ofspeech of a word as a result of affixation(e.g., adding -ize to modern, an adjective,makes it into a verb, modernize).

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C-command A syntactic notion that isinvolved in pronoun interpretation and isformulated as: NPa c-commands NPb if thefirst category above NPa contains NPb.

Central sulcus The fold that extends fromthe top of the cerebral cortex to the lateralfissure (also called the fissure of Rolando).

Cerebral cortex The gray wrinkled massthat sits like a cap over the rest of the brainand is the seat of cognitive functioning.

Cerebral hemispheres The left and righthalves of the brain, separated by the longitu-dinal fissure.

Cerebrovascular accident See Stroke.

Chain Connection between a moved wh-element and its trace that allows assignmentof case.

Characters The units of the contempo-rary Chinese writing system, many of whichconsist of two parts—a phonetic determi-native and a radical.Chart parser A computer program thatanalyzes phrase structure by charting all pos-sible parses of a sentence and choosing theanalysis that best fits the whole sentence.

Class 1 affixes A group of affixes that (inEnglish) often trigger changes in the conso-nant or vowel segments of the base and mayaffect the assignment of stress.

Class 2 affixes A group of affixes thattend to be phonologically neutral in English,having no effect on the segmental makeup ofthe base or on stress assignment.

Class node A label that represents eachphonological feature grouping in the featurehierarchy (also called simply a node).

Class (sound) A group of sounds thatshares certain phonetic properties (e.g., allvoiced sounds).

Classificatory verbs In Athabaskan lan-guages of North America, verb stems that arematched with noun classes on the basis ofthe type of movement or handling involvedin the verb meaning.

Classifier constructions In sign lan-guages, the combination of hand shapes fordifferent types of nouns with different man-ners of movement and location in space.Similar to classificatory verbs inAthabaskan languages.

Clever Hans A horse that seemed to havea humanlike capacity to think.

Clipping A word-formation process thatshortens a polysyllabic word by deleting oneor more syllables (e.g., prof from professor).

Clitic A word that is unable to stand aloneas an independent form for phonologicalreasons.

Cliticization The process by which aclitic is attached to a word.

Closed syllable A syllable with a coda(e.g., both syllables in camping).

Closing A discourse unit conventionallyused to end a conversation.

Coarticulation An articulation in whichphonemes overlap to a certain extent.

Cocktail party effect The ability to filterout background noise and pick out a particu-lar sound.

Coda (Co) The elements that follow the nucleus in the same syllable (e.g., [ɹf] in surf ).

Coda clause A type of narrative utterancesometimes found at the end of a narrativethat shifts the time of the narrative into thepresent.

Code-switching The systematic alterna-tion between language systems in discourse.

Cognates Words of different languages thathave descended from a common source, asshown by systematic phonetic correspondences(e.g., English father and German Vater).

Cognitive development The emergenceof the various mental abilities (such as lan-guage) that make up the human intellect.

Cognitive style The way in which we arepredisposed to process information in ourenvironment.

Cohesive device A device that establishesa connection among two or more elementsin the discourse (e.g., anaphoric reference,cataphoric reference, lexical cohesion, andellipsis).

Cohort In a psycholinguistic model ofspoken-word recognition, a set of possiblewords. (See also Cohort model.)Cohort model A model of spoken-wordrecognition according to which word recogni-tion proceeds by isolating a target word froma set of words that share initial segments.

Coinage See Word manufacture.

Communication strategies Strategiesused by L2 learners when they are lacking

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the necessary linguistic knowledge to saywhat they want to say (e.g., paraphrasing).Communicative competence Aspeaker’s underlying knowledge of the lin-guistic and social rules or principles for lan-guage production and comprehension inparticular speech situations.Comparative method In historical lin-guistics, the reconstruction of properties of aparent language through systematic compari-son of its descendant languages.Comparative reconstruction Thereconstruction of properties of a parent lan-guage through comparison of its descendantlanguages.Competence The mental system thatunderlies a person’s ability to speak andunderstand a given language; distinguishedfrom performance.Complement A syntactic constituent thatprovides information about entities and loca-tions implied by the meaning of the head.Complement clause A sentence-like con-struction that is embedded within a largerstructure (e.g., that his car had been totaled inJerry told Mary that his car had been totaled).Complementary distribution The dis-tribution of allophones in their respectivephonetic environments such that one neverappears in the same phonetic context as theother (e.g., the distribution of long and shortvowels in English).Complementizer (C) A functional cat-egory that takes an IP complement, forminga CP (complementizer phrase) (e.g., whetherin I wonder whether Lorna has left).Complex NP Constraint Prohibitionagainst moving an element out of a CP thatis embedded inside an NP.Complex word A word that contains two or more morphemes (e.g., theorize, unemployment).Complicating action clause A type ofnarrative utterance that describes the eventsin a story.Componential analysis The representa-tion of a word’s intension in terms ofsmaller semantic components called features.Compound word A word made up of twoor more words (e.g., greenhouse, pickpocket).Compounding Creating a new word bycombining two or more existing words (e.g.,fire + engine).

Comprehensible input The linguisticinput to which the L2 learner is exposed thatis slightly beyond his or her competence inthe target language (i+1).

Computational lexicography The sub-field of computational linguistics thatdeals with words in the lexicon (e.g., theirparts of speech, subcategorization, seman-tic properties).

Computational linguistics The area ofcommon interest between linguistics andcomputer science.

Computational system The syntacticcomponent of grammar that can combineand arrange words in particular ways.

Computerized axial tomography Atechnique for observing the living brain thatuses a narrow beam of X-rays to create brainimages that take the form of a series of brainslices (also called CT scanning).

Concatenative A term used for the mor-phological process that builds word structureby assembling morphemes in an additive,linear fashion.

Concord A kind of agreement in whichdeterminers and adjectives agree with theirnoun (e.g., in number or case).

Concordance An index of words showingevery occurrence of each word in its context.

Conflation pattern A class of meaningscreated by combining semantic elementssuch as manner and motion or direction andmotion.

Conjugation The set of inflected formsassociated with a verb (also called a verbalparadigm).

Conjunction (Con) A functional cate-gory that joins two or more categories of thesame type, forming a coordinate structure(e.g., and in a man and his dog).

Connectionist model A psycholinguistictheory built around the claim that the mindcan be best modeled by reference to complexassociations of simple units that approximateneurons.

Connotation The set of associations thata word’s use can evoke (e.g., in Wisconsin,winter evokes ice, snow, bare trees, etc.). (Seealso Denotation.)

Consonant deletion A phonetic processthat deletes a consonant (e.g., the deletion of[θ] in fifths).

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Consonant weakening A lessening inthe time or degree of a consonant’s closure.

Consonantal A major class feature thatcharacterizes sounds produced with a majorobstruction in the vocal tract.

Consonantal strength Increasing timeor degree of a consonant’s closure.

Consonants Sounds that are producedwith a narrow or complete closure in thevocal tract.

Constituent One or more words thatmake up a syntactic unit (e.g., the apple in the apple fell onto the floor). (See alsoCoordination test, Substitution test,and Movement test.)

Constricted glottis (CG) A laryngeal fea-ture that characterizes sounds made with theglottis closed (in English, only [ʔ]).

Constructional meaning The meaningassociated with a structural pattern above andbeyond the meaning of its component words.

Continuant A manner feature that char-acterizes sounds made with free or nearlyfree airflow through the oral cavity: vowels,fricatives, glides, and liquids.

Continuants Sounds that are producedwith a continuous airflow through the mouth.

Contour tones Tones that change pitchon a single syllable.

Contradiction A relationship betweensentences wherein the truth of one sentencerequires the falsity of another sentence (e.g.,Raymond is married contradicts Raymond is abachelor).

Contralateral The control of the rightside of the body by the left side of the brainand vice versa.

Contrast Segments are said to contrastwhen their presence alone may distinguishforms with different meanings from eachother (e.g., [s] and [z] in the words sip and zip).

Converge See Convergence.

Convergence The modification of lan-guage so that it becomes more similar to thatof another speaker or group of speakers.

Conversation analysis SeeEthnomethodology.

Conversational implicature Informa-tion that is understood through inferencebut is not actually said.

Conversational maxims See Maxims.

Conversion A word-formation processthat assigns an already existing word to anew syntactic category (also called zero der-ivation) (e.g., nurse [V] from nurse [N]).Cooperative overlaps Overlapping ofturns in a high-involvement-style conver-sation according to mutually held conven-tions of the participants.Cooperative Principle, The The generaloverarching guideline thought to underlieconversational interactions: Make your con-tribution appropriate to the conversation.Coordinate structure A phrase that isformed by joining two (or more) categoriesof the same type with a conjunction such asand or or (e.g., those men and that woman).Coordinate Structure Constraint Theprohibition against extracting material out ofa structure joined with a conjunction such asand or or (e.g., The exam will cover phoneticsand phonology → *What will the exam coverphonetics and?).Coordination The process of groupingtogether two or more categories of the sametype with the help of a conjunction (e.g.,Mary and the white horse).Coordination schema A blueprint forconjoining two categories of the same typewith a conjunction (e.g., [extremelypoor]AP but [very honest]AP).Coordination test A test used to deter-mine if a group of words is a constituentby joining it to another group of words witha conjunction such as and or or.CORONAL A place feature that characterizessounds made with the tongue tip or bladeraised (e.g., [t, d, s, θ]).Corpus A collection of texts that providesa database, e.g., for a computer grammar.Corpus analysis A technique for buildinglexicons by means of automated analysis of abody of texts.Corpus callosum The bundle of nerve fibersthat serves as the main connection between thecerebral hemispheres, allowing the two hemi-spheres to communicate with one another.Creativity The characteristic of humanlanguage that allows novelty and innovationin response to new thoughts, experiences,and situations.Creole A language that originated as apidgin and has become established as a firstlanguage in a speech community.

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Cricoid cartilage The ring-shaped carti-lage in the larynx on which the thyroid car-tilage rests.Critical period A particular time frameduring which children have to be exposed tolanguage if the acquisition process is to besuccessful.Critical Period Hypothesis The hypoth-esis that achievement of nativelike profi-ciency in a second language depends on ageof acquisition and is rarely attainable unlessthe learner begins second language acquisi-tion during the critical period.Cross-sectional (research) Research thatinvestigates and compares subjects selectedfrom different developmental stages.CT scanning See Computerized axialtomography.Cuneiform Writing invented in thefourth millennium B.C. in Mesopotamia andproduced by pressing a wedge-shaped stylusinto soft clay tablets.Cyrillic alphabet An alphabet that com-bined adaptations of Glagolitic script withGreek and Hebrew characters, evolving intothe alphabets that are currently used to rep-resent some of the languages spoken in theformer Soviet Union and in the Balkans.

Dative The case form characteristicallyused to mark a recipient.Deaffrication A type of segmental simpli-fication that turns affricates into fricatives byeliminating the stop portion of the affricate(e.g., [d�] becoming [�]).Declension See Nominal paradigm.Deep dyslexia A type of acquireddyslexia in which the patient produces aword that is semantically related to the wordhe or she is asked to read (e.g., producingfather when asked to read mother).Deep structure The structure generated bythe phrase structure rules in accordance withthe subcategorization properties of the heads.Degemination The weakening of a gemi-nate consonant (double consonant) to a non-geminate consonant (e.g., [tt] becoming [t]).Degree word (Deg) A functional cate-gory that serves as the specifier of a preposi-tion or an adjective (e.g., quite in quite tired,very in very near the house).Deictics Forms whose use and interpreta-tion depend on the location of the speaker

and/or addressee within a particular setting(e.g., this/that, here/there).Delayed release (DR) A manner featurethat refers to the release of the stop inaffricate consonants.Deletion A process that removes a seg-ment from certain phonetic contexts (e.g.,the pronunciation of fifths as [ffs]).Denasalization A common substitutionprocess in child language acquisition that in-volves the replacement of a nasal stop by anonnasal counterpart (e.g., come is pro-nounced [k�b]).Denotation Entities that a word or expres-sion refers to (also called its referents orextension).Dense social networks Social networksin which almost everyone in the networkknows everyone else in the network.Dentals Sounds made with the tongueplaced against or near the teeth.Dependent variable In an experiment,the behavior or event that is measured.Derivation (1) In morphology, a word-formation process by which a new word isbuilt from a stem—usually through the addi-tion of an affix—that changes the word classand/or basic meaning of the word. (2) Theset of steps or rule applications that results inthe formation of a sentence in syntax or of aphonetic representation from an underlyingform in phonology.Derived (phonology) Resulting from theapplication of phonological rules to underly-ing representations.Descriptive (grammar) A grammar thatseeks to describe human linguistic ability andknowledge, not to prescribe one system inpreference to another. (See also Prescriptive[grammar].)Design features Essential characteristics ofcommunication systems that have been estab-lished with reference to human language.Determinative A symbol used in non-alphabetic writing systems to assist thereader in knowing the intended meaning orpronunciation of a word.Determiner (Det) A functional cate-gory that serves as the specifier of a noun(e.g., a, the, these).Deterministic parsers Sentence proces-sors that pursue no more than one analysisat a time.

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Devanagari script Writing system thatdeveloped in India and was used for Sanskrit.

Developmental bilingual education Aneducational program for language minoritystudents usually lasting throughout elemen-tary school in which language proficiencyand literacy in both the minority languageand the majority language are promoted.

Developmental sequences The stages oflinguistic development that are relativelyinvariant across language learners.

Devoicing Voicing assimilation in whicha sound becomes voiceless because of anearby voiceless sound (e.g., the l in place isdevoiced because of the voiceless stop pre-ceding it).

Diacritics Marks added to a phonetic sym-bol to alter its value in some way (e.g., a cir-cle under a symbol to indicate voicelessness).

Dialect A regional or social variety of alanguage characterized by its own phonologi-cal, syntactic, or lexical properties.

Dialectology A branch of linguistics con-cerned with the analysis and description ofregional varieties of a language.

Diaphragm The large sheet of musclethat separates the chest cavity from theabdomen and helps to maintain the air pres-sure necessary for speech production.

Diary study A type of naturalistic investi-gation in which a researcher (often a parent)keeps daily notes on a child’s linguisticprogress.

Dichotic listening studies Research basedon an experimental technique in which thesubject listens to different sounds in each ear.

Diglossia The relationship between multi-ple varieties spoken by one speech commu-nity but with sharply distinct domains ofuse.

Diphthongization A process in which amonophthong becomes a diphthong (e.g.,[i:] became [aj] during the Great EnglishVowel Shift).

Diphthongs Vowels that show a notice-able change in quality within a single sylla-ble (e.g., the vowel sounds in house and ride).

Direct negative evidence Language instruction involving correction or focus onform.

Direct object The NP complement of averb (e.g., a fish in Judy caught a fish).

Discourse A set of utterances that consti-tute a speech event.Discourse analysis The field that dealswith the organization of texts, including waysin which parts of texts are connected and thedevices used for achieving textual structure.Discourse markers Words or expressionsthat bracket utterances in discourse andorganize the sequence and/or the relation-ship between them (e.g., well, y’know).Discrete sign A sign that is distinguishedfrom other signs by stepwise differences (e.g.,voiced and voiceless sounds, the numbers ofa digital clock).Displacement A property by which theusers of the communication system are ableto refer to events that are remote in spaceand time.Dissimilation A process whereby one seg-ment becomes less like another segment inits environment (e.g., anma ‘soul’ in a formof Latin became alma in Spanish).Distinctive feature A feature that servesto distinguish contrastive forms (e.g., the fea-ture [voice] is distinctive in English because itunderlies the contrast between /p/ and /b/,/t/ and /d/, etc.).Distribution The set of elements withwhich an item can co-occur.Diverge See Divergence.Divergence The modification of languageso that it becomes more different from thatof another speaker or group of speakers.Do insertion The syntactic rule thatplaces do into an empty I position, makinginversion possible in English questions.Domain The smallest IP or NP containing areflexive pronoun and a separate NP specifier.Domains of use Speech situations inwhich a particular variety is commonly used.DORSAL A place feature that representssounds produced when the body of thetongue is involved (e.g., vowels and [k, g]).Dorsum (of the tongue) The body andback of the tongue.Double-blind test A test in which a sub-ject’s responses are interpreted independentlyby someone other than the administrator ofthe test.Downdrift The maintenance of a distinc-tion among the pitch registers of an utteranceeven as the overall pitch of the utterance falls.

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Dressage Interaction between trainer andanimal in which the animal responds to sub-tle cues given by the trainer.D-structure See Deep structure.Dual-language programs See Two-wayimmersion (TWI) programs.Dual-route model A psycholinguistictheory built around the claim that a particu-lar type of language processing can beaccomplished in more than one manner.Duality of patterning A property ofcommunication systems in which meaning-less units are combined to form arbitrarysigns that, in turn, are recombined to formnew larger signs.Duetting The interchange of calls in apatterned manner between two members ofa species.Dysprosody The lack of sentence intona-tion, a common characteristic of the speechof Broca’s aphasics.

Ebonics See African AmericanVernacular English (AAVE).Economy constraint A grammatical con-straint whose effect is to reduce the compu-tational cost of derivations.Ejectives Stops or affricates that are madewith simultaneous closure of the glottis andconstriction of the throat, producing a dis-tinctive “popping” sound.Enclitic A clitic that attaches to the endof a word.Endocentric compound A compoundword in which one member identifies thegeneral class to which the meaning of theentire word belongs (e.g., dog food is a type of food in English). (See also Exocentric compound.)English language learners (ELLs)Nonnative speakers of English, particularlyused for those in U.S. schools (previouslyknown as Limited English Proficient [LEP]students).Entailment A relation between sentencesin which the truth of one sentence necessar-ily implies the truth of another (e.g., Gary isBernice’s husband entails the sentence Berniceis married).Environment The phonetic context inwhich a sound occurs.Epenthesis A process that inserts a seg-ment into a particular environment (e.g., the

insertion of a schwa in the pronunciation ofathlete as [θəlit]).Ergative The case associated with the sub-ject of a transitive verb (but not that of anintransitive verb).

Ergative-absolutive pattern Sentencepattern in which ergative case is assignedto the agent of a transitive verb, butabsolutive case is assigned to the subject ofan intransitive verb or the object of atransitive verb.

Ethnic dialect A dialect spoken by a par-ticular ethnic group.

Ethnography of communication Atype of discourse analysis that concentrateson how language is used to achieve commu-nicative goals in particular social situations.

Ethnolinguistic vitality The strength ofan ethnic group identity and the variety oflanguage associated with it as measured bythe number of people in the group relative tothe majority, the degree of institutional sup-port they receive, and their relative pride intheir identity.

Ethnomethodology A type of discourseanalysis that focuses on the structural relation-ship between utterances in conversations.

Euphemism A word or phrase that is lessdirect than the taboo word it replaces and isconsidered to be more socially acceptable(e.g., passed away for died).

Evaluation clause A type of narrativeutterance that gives comments or evaluationsregarding the events being narrated.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) A mea-surement of electrical activity in the brainthat is correlated with the presentation ofparticular stimulus events.

Evidentiality A system of morphologicalcontrasts indicating the type of evidence forthe truth of a statement.

Evidentials Morphological or syntacticelements (frequently enclitic morphemes)that indicate the speaker’s source of informa-tion for the statement he or she is making.

Exclusive A type of first person plural pro-noun whose referents do not include theaddressee. (See also Inclusive.)

Exocentric compound A compoundwhose meaning does not follow from themeaning of its parts (e.g., redneck, since itsreferent is not a type of neck).

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Experimental paradigm A method ofinvestigation that involves a particular wayof presenting stimuli and a particular way ofmeasuring responses.

Experimental studies Studies in childlanguage in which researchers make use ofspecially designed tasks to elicit linguisticactivity relevant to a particular phenomenon.

Extension The set of entities to which aword or expression refers (also called itsdenotation or referents).

Face-threatening acts Speech acts such asrequests, diagreement, or complaints that candisrupt social solidarity or impose on the free-dom of action of participants.

Feature (phonological) The smallestunit of analysis of phonological structure,combinations of which make up segments(e.g., [nasal], [continuant]).

Feature hierarchy A hierarchical represen-tation of how features are related to each other.

Features (semantic) The semantic com-ponents that make up a word’s intension.

Field dependence A learning style inwhich the learner operates holistically, per-ceiving the “field” as a whole rather than interms of its component parts.

Field independence A learning style inwhich the learner operates analytically, per-ceiving the “field” in terms of its componentparts rather than as a whole.

Field technique A method of study thatdoes not involve manipulation and controlof factors in a laboratory, but rather involvesobserving phenomena as they occur.

Fissure A relatively deep sulcus of thecerebral cortex.

Fixed stress Stress whose position in aword is predictable.

Fixed stress languages Languages inwhich the position of stress in words is pre-dictable. (See also Fixed stress.)

Flap A sound commonly identified with rand produced when the tongue tip strikes thealveolar ridge as it passes across it (e.g., inNorth American English, the medial conso-nant in bitter and bidder).

Flapping A phonetic process in which analveolar stop is pronounced as a voiced flapbetween vowels, the first of which is gener-ally stressed (e.g., [b�́tɹ ] → [b�́ɾɹ ]).

Fluency Second language speech that isproduced automatically and without notice-able hesitation.

Fluent aphasia The aphasia that occursdue to damage to parts of the left cortexbehind the central sulcus, resulting in fluentspeech but great difficulty selecting, organiz-ing, and monitoring language production(also called sensory aphasia).

Focus on form In second language teach-ing, the practice of giving explicit instructionabout the second language and overtly cor-recting errors.

Folk etymology Reanalysis of a word thatis based on an incorrect historical analysis(e.g., hamburger being reanalyzed into twomorphemes, ham and burger).

Foreigner talk The type of speech that istypically addressed to second language learn-ers, characterized by such properties as sim-ple word order and more commonvocabulary items (also called teacher talk).

Forest-based generation In computa-tional linguistics, a method of creating textby programming a computer with a simple,underconstrained grammar and allowing thecomputer to select the best sentence that isgenerated.

Formants The main frequencies of aspeech wave.

Fossilized Characteristic of an interlan-guage grammar that has reached a plateau,i.e., ceased to improve.

Free form An element that can occur inisolation and/or whose position with respectto neighboring elements is not entirely fixed.

Free morpheme A morpheme that canbe a word by itself (e.g., fear).

Free stress Stress whose position in aword is not predictable and must be learnedon a case-by-case basis.

Free stress languages Languages inwhich the position of stress in words is notpredictable. (See also Free stress.)

Free variation The free alternation of allo-phones and/or phonemes in a given environ-ment (e.g., sto[p�], sto[p]; /ε/conomics,/i/conomics).

Frequency effect The common experi-mental finding that words that occur morefrequently in a language are processed morequickly and more accurately.

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Frication The weakening of a stop to africative (e.g., [d] becoming [ð]).Fricatives Consonants produced with acontinuous airflow through the mouth,accompanied by a continuous audible noise(e.g., [f], [ʃ]).Front See Front vowel.Front vowel A vowel that is made with thetongue positioned in the front of the oral cav-ity (e.g., the vowel sounds in seal and bat).Frontal lobe The lobe of the brain thatlies in front of the central sulcus and inwhich Broca’s area is located.Fronting A common substitution processin child language acquisition that involvesthe moving forward of a sound’s place ofarticulation (e.g., cheese pronounced as [tsiz]).Full reduplication A morphologicalprocess that duplicates the entire word (e.g.,in Turkish, tʃabuk ‘quickly’/tʃabuk tʃabuk‘very quickly’).Function words Words such as determinersand conjunctions that specify grammaticalrelations rather than carry semantic content.Functional analysis An approach to syn-tactic analysis that attempts to understandsyntactic phenomena in terms of their com-municative function.Functional category A word-level syn-tactic category whose members specify gram-matical relations rather than carry semanticcontent (e.g., auxiliary verbs, conjunctions,determiners, and degree words) (also callednonlexical category).Functional magnetic resonance imag-ing (fMRI) A brain imaging techniquethat yields information on areas of highbrain activity during the performance of cog-nitive tasks.Fusion A morphological change in whicha word becomes an affix (e.g., English affixessuch as -hood, -dom, and -ly used to be words).Fusional languages Languages in whichwords typically consist of several mor-phemes, and the morphemes that are affixesoften mark several grammatical categoriessimultaneously (e.g., Russian).Fuzzy concepts Concepts that do not haveclear-cut boundaries that distinguish themfrom other concepts (e.g., the concept POOR).

Garden path sentence A sentence that isdifficult to process and interpret because its

structure biases sentence parsing toward anincorrect analysis.

Gender See Noun class.

Gender-exclusive (differentiation) Atype of social differentiation in which theuse of some linguistic forms depends on thegender of the speakers.

Gender-variable (differentiation) Therelative frequency with which men andwomen use certain features of language.

Genetic classification The categoriza-tion of languages according to the ancestorlanguages from which they developed.

Genetic relationships Relationshipsamong languages that have descended froma common ancestor language. (See alsoGenetic classification and Geneticallyrelated languages.)

Genetically related languages Lan-guages that have descended from a commonparent (e.g., German and Italian have bothdescended from Indo-European).

Genitive The case form characteristicallyused to mark a possessor.

Given information Knowledge that thespeaker assumes is available to the addresseeat the time of the utterance, either because itis shared by both or because it has alreadybeen introduced into the discourse (alsocalled old information).

Glagolitic script A script that was intro-duced in Slavic-speaking areas in the ninthcentury A.D. for the translation of the Bible.

Glide strengthening The strengtheningof a glide to an affricate (e.g., [j] becoming[d�]).

Glides Sounds that are produced with anarticulation like that of a vowel, but movequickly to another articulation (e.g., [j], [w]).

Gliding A common substitution process inchild language acquisition that involves thereplacement of a liquid by a glide (e.g., playis pronounced [pwej]).

Global aphasia The most severe form ofnonfluent aphasia, in which the patient iscompletely mute.

Glottalization A consonant that is madewith simultaneous closure of the glottis andconstriction of the throat. Glottalized stopsand affricates (ejectives) are the most com-mon glottalized consonants.

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Glottals Sounds produced by using thevocal folds as the primary articulators (e.g.,[h], [ʔ]).

Glottis The space between the vocalfolds.

Glyphs The symbols used in Mayan writing.

Goal A thematic role that describes theend point for a movement (e.g., Mary in Terrygave the skis to Mary).

Graded (concept) A concept whose mem-bers display varying degrees of the character-istics that are considered typical of the concept.

Graded sign A sign that conveys itsmeaning by changes in degree (e.g., voicevolume, a blush).

Grammar The mental system of rules andcategories that allows humans to form andinterpret the words and sentences of theirlanguage.

Grammar-based generation In compu-tational linguistics, a method of creating textby programming the computer with anextensive grammar.

Grammatical (sentence) A sentencethat speakers judge to be a possible sentencein their language.

Grammatical competence Competencein the structural aspects at or below the sen-tence level.

Grammatical knowledge Knowledge ofthe meaning and use of words in sentences.(Compare real-world knowledge.)

Grammaticalization The change of alexical form into a grammatical form (e.g., anaffix or member of a functional category).

Grammaticalized See grammaticaliza-tion.

Grammaticized concepts Concepts thatare expressed as affixes or nonlexical cate-gories (e.g., the concept of ‘obligation’ asexpressed by the auxiliary verb must).

Great English Vowel Shift A series ofnonphonetically conditioned modificationsto long vowels that occurred from the Mid-dle English period to the eighteenth century.

Grimm’s Law A set of consonant shiftsthat took place between Proto-Indo-Europeanand Proto-Germanic.

Gyri Plural of gyrus.

Gyrus An area where the cerebral cortex isfolded out.

Habitual (invariant) be Uninflected beused to indicate a habitual state or action inAfrican American Vernacular English(e.g., The coffee be cold means ‘the coffee isusually cold’).

Hangul The alphabetic script used to rep-resent Korean, the symbols of which aregrouped to represent the syllables of individ-ual morphemes.

Hanja The Korean word for the Chinesecharacters used in Korean writing.

Head (of a phrase) The category aroundwhich a phrase is built (e.g., V is head of VP,N is head of NP, A of AP, P of PP).

Head (of a word) The morpheme thatdetermines the category of the entire word ina compound (e.g., bird in blackbird).

Head-final (language) Language inwhich the head of a phrase follows its com-plement (e.g., the verb comes after thedirect object in the VP).

Head-initial (language) Language inwhich the head comes before its comple-ment (e.g., the verb comes before the directobject in the VP).

Head position parameter A parameterthat offers two versions of the X' schema—one in which the head precedes its comple-ment and one in which the head follows itscomplement.

Heavy syllable Syllable that has either acoda or two elements in the nucleus (e.g., adiphthong or a long vowel).

Heritage language programs Educa-tional programs designed to preserve, main-tain, or revive the ancestral languages ofindigenous peoples, immigrants, or refugeesin the United States.

Hierarchies In the classification of lan-guages, the degrees of markedness of par-ticular structures in the world’s languages,going from least marked (i.e., most common)to most marked (i.e., least common).

Hieroglyphs An ancient Egyptian writingsystem that used pictures as pictograms,logograms, and consonant phonemes.

High A DORSAL feature that characterizessounds produced with the tongue bodyraised.

High involvement style A style of turn-taking in a conversation in which speakerturns overlap.

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High vowel A vowel that is made withthe tongue raised (e.g., the vowel sounds inbeat and lose).Hiragana The Japanese syllabary that isused in conjunction with katakana andkanji to write Japanese.Historical linguistics The linguistic dis-cipline that is concerned with the descrip-tion and the explanation of language changeover time.Holophrases Utterances produced by chil-dren in which one word expresses the typeof meaning that would be associated with anentire sentence in adult speech (e.g., up usedto mean ‘Pick me up’).Homophony The situation in which asingle form has two or more entirely distinctmeanings (e.g., club ‘a social organization’,club ‘a blunt weapon’).Host The element to which a clitic isattached.Hypercorrection Overgeneralization ofparticular rules in a language in an attemptto speak (or write) “correctly.”

Iconic sign A sign that bears some resem-blance to its referent (e.g., a picture of awoman on a washroom door).Icon See Iconic sign.Illocutionary competence The abilityto understand a speaker’s intent and to pro-duce a variety of forms to convey intent.Illocutionary force The intended mean-ing of an utterance.Immersion A method of teaching a sec-ond language to children in which studentsare given most of their content courses andschool activities in the target language.Impaired Representation HypothesisThe hypothesis that states that second lan-guage learners who produce errors lack anunderlying representation of the structure inwhich they have produced errors.Implementation A practical applicationof a formal system.Implicational universals A universal oflanguage that specifies that the presence ofone trait implies the presence of another (butnot vice versa).Inalienably possessed nouns Nounsthat must always have a pronominal posses-sor indicated; usually parts of the body orkinship terms.

Inanimate A noun class category in somelanguages generally assigned to nonlivingreferents. (See also Animate.)

Inclusive A contrast in some languages thatindicates that the addressee is to be includedin the interpretation of the first person pluralmorpheme. (See also Exclusive.)

Incorporation The combination of aword (usually a noun) with a verb to form acompound verb.

Index See Indexical sign.

Indexical sign A sign that fulfills its func-tion by pointing out its referent, typically bybeing a partial sample of it (e.g., the track ofan animal).

Indexing Finding, identifying, and count-ing all occurrences of a word in large texts.

Indexing analysis A means of analyzingsociolinguistic variation by putting eachinstance of a variable on a continuum; usedespecially to evaluate degree and direction ofvowel movement.

Indirect negative evidence The assump-tion that nonoccurring structures in the lin-guistic environment are ungrammatical.

Indo-European family The languagefamily that includes most of the languages in a broad curve from northern Indiathrough western Asia (Iran and Armenia) to Europe.

Infix An affix that occurs within a base.

Inflection The modification of a word’sform to indicate the grammatical subclass towhich it belongs (e.g., the -s in books marksthe plural subclass).

Inflectional language See Fusionallanguages.

Insertion rule An operation that adds anelement to a tree structure.

Instrumental motivation The desire toachieve proficiency in a new language forutilitarian reasons, such as a job promotion.

Integrative motivation The desire toachieve proficiency in a new language inorder to participate in the social life of thecommunity that speaks the language.

Intension An expression’s inherent sense;the concepts that it evokes.

Intercostals The muscles between the ribsthat help to maintain the air pressure neces-sary for speech production.

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Interdentals Sounds made with thetongue placed between the teeth (e.g., [θ], [ð]).

Interlanguage (IL) The changing gram-matical system that an L2 learner is using ata particular period in his or her acquisitionof a second language as he or she movestoward proficiency in the target language.

Interlocutors Participants in a conversation.

Internal change A process that substi-tutes one nonmorphemic segment foranother to mark a grammatical contrast (e.g.,sing, sang, sung).

Internal reconstruction The recon-struction of a protolanguage that relies onthe analysis of morphophonemic variationwithin a single language.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)A system for transcribing the sounds ofspeech that attempts to represent each soundof human speech with a single symbol.

Internet survey A linguistic survey com-pleted by subjects who happen to access agiven Web site, Internet bulletin board, orspecial interest list on the Internet.

Intonation Pitch movement in spokenutterances that is not related to differences inword meaning.

Intransitive verb A verb that does nottake a direct object (e.g., sleep).

Inversion A transformation that movesthe element in the I position to a position infront of the subject, formulated as: Move I to C.

Island A constituent that does not permita component part to be moved from it (e.g.,a coordinated phrase such as Jerry andGretchen).

Island constraints Prohibitions againstmoving elements out of particular kinds ofconstituents such as subject NPs and com-plex NPs.

Isogloss bundle Convergence of severallines drawn on a dialect map to representboundaries between dialects.

Isoglosses Lines drawn on a dialect mapto represent boundaries between dialects.

Isolate A language that is not known to berelated to any other living language (e.g.,Basque, Kutenai).

Isolating languages Languages whosewords typically consist of only one mor-

pheme (e.g., Mandarin). (Also called ana-lytic languages.)

Jargon (1) Vocabulary peculiar to a partic-ular field; (2) a simple pidgin used in verylimited circumstances.Jargonaphasia A symptom of severe casesof Wernicke’s aphasia in which speechcontains very few real words of the language.

Kanji The Japanese word for the Chinesecharacters used to write Japanese.Katakana The Japanese syllabary that isused in conjunction with hiragana andkanji to write Japanese.

LABIAL A place feature that characterizessounds articulated with one or both lips.Labials Sounds made with closure or nearclosure of the lips (e.g., the initial sounds ofwin and forget).Labiodentals Sounds involving the lowerlip and upper teeth (e.g., the initial sounds offreedom and vintage).Labiovelars Sounds made with the tongueraised near the velum and the lips rounded atthe same time (e.g., the initial sound of wound).Language Bioprogram Hypothesis Thehypothesis that similarities among creolesreflect linguistic universals both in terms offirst language acquisition and with respect toprocesses and structures that are innate.Language contact Interaction betweenspeakers of one language and speakers ofanother language or dialect.Language family In language classifica-tion, a group of languages with a historicalorigin in the same protolanguage.Language nest An educational programfor preschoolers in which a (usually endan-gered) minority language is used exclusively.Language planning Official policy withthe goal of increasing or limiting the domainof use of a particular language or languages.Laryngeal features Phonological featuresthat represent laryngeal states (e.g., [voice],[spread glottis], and [constricted glottis]).Laryngeal node A node in the featuregeometry in autosegmental phonology thatdominates laryngeal features such as voicing,spread glottis, and constricted glottis.Larynx The box-like structure located inthe throat through which air passes during

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speech production; commonly known as thevoice box.

Late closure A parsing principle thatclaims that in sentence comprehension,humans prefer to attach new words to theclause currently being processed.

Lateral (feature) A manner feature thatcharacterizes a sound made with the sides ofthe tongue lowered (e.g., varieties of l).

Lateral (sound) A sound made with thesides of the tongue lowered (e.g., varieties of [l]).

Lateral fissure The fissure that separatesthe temporal lobe from the frontal and pari-etal lobes in the brain.

Lateral fricative A lateral sound madewith a narrow enough closure to be classifiedas a fricative.

Lateralization The unilateral control ofcognitive functions by either the left or theright side of the brain (e.g., language is later-alized to the left hemisphere in most people).

Lateralized See Lateralization.

Laterals Sounds made with the sides ofthe tongue lowered (e.g., varieties of l).

Lax vowels Vowels that are made with aplacement of the tongue that results in rela-tively less vocal tract constriction (e.g., thevowel sounds in hit and but).

Learning strategies The activities inwhich language learners engage to help themdevelop linguistic knowledge.

Length The subjective impression of timeoccupied by the duration of a phone.

Lesion Severe damage to the brain.

Lexical ambiguity A situation in whicha single form has two or more meanings(e.g., a trunk is a ‘piece of luggage’ or an ‘ele-phant nose’).

Lexical category The word-level syntac-tic categories noun (N), verb (V), adjective(A), and preposition (P).

Lexical decision An experimental para-digm in which a person sees or hears a stim-ulus and must judge as quickly as possiblewhether or not that stimulus is a word of hisor her language.

Lexical diffusion Linguistic change thatfirst manifests itself in a few words and thengradually spreads through the vocabulary ofthe language.

Lexical gaps Gaps in the lexicon thatresult from technological innovation or con-tact with another culture.

Lexicalization The process whereby con-cepts are encoded in the words of a language(e.g., the concepts of ‘motion’ and ‘manner’are both encoded by the word roll).

Lexicon A speaker’s mental dictionary,which contains information about the syn-tactic properties, meaning, and phonologicalrepresentation of a language’s words.

Lexifier language The language thatprovides most of the lexical items to a con-tact variety.

Lingua franca A language that is usedwhen speakers of two or more different lan-guages come into contact and do not knoweach other’s languages.

Linguistic competence Speakers’ knowl-edge of their language, which allows them toproduce and understand an unlimited num-ber of utterances, including many that arenovel.

Linguistic insecurity The degree towhich speakers believe that their own varietyis not standard.

Linguistic typology An approach to language classification that classifies lan-guages according to their common structuralcharacteristics without regard for geneticrelationships.

Linguistic universals Structural charac-teristics that occur across the languages ofthe world.

Linguistics The discipline that studies thenature and use of language.

Liquids A class of consonants containing land r sounds and their variants.

Lobes Substructures of the hemispheres ofthe brain that appear to have distinct responsi-bilities (e.g., frontal lobe, temporal lobe).

Location A thematic role that specifiesthe place where an action occurs (e.g., theSkyDome in The athletes practiced in theSkyDome).

Locative The case form characteristicallyused for the noun that is in, to, or at a location.

Logogram A written symbol representinga morpheme or word.

Logographic writing A type of writingin which symbols represent morphemes oreven entire words.

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Longitudinal fissure The fissure thatextends from the front of the brain to theback and separates the left and right cerebralhemispheres.

Longitudinal studies Studies that exam-ine language development over an extendedperiod of time.

Loudness The subjective impression of aspeech sound’s volume relative to the soundsaround it.

Low (feature) A DORSAL feature that char-acterizes sounds made with the tongue bodylowered.

Low (sound) A sound made with thetongue lowered (e.g., [a], [ɑ], [æ]).

Low vowel A vowel that is made with thetongue lowered (e.g., the vowel sounds madein the words cat and top).

Machine-readable dictionary (MRD) Adictionary that can be read by a computer.

Machine translation The process bywhich a machine (e.g., a computer) takestext spoken or written in one language andtranslates it into another language.

Macrofamilies See Phyla.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) Atechnique that provides detailed informationon which parts of the brain are involved inlanguage-processing activity by recordingchanges in magnetic fields generated withinthe brain.

Major class features Phonological fea-tures that represent the classes consonant,obstruent, nasal, liquid, glide, and vowel.

Majority rules strategy A secondarystrategy used to reconstruct protoforms,which stipulates that the segment found inthe majority of cognates should be assumedto be part of the protoform. (See alsoPhonetic plausibility strategy.)

Manner features Phonological featuresthat represent manner of articulation.

Manners of articulation The variousconfigurations produced by positioning thelips, tongue, velum, and glottis in differentways (e.g., nasal, fricative, liquid).

Marginal analysis Analysis of sociolin-guistic data in which overall percentages ofoccurrences in relevant linguistic and socialcontexts are reported for each variant.

Marked Occurring less commonly inworld languages. (See also Marked traitsand Markedness theory.)

Marked traits Complex or less commonfeatures or characteristics of languages.

Markedness The quality of being rela-tively complex or rare in world languages.(See also Marked traits and Markednesstheory.)

Markedness Differential HypothesisThe hypothesis that L2 elements that are dif-ferent and more marked than the L1 ele-ments will cause difficulty in learning L2.

Markedness theory A theory that classi-fies traits or patterns of languages as marked(those that are considered to be more com-plex and/or universally rarer) and unmarked(those that are considered to be less complexand/or universally more common).

Matched guise test A test of languageattitudes that asks subjects to evaluaterecordings of the same person speaking dif-ferent language varieties.

Matrix A representation of sounds inwhich all the relevant distinctive featuresand their values are placed in an array.

Matrix clause The larger IP in which acomplement clause occurs.

Maxim of Manner A principle that isthought to underlie the efficient use of lan-guage and is formulated as: Avoid ambiguityand obscurity; be brief and orderly.

Maxim of Quality A principle that isthought to underlie the efficient use of lan-guage and is formulated as: Try to make yourcontribution one that is true. (Do not saythings that are false or for which you lackadequate evidence.)

Maxim of Quantity A principle that isthought to underlie the efficient use of lan-guage and is formulated as: Do not makeyour contribution more or less informativethan required.

Maxim of Relevance A principle that isthought to underlie the efficient use of lan-guage and is formulated as: Be relevant.

Maxims The specific principles that ensurethat conversational interactions satisfy TheCooperative Principle.

Meaning The message or content that asign or utterance conveys.

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Mental lexicon See Lexicon.

Merge A syntactic operation that combineselements to create phrases and sentences.

Merger A change in a phonological sys-tem in which two or more phonemes col-lapse into one, thereby reducing the numberof phonemes in that language.

Mesolect A creole variety that fallsbetween an acrolect and a basilect interms of the amount of influence from thestandard language.

Metaphor The understanding of one con-cept in terms of another, sometimes respon-sible for language change (e.g., ‘argument’understood in terms of ‘war’: She annihilatedhim in the debate).

Metaphorical code-switching The useof code-switching to express solidarity withor distance from the speech communitiesassociated with the languages being switched.

Metathesis A process that reorders asequence of segments (e.g., in child lan-guage, pronouncing spaghetti as [pəskεɾi]).Mid vowels Vowels that are made withthe tongue neither raised nor lowered (e.g.,the vowel sounds in set and Coke).

Minimal attachment A proposed pars-ing principle that claims that in sentencecomprehension, humans tend to attachincoming material into phrase structureusing the fewest nodes possible.

Minimal pair Two forms with distinctmeanings that differ by only one segmentfound in the same position in each form(e.g., [ʃp] and [ʃip]).

Missing Surface Inflection HypothesisThe hypothesis that states that second lan-guage learners who produce errors may actu-ally have correct underlying representationsfor the structure in which they have madeerrors but have difficulty mapping theseunderlying representations to their surfaceforms.

Modal auxiliary An English auxiliaryverb in the I position that is not inflectedfor agreement with the subject (e.g., may,can, will, must, could) but may show tense(e.g., could, would may be past).

Modifier An optional element thatdescribes a property of a head (e.g., blue inthat blue car, or that Gloria likes in the car thatGloria likes).

Module A unit of processing that is rela-tively autonomous from other processingunits.

Morpheme The smallest unit of languagethat carries information about meaning orfunction (e.g., books consists of the two mor-phemes book + s).

Morphological parsing The computa-tional process in the brain that analyzes con-stituent morphemes of a word.

Morphology The system of categories and rules involved in word formation andinterpretation.

Morphophonemics Rules that accountfor alternations among allomorphs.

Morphophonology SeeMorphophonemics.

Motherese The type of speech that is typi-cally addressed to young children (also calledcaregiver speech).

Motion verbs Words that can describemotion through space (e.g., come, go, andmove in English).

Motor aphasia See Nonfluent aphasia.

Move A syntactic operation that transportsan element to a new position within a partic-ular sentence.

Movement test A test used to determineif a group of words is a constituent bymoving it as a single unit to a different posi-tion within the sentence.

MRD See Machine-readable dictionary.

Multiplex networks Social networks inwhich the connections are based on severalkinds of relationships.

Murmur The glottal state that producesvoiced sounds with the vocal folds relaxedenough to allow enough air to escape to pro-duce a simultaneous breathy effect (alsocalled breathy voice).

Mutual intelligibility The criterion thatis sometimes used to distinguish between alanguage and a dialect: Mutually intelligiblevarieties of a language can be understood byspeakers of each variety and are thereforedialects of the same language.

Narrative A type of discourse unit thattells a story.

Narrow transcription Phonetic tran-scription that uses a fairly elaborate set of

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symbols and diacritics to show phoneticdetail.

Nasal A manner feature that characterizesany sound made with the velum lowered.

Nasal phones Sounds produced by lower-ing the velum, allowing air to pass throughthe nasal passages.

Nasal vowels Vowels produced with alowered velum so that air passes throughthe oral and nasal cavities at the same time.

Nasalization The nasalizing effect that anasal consonant can have on an adjacentvowel.

Native speakers Those who haveacquired a language as a child in a naturalsetting.

Nativism The view that certain grammati-cal knowledge is inborn.

Natural class A class of sounds that sharesa feature or features (e.g., voiced stops).

Natural language generation All theprocesses that transform an intention tocommunicate into written or spoken communication.

Natural language processing systemsComputer systems that can process humanlanguage.

Naturalistic approach An approach toinvestigating child language in whichresearchers observe and record children’sspontaneous verbal behavior.

Naturalness A criterion that guides lan-guage reconstruction by determiningwhether or not changes are natural.

Near-minimal pair Two forms with dis-tinct meanings that contrast segments innearly identical environments.

Negative evidence Information as to theungrammatical nature of utterances.

Negative face The need of every person toremain autonomous and free from imposition.

Negative politeness Strategies used bythe speaker to lessen the imposition on thehearer (e.g., expressing tentativeness byphrasing a request in the form of a question).

Network density The degree to whichspeakers in a social network are intercon-nected to each other.

Neurolinguistics The study of how lan-guage is represented and processed in thebrain.

Neurons The basic information-processingunits of the nervous system, also called nervecells.

Neuroscience The scientific study of thebrain.

New information Knowledge that is intro-duced into the discourse for the first time.

Newcomer programs Programs designedto provide intensive language instruction, lit-eracy development, and cultural orientationfor English language learners who arrive inU.S. schools with very low-level skills inEnglish and/or little previous experience inschool.

Node (1) Large association of simple unitsin the mind; (2) See class node.

Nominal paradigm The set of relatedforms associated with a noun (also called adeclension).

Nominative The case form characteristi-cally used to mark a subject.

Nominative-accusative pattern Sen-tence pattern in which the subject of the sen-tence is identified by nominative case, andthe direct object is marked by accusative case.

No-naming The practice of avoidingaddress terms when participants are unsurewhich term to use.

Nondeterministic parsers Sentenceprocessors that can pursue more than oneanalysis at a time.

Nonfluent aphasia Aphasia that resultsfrom damage to parts of the brain in front ofthe central sulcus and that is characterizedby slow, effortful speech production (alsocalled motor aphasia).

Nonlexical category See Functionalcategory.

Nonmanual grammatical markers Insign languages, facial expression or body pos-ture used to indicate a particular grammaticalstructure, such as a subordinate clause.

Nonmodal auxiliaries Auxiliary verbsthat show agreement with the subject, origi-nate in VP, and raise to I when there is nomodal auxiliary; in English, the auxiliaryverbs be and have when they occur with amain verb (e.g., was writing; have seen).

Nonstandard (dialect) A variety of lan-guage that differs from the standard dialectin systematic ways.

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Nonstridents Coronal fricatives andaffricates that have less acoustic noise thanstridents ([θ, ð] are nonstridents).

Nonsyllabic (sounds) Sounds that donot act as syllable peaks, as distinguishedfrom syllabic sounds.

Nonterminal (intonation) contourRising or level intonation at the end of anutterance, often signaling that the utteranceis incomplete.

Nonterminals Parts of a structure that arenot lexical items, for example VP, NP, Det,N'. Compare with terminals.

Northern Cities Shift The systematicchange in vowel sounds taking place in citiesaround the Great Lakes. (See also Shift.)

Noun (N) A lexical category that typi-cally names entities, can usually be inflectedfor number and possession (in English), andfunctions as the head of a noun phrase (e.g.,key, Bob, perception).

Noun class A grammatical category divid-ing nouns into classes often based on sharedsemantic properties (also called gender).

Noun incorporation See Incorporation.

NP Movement A transformation thatmoves a noun phrase into the subject position.

Nucleus (N) A vocalic element that formsthe core of a syllable (e.g., the vowel [] isthe nucleus of the first syllable of Patrick).

Null Subject Parameter A cross-linguisticvariation that allows some languages to dropsubject pronouns, while other languagesrequire an overt grammatical subject.

Number The morphological category thatexpresses contrasts involving countablequantities (e.g., in English, the two-way dis-tinction between singular and plural).

Object permanence A developmentalmilestone characterized by the child’s abilityto recognize that objects have an existenceindependent of one’s interaction with them.

Oblique NP A noun phrase that combineswith a preposition.

Obstruent Any nonsonorant consonant:fricatives, affricates, oral stops.

Occipital lobe The area of the brain tothe rear of the angular gyrus in which thevisual cortex is located.

Official language A language that hasbeen designated by political or other official

authorities as the working language of aregion, nation, or other group.

Old information See Given information.

One-way bilingual education An edu-cational program in which language minor-ity students are offered instruction in theirfirst language and the majority language.

One-word stage A stage of first languageacquisition at which children characteristi-cally produce one-word utterances.

Onomatopoeic words Words that soundlike the thing that they name (e.g., plop, hiss).

Onset The portion of a syllable that pre-cedes the nucleus (e.g., /spl/ in spleen).

Open syllable A syllable that is not closedby a consonant.

Opening A discourse unit conventionallyused to begin a conversation.

Oral phones Sounds produced with thevelum raised and the airflow through thenasal passage cut off.

Ordered rule application In a phono-logical derivation, an application of rulesin which the rules must be applied in a cer-tain order to derive the surface form fromthe underlying representation.

Ordered rules Rules that must be appliedin a particular order. See ordered ruleapplication.

Orderly heterogeneity Variation in useof language among groups (e.g., socialgroups) such that members from one groupcan be distinguished from members of othergroups on the basis of linguistic variants.

Orientation clause A type of narrativeutterance that gives background informationto the story; e.g., the time and place where itoccurred.

Orthography A set of conventions forrepresenting language in written form.

Overextension A developmental phe-nomenon in which the meaning of a child’sword overlaps with that of the equivalentadult word but also extends beyond it (e.g.,dog is used to refer to other animals as wellas dogs).

Overgeneralization A developmentalphenomenon that results from the overlybroad application of a rule (e.g., falledinstead of fell).

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Overregularization SeeOvergeneralization.

Palatalization The effect that front vow-els and the palatal guide [j] typically have onvelar, alveolar, and dental stops, makingtheir place of articulation more palatal (e.g.,the first sound of keep is palatalized).

Palatals Sounds produced with thetongue on or near the palate (e.g., [j]).

Palate The highest part of the roof of themouth.

Palatoalveolar See Alveopalatal (area).Paragraphia Writing errors made byBroca’s aphasics that have characteristics cor-responding to their speech.

Parallel processing model A psycholin-guistic theory built around the claim thatphonological, lexical, and syntactic processesare carried out simultaneously.

Parameter The set of alternatives for a par-ticular phenomenon made available by Uni-versal Grammar to individual languages.

Parameter setting The determination ofwhich option permitted by a particularparameter is appropriate for the languagebeing learned.

Paraphrases Two sentences that have thesame basic meaning (e.g., A Canadian wrotethat book is a paraphrase of That book waswritten by a Canadian).

Parietal lobe The lobe of the brain thatlies behind the central sulcus and above thetemporal lobe.

Parser A program or mental process fordoing grammatical analysis.

Parsing The procedure through whichspeech or text is analyzed by assigning cate-gories to words and assigning structure tostrings of words.

Partial reduplication A morphologicalprocess in which part of a stem is repeated toform a new word (e.g., in Tagalog, takbuh‘run’ and tatakbuh ‘will run’).

Partial suppletion A morphologicalprocess that marks a grammatical contrast byreplacing part of a morpheme (e.g.,think/thought).

Passive sentence A sentence whose gram-matical subject is the theme (the entityaffected by the action of the verb) (e.g., Thereport was prepared by the committee members).

Patient The recipient of an action (e.g.,dolphin in Marilyn fed the dolphin).Pejoration A semantic change in whichthe meaning of a word becomes more nega-tive or unfavorable (e.g., the meaning ofwench used to be ‘girl’).Performance Actual language use in par-ticular situations.Person A morphological category that typ-ically distinguishes among the first person(the speaker), the second person (theaddressee), and the third person (anyoneelse) (e.g., in English, the difference betweenI, you, and she/he/it).Pharyngeals Sounds made through themodification of airflow in the pharynx byretracting the tongue or constricting thepharynx.Pharynx The area of the throat betweenthe uvula and the larynx.Pheromone Chemical used by an animalspecifically for communicative purposes.Phoenician script An early writing sys-tem that had twenty-two consonantal signs,devised by the Semitic peoples of ancientPhoenicia as early as 1000 B.C.Phonemes Distinctive sounds in a languagethat contrast with other sounds in that lan-guage (e.g., the sounds [] and [i] as in rich andreach contrast with each other as separatephonemes in English but not in Spanish).Phonemic level See Phonemic representation.Phonemic paraphasias Speech errors thatresult from phonemic substitutions and omis-sions (e.g., spoon may be pronounced as poon).Phonemic representation The represen-tation that consists of the phonemes towhich allophones belong; predictable pho-netic information is not represented.Phonemic transcription A type of tran-scription of sounds where phonetic detailsare ignored and only phonemic contrast isrecorded.Phones Any sounds used in human lan-guage (also called speech sounds).Phonetic determinative The part of aChinese character that provides informationabout the pronunciation of the correspond-ing morpheme.Phonetic level See Phonetic representation.

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Phonetic plausibility strategy The pri-mary strategy used to reconstruct protoformsthat requires any sound changes posited tobe phonetically plausible. (See also Majorityrules strategy.)Phonetic representation What is actu-ally produced in speech after rules have beenapplied to the underlying representation(i.e., predictable variants, or allophones).Phonetic sound change A sound changethat results in a new allophone of an alreadyexisting phoneme.Phonetic transcription A type of tran-scription of sounds in which not onlyphonemic differences but also phoneticdetails are recorded.Phonetically conditioned changeSound change that begins as subtle alter-ations in the sound pattern of a language inparticular phonetic environments.Phonetics The study of the inventory andstructure of the sounds of language.Phonographic writing A type of writ-ing in which symbols represent syllables orsegments.Phonological dyslexia A type ofacquired dyslexia in which the patient seemsto have lost the ability to use spelling-to-sound rules and can only read words thatthey have seen before.Phonological processes See Processes.Phonological representation SeePhonemic representation.Phonological rules Rules that relate theunderlying forms of words to their phoneticforms.Phonological (sound) change A soundchange that results in the addition, elimina-tion, or rearrangement of phonemes (e.g.,splits, mergers).Phonology The component of a grammarmade up of the elements and principles thatdetermine how sounds pattern in a language.Phonotactics The set of constraints onhow sequences of segments pattern.Phrase A unit of syntactic structure that isbuilt by combining words together so thatthe phrase consists of a head and anoptional specifier and/or complement(e.g., the apple, Bob, hurried to class).Phrase structure rule A rule that speci-fies how a syntactic constituent is formed

out of other smaller syntactic constituents(e.g., IP → NP I').

Phrase structure schema The blueprintfor the internal structure of phrases (see alsoX' schema).

Phyla The groups into which purportedlyrelated language stocks are placed (alsocalled superstocks).

Pictograms Pictorial representations ofobjects or events.

Pidgin A lingua franca with a highlysimplified grammatical structure that hasemerged as a mixture of two or more lan-guages and has no native speakers.

Pinyin The system of writing Mandarinwith a modified Latin alphabet, used forsuch things as street signs and brand names.

Pitch The auditory property of a soundthat enables us to place it on a scale thatranges from low to high.

Place features Phonological features thatrepresent place of articulation.

Place node A node in the feature geome-try in autosegmental phonology, which dom-inates major place features.

Place or manner assimilation Theprocess by which one segment becomes morelike another in either the place at which it isarticulated or the manner by which it isarticulated.

Places of articulation The points atwhich the airstream is modified in the vocaltract to produce phones (also called points ofarticulation).

Plural An inflectional category associatedwith nouns with more than one referent.

Points of articulation See Places ofarticulation.

Polysemy The situation in which a wordhas two or more related meanings (e.g.,bright ‘intelligent’, bright ‘shining’).

Polysynthetic languages Languages inwhich single words can consist of longstrings of lexical categories and affixes, oftenexpressing the meaning of an entire sentencein English (e.g., Inuktitut).

Positive evidence Grammatical utter-ances in the learner’s linguistic environment.

Positive face The need of every person tobelong to a group and to maintain solidaritywith a group.

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Positive politeness The use of politenessconventions to express regard and solidaritywith other participants in discourse.Positron emission tomography (PET)A brain imaging technique that uses radioac-tive isotopes to measure changes in brainmetabolism associated with particular cogni-tive and behavioral tasks.Postal survey A linguistic survey given inthe form of a written questionnaire and dis-tributed by mailing batches of questionnairesto selected intermediaries in the communitywho then pass them on to subjects.Postlexical decomposition The processby which the constituents of a multimor-phemic word are activated in the brainthrough the representation of the whole lexi-cal item.Postposition A P that occurs after itscomplement. (See Preposition.)Postvocalic r An r that occurs after avowel in the same syllable (e.g., the r in coreor darling).Power The degree of control that onegroup or individual may hold over another.Pragmatics Speakers’ and addressees’background attitudes and beliefs, theirunderstanding of the context of an utter-ance, and their knowledge of how languagecan be used for a variety of purposes.Predicate A traditional term for the verbphrase in a sentence.Prefix An affix that is attached to thefront of its base (e.g., re- in replay).Prelexical decomposition The compu-tational process by which the individualmorphemes of a multimorphemic word arescanned and isolated in the brain.Preposition (P) A minor lexical cate-gory whose members typically designaterelations in space or time (e.g., in, before);they come before the NP complement withwhich they combine to form a PP.Prescriptive (grammar) A grammar thataims to state the linguistic facts in terms ofhow they should be. (See also Descriptive[grammar].)Presupposition The assumption or beliefimplied by the use of a particular word orstructure.Prewriting Possible forerunners of writ-ing, such as incised bone or clay countersused to keep records.

Primary stress The most prominentstress of a word.Prime In a priming experiment, this is thestimulus that is expected to affect a subject’sresponse accuracy and response latencyto the following stimulus.Priming A situation in which the presen-tation of a stimulus makes it easier to processthe following stimulus.Priming effect In a priming experiment,this is the extent to which a priming stimu-lus facilitates the processing of the next stimulus.Principal component A set of variablesthat when taken together, show patterns ofvariation that provide the best statistical fitfor determining how test subjects should begrouped together.Principal components analysis (PCA)An approach to studying social differentia-tion in which the statistical investigation ofa large number of linguistic variants precedesdetermining what social similarities areshared among them.Principle A The syntactic principle thatconstrains the interpretation of reflexive pro-nouns and is formulated as: A reflexivepronoun must have an antecedent (withinthe same clause) that c-commands it.Principle B The syntactic principle thatconstrains the interpretation of pronominalsand is formulated as: A pronominal mustnot have an antecedent (within the sameclause) that c-commands it.Principle of Compositionality, The Aprinciple underlying sentence interpretationthat is formulated as: The meaning of a sen-tence is determined by the meaning of itscomponent parts and the manner in whichthey are arranged in syntactic structure.Processes See Articulatory processes.Proclitic A clitic that attaches to thebeginning of a word.Productivity In morphology, the relativefreedom with which affixes can combinewith bases of the appropriate category.Progressive assimilation Assimilationin which a sound influences a following seg-ment (e.g., liquid-glide devoicing).Pronominal A pronoun whose interpreta-tion may, but does not have to, be deter-mined by an antecedent in the samesentence (e.g., he, her).

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Pronoun (Pro) A minor lexical cate-gory whose members can replace a nounphrase and look to another element for theirinterpretation (e.g., he, herself, it).

Prosodic properties SeeSuprasegmental properties.

Prosody Rhythm, prominence, or intona-tion, often used to separate parts of a sen-tence, emphasize selected elements, orcommunicate other important information.

Protoform The form that is reconstructedas the source of cognate words in related languages.

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) The proto-language from which evolved most of thelanguages of Europe, Persia (Iran), and thenorthern part of India.

Protolanguage The reconstructed lan-guage that is presumed to be the commonsource for two or more related languages(e.g., Proto-Indo-European).

Prototypical Characteristic of the bestexemplars of a concept (e.g., robins or spar-rows are prototypes of the concept BIRD).

Psycholinguistic model A schematicrepresentation based on experimental resultsof how language is processed mentally.

Psycholinguistics The study of the men-tal processes and representations involved inlanguage comprehension and production.

Q feature In syntax, a feature in the com-plementizer position that marks a sentenceas a question and that may attract elements(such as an auxiliary verb) to the comple-mentizer position.

Radical The part of a Chinese characterthat provides clues about the morpheme’smeaning (also called a key).

Reading The interpretation for a particu-lar utterance.

Real-world knowledge Knowledge ofwhat is likely in real life.

Reanalysis A source of language changethat involves an attempt to attribute aninternal structure to a word that formerlywas not broken down into component mor-phemes (e.g., ham + burger).

Rebus principle In writing, the use of asign for any word that is pronounced like theword whose meaning the sign representedinitially.

Recast A repetition of a child’s utterancethat includes adjustments to its form and/orcontent.

Recursion Repeated application of thesame rule to create a more and more com-plex sentence, such as a series of embeddedclauses (e.g., This is the cat that killed the ratthat ate the malt that lay in the house that Jackbuilt).

Reduced A phonological characteristic ofschwa [ə], indicating a weakly articulated,unstressed variant of stressed vowels.

Reduced vowel See Schwa.

Redundancy The use of different modali-ties to convey the same information.

Reduplication A morphological processthat repeats all or part of the base to which itis attached. (See also Partial reduplicationand Full reduplication.)

Reference resolution Identifying who orwhat a referring expression is naming.

Referents The set of entities to which aword or expression refers (also called itsdenotation or extension).

Referring expressions Words or expres-sions (typically nouns or pronouns) thatname entities (e.g., Johanna, the class, they).

Reflexive pronoun A pronoun that musthave a c-commanding antecedent, usually inthe same clause (e.g., himself, herself).

Regional dialect A speech variety spokenin a particular geographical area (e.g.,Appalachian English).

Register A speech variety appropriate to aparticular speech situation (e.g., formal ver-sus casual).

Register tones Tones that have a stablepitch over a single syllable.

Regressive assimilation Assimilation inwhich a sound influences a preceding seg-ment (e.g., nasalization in English).

Regressive saccades Eye movements inwhich the eyes dart backward to a section oftext that has been previously read.

+ Rel feature In syntax, a feature in thecomplementizer position that attracts theWH- word of a relative clause to the spec-ifier position of CP.

Relational analysis A syntactic analysisin which phenomena are described in termsof grammatical relations such as subject and

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direct object rather than morphologicalpatterns or the order of words.

Relative clause A sentence-like construc-tion that follows a noun (in English) andgives information about the noun it follows(e.g., the linguistics class that my favorite pro-fessor teaches).

Relexification Hypothesis The hypoth-esis that creoles are formed by using wordsfrom one language and the grammatical sys-tem of another.

Relic forms Forms that used to be wide-spread in a language but have survived onlyin a particular dialect (e.g., a-prefixing is arelic form in Appalachian English).

Representations Models of one aspect oflanguage (e.g., phonological representation,syntactic representation).

Response accuracy The correctness of asubject’s responses to particular stimuli in anexperiment.

Response latency The amount of timetaken by a subject in an experiment torespond to a stimulus.

Retroflex Sounds produced by curling thetongue tip back into the mouth (e.g., Ameri-can English [ɹ]).Rhotacism A type of weakening that typi-cally involves the change of /z/ to /r/.

Rhyme (R) The nucleus and the coda ofa syllable (e.g., [uts] in the word boots).

Right ear advantage (REA) A phenom-enon where speech is louder and clearerwhen it is heard in the right ear than in theleft ear for right-handed people.

Root (of a word) In a complex word, themorpheme that remains after all affixes areremoved (e.g., mind in unmindfulness).

Root (of the tongue) The part of thetongue that is contained in the upper part ofthe throat.

Root node The highest node of the fea-ture hierarchy.

Round A place feature that characterizessounds made by protruding the lips (e.g., [ɔ],[w]).

Rounded (sounds) Sounds made withthe lips protruding (e.g., [ow], [ɔ]).

Rounding The act of protruding the lipsto make rounded sounds.

Runic writing A writing system that wasdeveloped shortly after the beginning of theChristian era by Germanic tribes and thatlasted until the sixteenth century.

Saccades The quick and uneven move-ments of the eyes during reading.

Schwa The mid lax unrounded vowel thatis characterized by briefer duration than anyof the other vowels (also called a reducedvowel) (e.g., the underlined vowels inCanada, suppose).

Second language acquisition (SLA)The acquisition of a language that is notone’s native language.

Secondary stress The second mostprominent stress in a word.

Segmental change A sound change thataffects a segment.

Segments Individual speech sounds.

Semantic broadening The process inwhich the meaning of a word becomes moregeneral or more inclusive than its historicallyearlier form (e.g., the word aunt used tomean only ‘father’s sister’).

Semantic decomposition SeeComponential analysis.

Semantic features The components ofmeaning that make up a word’s intension(e.g., man has the feature [+human]; dog hasthe feature [-human]).

Semantic narrowing The process inwhich the meaning of a word becomes lessgeneral or less inclusive than its historicallyearlier meaning (e.g., the word meat used tomean any type of food).

Semantic shift The process in which aword loses its former meaning, taking on anew, often related meaning (e.g., immoralused to mean ‘not customary’).

Semantics The study of meaning inhuman language.

Semiotics The study of signs.

Sensory aphasia See Fluent aphasia.

Sentence (IP) A syntactic unit consistingof a noun phrase and a verb phrase.

Sentence ambiguity The possibility thata sentence can be interpreted in more thanone way.

Sequential change Sound change thatinvolves sequences of segments (e.g., assimilation).

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Serial processing model A psycholin-guistic theory built around the claim thatlanguage processing proceeds in a step-by-step manner.Seriation A child’s ability to arrange objectsin order of increasing or decreasing size.Setting Contextual information having todo with the physical environment in whicha sentence is uttered.Sheltered instruction A type of Englishas a second language (ESL) program thatcombines English language instruction withinstruction in academic content for Englishlanguage learners in U.S. schools.Shift A change in a phonological systemin which a series of phonemes is systemati-cally modified so that their organizationwith respect to each other is altered (e.g., theGreat English Vowel Shift).Shortest move The requirement in syntaxthat constituents should be moved the shortestpossible distance from their original position.Sibilants See Stridents.Sign A unit of communication structurethat consists of two parts: a signifier (suchas a sequence of sounds [tri]) and somethingsignified (such as a tree in the real world).Signal A sign that triggers a specific actionon the part of the receiver (e.g., traffic lights).Signified The real-world object that a signrepresents, as well as the sign’s conceptualcontent.Signifier That part of a sign that stimu-lates at least one sense organ of the receiverof a message.Similarity Differential RateHypothesis The hypothesis that claimsthat the rates of acquisition for dissimilarphenomena in two languages are faster thanfor similar phenomena.Simple vowels Vowels that do not showa noticeable change in quality during theirproduction (also called monophthongs) (e.g.,the vowel sounds of cab and get).Simple word A word that consists of asingle morpheme (e.g., horse).Single-route model A psycholinguistictheory built around the claim that a particu-lar type of language processing is accom-plished in one manner only.Singular An inflectional category associ-ated with nouns with a single referent.

Situational code-switching Switchingbetween languages for clearly identifiablereasons, such as when reporting the speechof another or when the topic of conversationswitches from personal to business affairs.

Size and shape classifiers (SASSes) Insign languages, hand shapes that representthe size or shape of an object and that can becombined with morphemes of motion, loca-tion, or manner of movement to form mor-phologically complex structures. (See alsoclassifier constructions).

Slang An informal nonstandard speechvariety characterized by newly coined andrapidly changing vocabulary.

Social network analysis An approach to sociolinguistic research in which theresearcher is a participant-observer of a socialgroup and interprets linguistic variation interms of the kinds and densities of relation-ships experienced by speakers.

Sociolect A speech variety spoken by agroup of people who share a particular socialcharacteristic, such as socioeconomic class,ethnicity, or age.

Sociolinguistic competence The abilityto understand and produce a variety of socialdialects in appropriate circumstances.

Sociolinguistic norms Conventions foruse of language structures in particular socialsituations.

Sociolinguistic variables Alternativeways of saying the same thing.

Sociolinguistics The study of the socialaspects of language.

Sociolinguistics of language The studyof how language structures are associatedwith particular social circumstances.

Sociolinguistics of society The study ofhow language structures are related to aspeaker’s social identity.

Solidarity The degree of intimacy or simi-larity that one group or individual may feelfor another.

Song In bird communication, lengthy,elaborate patterns of mostly pitched sounds.

Sonorant (feature) A major class featurethat characterizes all and only the“singables”: vowels, glides, liquids, andnasals.

Sonorant (sound) A sound that is “sing-able,” in contrast with an obstruent.

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Sonorous Characterized by a relativelyopen vocal tract with relatively little obstruc-tion of airflow as a sound is made (e.g., vow-els are sonorous sounds).

Sound change A systematic change ofsounds that took place over a long period.

Sound class See Class (sound).

Sound shift The systematic modificationof a series of phonemes (e.g., Grimm’s Law).

Source A thematic role that describesthe starting point for a movement (e.g.,Maine in The senator sent the lobster fromMaine to Nebraska).

Southern Shift The systematic change inpronunciation of vowels in the southernstates of the United States. (See also Shift.)

Spatial metaphor Use of a word that isprimarily associated with spatial orientationto talk about physical and psychologicalstates.

Speaker-dependent speech recognizersComputer programs that decode the spokenlanguage of a particular individual.

Speaker-independent speech recogniz-ers Computer programs that are able todecode the spoken language of many indi-viduals (e.g., for customer service telephonecalls).

Specifier A word that helps to make moreprecise the meaning of the head of thephrase and that occurs immediately beneathXP (e.g., the in the book).

Spectrogram An acoustic recording thatgraphically shows the frequency, intensity,and time of sounds.

Speech act theory A theory explaininghow speakers use language to accomplishintended actions and how hearers inferintended meaning from what is said.

Speech community A group whosemembers share both a particular language orvariety of language and the norms for itsappropriate use in social context.

Speech event An identifiable type of dis-course associated with a particular speech situation.

Speech recognition The ability (e.g., of acomputer) to decode the waveforms thatconstitute spoken language.

Speech situation The social situation inwhich language is used.

Speech sounds See Phones.

Speech synthesis system A computer-ized system (sometimes called text-to-speechsynthesis) that converts written text to spo-ken language (e.g., reading aloud to the visu-ally impaired).

Speech variety The language or form oflanguage used by any group of speakers.

Spelling pronunciation One factor insound change, where a new pronunciationreflects the spelling of the word (e.g., often).

Split brain experiments Studies thatinvestigate the effects of surgically severingthe corpus callosum.

Splits Phonological changes in which twoallophones become separate phonemes dueto the loss of the conditioning environment.

Spoonerisms A type of speech error,named after Reverend William A. Spooner, inwhich words or sounds are rearranged withoften humorous results.

Spread Glottis (SG) A laryngeal featurethat refers to the position of the vocal foldsand that distinguishes unaspirated from aspi-rated sounds.

Spreading Association of a feature to neigh-boring segments in autosegmental phonology.

S-structure See Surface structure.

Standard language The prestige varietyof a language that is employed by the gov-ernment and media, is used and taught ineducational institutions, and is the main oronly written variety.

Stem The base to which an inflectionalaffix is added (e.g., modification is the stemfor -s in the word modifications).

Stem-based dictionary In computationallinguistics, a dictionary that lists stems ratherthan words (e.g., it would list -cept as a stemrather than the words reception or perception).

Stemming A computer program for doingautomated morphological analysis by strip-ping affixes off words and matching baseforms to forms stored in the database.

Stimulus-bound communicationCommunication that only occurs when it istriggered by exposure to a certain stimulus orfor certain specific ends (e.g., the warningcall of a bird).

Stocks In language classification, groupsof related language families.

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Stopping In child language acquisition,the replacement of a fricative by a correspond-ing stop (e.g., zebra is pronounced [dibrə]).Stops Sounds made with a complete andmomentary closure of airflow through thevocal tract (e.g., [p], [t], [k]).Stress See Stressed vowels.Stressed vowels Vowels that are per-ceived as relatively more prominent due tothe combined effects of pitch, loudness, andlength.Strident A place feature of fricatives andaffricates characterized by greater acousticnoise (in English, [s, z, ʃ, �, tʃ, d�]).Stridents The noisier coronal fricativesand affricates (in English, [s, z, ʃ, �, tʃ, d�])(also called sibilants).Stroke A hemorrhage in the brain or theblockage or rupture of an artery, causingbrain damage (also called a cerebro-vascular accident).Strong generative capacity Capacity todescribe correctly the structures of the stringsof a language.Structurally ambiguous A property ofphrases or sentences whose componentwords can be combined in more than oneway (e.g., fast cars and motorcycles).Style The level of formality associated witha linguistic structure or set of structures clas-sified along a continuum from most informalto most formal.Subcategorization The classification ofwords in terms of their complement options(e.g., the verb devour is subcategorized for acomplement NP).Subject The NP occurring immediatelyunder IP (e.g., Irene in Irene is a tailor).Subject Constraint, The A constraint ontransformations that prevents elements frombeing moved out of a subject phrase.Subject-object agreement Agreement ofverbs in person and number with their sub-jects and objects.Subordinate clauses Sentence-like con-structions that are embedded inside othersentences (e.g., the string of words beginningwith that in Jamie told me that Johanna isgraduating soon).Subset Principle, The The initial or de-fault setting of a parameter will correspondto the option that permits fewer patterns.

Substitution (of sounds) Replacementof one segment with another similar sound-ing segment.

Substitution test A test used to deter-mine if a group of words is a syntactic con-stituent by replacing it with a single word.

Substrate language A language hypothe-sized to have supplied the basic grammaticalstructure for a contact variety.

Substratum influence The influence ofa politically or culturally nondominant lan-guage on a dominant language in the area(e.g., the borrowing of words into Englishfrom Native American languages).

Suffix An affix that is attached to theend of its base (e.g., -ly in quickly).

Sulci Plural of sulcus.

Sulcus An area in the brain where thecerebral cortex is folded in.

Superstratum influence The influenceof a politically or culturally dominant lan-guage on a less dominant language in thearea (e.g., the effects of Norman French onEnglish during the Middle English period).

Suppletion A morphological process thatmarks a grammatical contrast by replacing amorpheme with an entirely different mor-pheme (e.g., be/was).

Suprasegmental Above the individualspeech sound. (Syllables are suprasegmental.)

Suprasegmental properties Thoseproperties of sounds that form part of theirmakeup no matter what their place or man-ner of articulation: pitch, loudness, andlength (also called prosodic properties).

Surface dyslexia A type of acquireddyslexia in which the patient seems unableto recognize words as wholes, but must processall words through a set of spelling-to-soundrules (e.g., yacht would be pronounced /j�t/).Surface representation In phonology, theform that is actually produced by a speaker.Also called phonetic representation.

Surface structure The structure thatresults from the application of whatevertransformations are appropriate for the sen-tence in question (also called S-structure).

Syllabary A set of signs used for writingthe syllables of a language.

Syllabic A major phonological class fea-ture assigned to segments that function asthe nuclei of syllables (vowels and liquids).

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Syllabic (sounds) Sounds that could bepeaks of syllables (e.g., vowels in English).

Syllabic liquids Liquids that function assyllabic nuclei (e.g., the l in bottle).

Syllabic nasals Nasals that function assyllabic nuclei (e.g., the n in button).

Syllabic writing A type of writing inwhich each symbol represents a syllable.

Syllable A unit of linguistic structure thatconsists of a syllabic element and any seg-ments that are associated with it. (See alsoOnset, Nucleus, Coda.)

Symbolic model A psycholinguistic the-ory built around the claim that models oflinguistic knowledge make reference to rulesand representations consisting of symbolssuch as phonemes, words, syntactic categorylabels, and so forth.

Symbolic sign A sign that bears an arbi-trary relationship to its referent (e.g.,nononomatopoeic words, a stop sign).

Symptomatic sign A sign that sponta-neously and involuntarily conveys an inter-nal state or an emotion (e.g., crying).

Syncope The deletion of a word-internalvowel (e.g., the deletion of the schwa inpolice).

Synonyms Words or expressions that havethe same meanings in some or all contexts(e.g., buy and purchase).

Synsets Sets of synonyms that act as defi-nitions for a word in the WordNet machine-readable lexical resource.

Syntactic category The category intowhich an element is placed depending onthe type of meaning that it expresses, thetype of affixes it takes, and the type of struc-ture in which it occurs (includes both lexicaland functional categories).

Syntactic parser The theoretical con-struct that accounts for the human ability toassign grammatical categories and hierarchi-cal structure to elements in a stream of lan-guage input.

Syntax The system of rules and categoriesthat underlies sentence formation in humanlanguage.

Synthetic language A language thatmakes extensive use of polymorphemicwords (e.g., words containing a root and oneor more affixes) (also called an inflectionallanguage) (e.g., Spanish).

Systematic gaps Nonoccurring forms thatwould violate the phonotactic constraints ofa language (e.g., in English *mtlow).

Systematic phonetic correspondencesSound correspondences between two or morerelated languages that are consistent through-out the vocabularies of those languages.

Taboo Expressions that are seen as offen-sive and are therefore often euphemized.

Target (1) In second language acquisition,the language the learner is learning. (2) In apriming experiment, the stimulus to which asubject must respond and for whichresponse accuracy and response latencyare measured.

Teacher talk See Foreigner talk.

Telegraphic speech Speech lacking func-tional categories and bound morphemes.

Telegraphic stage The stage in child lan-guage acquisition in which children’s utter-ances are generally longer than two wordsbut lack bound morphemes and most func-tional categories.

Telephone survey A linguistic surveyconducted over the telephone.

Template The innate blueprint of bird-song that predisposes birds to perform a gen-eral song that is extremely simplified.

Template generation In computationallinguistics, the creation of sentences by usinga set of basic patterns (e.g., for an air-travelreservation system).

Temporal lobe The lobe of the brain thatlies beneath the lateral fissure and in whichWernicke’s area is located.

Tense (feature) A DORSAL feature thatexpresses the distinction between a tenseand a lax vowel.Tense (verb) In syntax and morphology,an inflectional category indicating the timeof an event or action relative to the momentof speaking.

Tense vowels Vowels that are made witha relatively tense tongue and greater vocaltract constriction than a lax vowel (e.g., thevowel sounds in heat and boat).

Terminal (intonation) contour Fallingintonation at the end of an utterance, signal-ing that the utterance is complete.

Terminals The lexical items or prefixes,suffixes, stems, or words of a language.

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Text analysis A type of discourse analysisthat studies how linguistic structures are usedto perform particular discourse functions.Textual competence Competence in the organization of language beyond the sentence.That-trace filter Constraint against havingboth that and a trace inside a CP.Thematic grid The part of a word’s lexi-cal entry that carries information about thethematic roles that it assigns.Thematic role The part played by a par-ticular entity in an event (e.g., agent, theme,source, goal, location).Theme The thematic role of the entitydirectly affected by the action of the verb(e.g., the ball in Tom caught the ball).Thyroid cartilage The cartilage thatforms the main portion of the larynx,spreading outward like the head of a plow.Tiers Different levels of structure in whichonly certain elements are represented (e.g.,in phonology, a syllabic tier and a tonal tier;in morphology, an affix tier and a root tier).Tip (of the tongue) The narrow area atthe front of the tongue.Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenaInstances of temporary inability to access aword in the mental lexicon.Token An individual instance of a variableor sign.Tone Pitch differences that signal differ-ences in meaning.Tone language A language in which dif-ferences in word meaning are signaled by dif-ferences in pitch.(Tongue) back See Back.(Tongue) blade See Blade.(Tongue) body See Body.(Tongue) dorsum See Dorsum.(Tongue) root See Root.(Tongue) tip See Tip.Top-down parsing A method of sentenceanalysis in which the entire sentence is con-sidered first, before its component parts.Top-down processing A type of mentalprocessing using a set of expectations to guidephonetic processing and word recognition.Topic What a sentence or group of sen-tences is about.

Topicalization The process by which thetopic of a sentence is moved to the front ofthe sentence (e.g., Vanilla pudding I like).

Total assimilation The assimilation ofall the features of neighboring segments.

Trace The empty element, marked by thesymbol t, that is left in syntactic structureafter an element has been moved.

Trachea The tube below the larynxthrough which air travels when it leaves thelungs, commonly known as the windpipe.

Transfer The process by which the firstlanguage (L1) influences the interlanguagegrammar of the learner of a second language.

Transformation A type of syntactic rulethat can move an element from one positionto another.

Transformational generative grammarA widely accepted approach to syntacticanalysis in which syntactic phenomena aredescribed in terms of building phrase struc-tures and moving elements (transformations)as a result of Merge and Move operations.

Transitional bilingual education Aneducational program for language minoritystudents in which initial instruction is pro-vided in the minority language along with themajority language, but full literacy in the mi-nority language is not a goal. (Compare withdevelopmental bilingual education).

Transitive See Transitive verb.

Transitive verb A verb that takes adirect object (e.g., hit).

Tree A diagram that represents the internalorganization of a word, phrase, or sentence.

Trill An r-like sound that is made by pass-ing air over the raised tongue tip, allowing itto vibrate.

Truth conditions The circumstancesunder which a sentence is true.

Turn-taking The changeover betweenspeakers’ turns in a conversation.

Two-level morphology In computationallinguistics, an approach to morphologicalanalysis that uses a stem-based dictionaryand rules to derive surface forms from theunderlying stems.

Two-way immersion (TWI) programsEducational programs that provide instruc-tion in two languages for language minoritystudents and language majority students

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together (also known as dual-languageprograms).Two-word stage A stage of first languageacquisition in which children normally uttertwo succeeding words to make a sentence.Typological plausibility A criterionthat guides language reconstruction by refer-ring to universals or existing properties oflanguage.

Umlaut The effect that a vowel (or some-times a glide) in one syllable can have on thevowel of another (usually preceding) syllable.Underextension A developmental phe-nomenon in which a child uses a lexicalitem to denote only a subset of the itemsthat it denotes in adult speech (e.g., car usedto refer to only moving cars).Underlying Unpredictable and basic (e.g., features of a phonemic segment beforederivation).Underlying form See underlying representation.Underlying representation In phonol-ogy, a form from which phonetic forms arederived by rule.Universal Grammar (UG) The system ofcategories, operations, and principles sharedby all human languages and considered to beinnate.Universal tendencies Patterns or traitsthat occur in all or most languages.Unmarked Tending to be relatively com-mon in world languages and/or less complex.(See also Unmarked traits.)Unmarked traits Those characteristics oflanguage that are considered to be less com-plex and/or universally more common inlanguages.Unordered rule application In a phono-logical derivation, an application of rules inwhich the outcome will be the same regard-less of the order in which rules are applied.Utterance Any bit of talk produced by aspeaker that is distinct from other bits of talkin a speech situation.Uvula The small fleshy flap of tissue thathangs down from the velum.Uvulars Sounds made with the tonguenear or touching the uvula.

Variable rule analysis Method of ana-lyzing sociolinguistic data in which statistical

procedures allow a variety of social and lin-guistic factors to be considered simultaneously.Variant One of a set of several possibleforms that can be used to express the samefunction or meaning.Velars Sounds made with the tonguetouching or near the velum (e.g., [ŋ], [k]).Velum The soft area toward the rear of theroof of the mouth.Verb (V) A lexical category that typi-cally designates actions, sensations, andstates; can usually be inflected for tense; andfunctions as the head of a verb phrase (e.g.,see, feel, remain).Verb Movement Parameter A cross-linguistic variation involving whether theverb does or does not raise to I.Verb raising transformation A syntac-tic rule that moves the verb to the I positionin S-structure in languages such as French.Verbal hedges Words or phrases that makestatements less assertive (e.g., maybe, sort of ).Verbal paradigm The set of inflectedforms associated with a verb (also called aconjugation).Verner’s Law A generalization made byKarl Verner, which states that a word-internalvoiceless fricative resulting from Grimm’sLaw underwent voicing if the original Proto-Indo-European accent did not immediatelyprecede it.Vocal cords See Vocal folds.Vocal folds A set of muscles inside thelarynx that may be positioned in variousways to produce different glottal states (alsocalled vocal cords).Vocal tract The oral cavity, nasal cavity,and pharynx.Voice A laryngeal feature that distinguishesbetween voiced and voiceless sounds.Voiced The glottal state in which thevocal folds are brought close together but not tightly closed, causing air passingthrough them to vibrate (e.g., [], [z], [m] arevoiced).Voiceless The glottal state in which thevocal folds are pulled apart, allowing air topass directly through the glottis (e.g., [t], [s],[f] are voiceless).Voicing A historical process of conso-nant weakening in which voiceless stopsor fricatives become voiced.

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Voicing assimilation Process in whichone sound becomes more like another soundin terms of whether it is voiced or voiceless.

Vowel harmony Phonological phenome-non in which all vowels of a word share oneor more features (e.g., all [+back, +round]).

Vowel qualities Vowel sounds.

Vowel reduction A process that convertsa full vowel, typically unstressed, to theshort, lax schwa.

Vowel shift See Shift.

Vowels Resonant, syllabic sounds pro-duced with less obstruction in the vocal tractthan that required for glides.

Weak generative capacity Capacity to describe properly all the strings of a language.

Weakening (phonetic) A type of assim-ilation in which a lessening in the time ordegree of a consonant’s closure occurs (alsocalled lenition).

Weakening of meaning The process inwhich the meaning of a word has less force(e.g., soon used to mean ‘immediately’ butnow means ‘in the near future’).

Wernicke’s aphasia The aphasia thatresults in fluent but nonsensical speech,sometimes characterized by jargonaphasia.

Wernicke’s area The area of the braininvolved in the interpretation and the selec-tion of lexical items.

Wh Movement A transformation thatmoves a wh phrase to the beginning of thesentence, formulated as: Move a wh phrase tothe specifier position under CP.

Wh question A sentence that begins witha wh- word such as who, what, where, when(e.g., Who did you see?).

Whisper The glottal state in which thevocal folds are adjusted so that the frontportions are pulled close together while theback portions are apart.Word The smallest free form found in language.Word manufacture The creation of aword from scratch, sometimes with the helpof a computer (also called coinage) (e.g.,Kodak).Word-based dictionary In computa-tional linguistics, a dictionary that listswords only and not stems that are not words(e.g., the word reception would be listed butnot the stem -cept).Word-based morphology Morphologythat can form a new word from a base that isitself a word (e.g., re-do and treat-ment inEnglish).Writing The representation of languageby graphic signs or symbols.

X' rule A phrase structure rule that dealswith intermediate categories, which statesthat an intermediate category X' consists of ahead, X, and any optional complements.X' schema The template for phrase struc-ture, indicating that a phrase is hierarchicallyorganized with a head, complement, andspecifier.XP rule A phrase structure rule that dealswith maximal categories, which states that amaximal category XP consists of an optionalspecifier and an X'.

Yes-no questions Questions that requirean answer of either yes or no (e.g., Is lin-guistics interesting? Do you speak a second language?).

Zero derivation See Conversion.

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