Glossary

Here I give very brief definitions of the technical terms introduced in the text. Terms defined elsewhere in the Glossary are given in the definitions in bold. The definitions are intended for reference only, and in some cases are rather terse; in general, the relevant passages in the main text of the book contain fuller explanation and illustration. For further details on these and many other technical terms in linguistics, see P. Matthews’s Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 2014.

accent

(i) a diacritic mark on a letter, as in the <é> of French café, accents have different phonetic or phonological values depending on the spelling conventions of the language in question; accents are often used to mark tone in tone languages, as in the standard transliteration of Mandarin Chinese; (ii) a regional or social phonetic/phonologically defined variety of a language, often non-standard (as in ‘Northern accent’, ‘Cockney accent’, etc.); in ordinary usage the term refers to non-standard varieties and can be slightly pejorative, hence standard speech may be described as having ‘no accent’, although from a linguistic point of view this is incoherent since the term refers to the variety’s phonetics/phonology, and all varieties have this; non-standard varieties which show distinct morphology, syntax and lexicon from the standard are usually referred as dialects; (iii) a synonym for stress, referring to the most prominent syllable in a multisyllable word (where ‘prominence’ is a perceptual term with complex articulatory correlates involving loudness and pitch).

accusative

one of the case forms found in Latin, Sanskrit and many other languages. It typically marks the direct object of a verb.

affricates

a class of consonants with a complex articulation involving a stop phase and delayed release, giving rise to fricative noise. Since they involve two phonetically distinguishable phases, they are written as digraphs in the IPA. Received Pronunciation has two affricates: [ʧ] and [ʤ].

agent

the ‘doer’ of an action described by a verb of the relevant type, e.g. Mary in Mary ate her dinner. If there is an Agent, it corresponds to the subject of an active clause.

air stream

in articulatory phonetics, the flow of air which is modified in the articulation of consonants or vowels. English uses only the air stream emanating from the lungs in normal exhalation (known as the pulmonic egressive airstream), and this is the only one discussed here. Other languages make use, to varying degrees, of other air streams: pulmonic ingressive (inhaled air), glottalic egressive and ingressive and velaric egressive and ingressive. See for more on these.

allomorph

a variant form of a morpheme; allomorphy may arise through free variation, be phonologically conditioned or morphologically conditioned.

allophone

a variant form of a phoneme; allophony may arise through free variation or be phonologically conditioned.

alveolar

a natural class of consonants whose articulation involves total or partial blockage at the alveolar ridge, these include English /t, d, s, n, l/; defined by the distinctive features [+ant, +cor].

alveolar ridge

a ridge at the front of the hard palate behind the upper teeth, involved in the articulation of alveolar consonants.

aphasia

a form of acquired (i.e. non-congenital) language impairment arising from damage to Broca’s area or Wernicke’s area, or both, usually caused by trauma or stroke; the two main types of aphasia are known as Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia respectively.

arbitrary

relating to the conventional nature of the sound-meaning relation for the vast majority of morphemes and words in all languages; famously encapsulated in de Saussure’s doctrine of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign.

argument

in predicate logic, the name for the constant or variable associated with a predicate; in the usual notation, written as a lower case letter in parentheses immediately following the symbol designating the predicate.

aspiration

a delay in the onset of voicing after the release of a stop consonant giving rise to a brief [h]-like articulation, IPA [^h].

assimilation

a phonological process whereby nearby (typically adjacent) phonemes undergo phonetic modification in such a way that they become more similar; the realisation of English past-tense /d/ as /t/ following a verb ending in a voiceless obstruent is an example of voicing assimilation.

auxiliary

a ‘helping’ verb, which supplements the meaning of the main verb in some way, often connected with tense or mood; have in I have eaten lunch is an auxiliary.

back

(i) in the standard terminology of articulatory phonetics, a class of vowels characterised by an articulation involving backing of the tongue body towards the velum, as in English [u:, ʊ, ɔ:, ɑ:, ɒ]; in English, only back vowels are also rounded; (ii) in phonology a distinctive feature whose positive value designates both vowels and consonants whose articulation involves raising of the body of the tongue towards the velum; thus, in addition to the vowels mentioned under (i), the consonants /k/ and /g/ are [+back].

bilabial

a type of articulation of obstruents involving disturbance of the air stream by the lips; English has two bilabial stops, /p/ and /b/.

blade

area of the tongue behind the tip but in front of the main body involved in the articulation of typical pronunciations of alveolar and interdental consonants.

bound morpheme

a morpheme which cannot occur alone but must occur attached to another morpheme, e.g. English past-tense -d.

branch

in syntax, a line connecting two nodes in a tree.

branching node

in syntax, a node which immediately dominates more than one constituent, hence two branches emanate underneath it in the standard format for representing constituent structure in a tree diagram; branching nodes are always non-terminal nodes.

Broca’s aphasia

also known as agrammatic aphasia or expressive aphasia, one of the two main kinds of aphasia, characterised by highly disfluent speech with missing functional categories and inflections, as well as impaired stress and intonation; involves damage to Broca’s area.

Broca’s area

a region of the brain in the inferior frontal gyrus of the left hemisphere; damage to this area leads to Broca’s aphasia. The nature of Broca’s aphasia makes it tempting to conjecture that this region of the brain may form a significant part of the neural substrate for morphology and syntax.

case

a class of bound morphemes (typically suffixes) which attach to nouns in many languages to mark the syntactic role of a noun or noun phrase in the sentence.

case forms

the morphophonological forms of case suffixes.

category

in syntax, a class of morphemes sharing the same distribution, morphological markings and (roughly) semantic properties, e.g. noun, verb, etc. Roughly corresponds to the traditional notion of ‘part of speech’.

centring diphthongs

a class of diphthongs found in most varieties of British English (and non-rhotic varieties generally) involving movement of the tongue from a peripheral part of the vowel space to a central area, roughly where schwa is articulated.

comparative reconstruction

in historical linguistics, the technique for postulating forms of protolanguages based on correspondence sets; for morphology and phonology, the technique relies on the thesis of the regularity of sound change.

competence

the system of linguistic knowledge underlying a normal adult’s ability to produce and understand an unbounded range of sentences in the native language; as opposed to performance, competence need not be overtly manifested in behaviour.

complementary distribution

in phonology, the case where distinct allophones of a given phoneme always appear in identifiable phonologically conditioned contexts; opposed to free variation.

compositional semantics

the approach to sentence meaning which follows the principle that the meaning of a complex expression can be computed from the meanings of its parts; in many approaches to compositional semantics, some version of type theory is involved.

compound

in morphology, a complex word consisting of at least two elements which are independently able to be free morphemes, possibly with further bound morphemes, e.g. blackbird and coffee-maker.

conditioned allomorphy

in morphology, the case where the forms of distinct allomorphs of a given morpheme are determined by their morphological context (morphologically conditioned allomorphy) or by their phonological context (phonologically conditional allomorphy).

conjugation

generally, morphological classes of verbs; in Latin and the Romance languages, the three or four morphological classes defined by theme vowels.

conjunction

in logic, the connective which connects two propositions such that the resulting proposition is true only where both conjoined propositions are true; conventionally written ‘&’.

connective

in logic, elements which typically connect two propositions in such a way that the truth of the resulting proposition can be computed from the truth of the connected propositions combined with the semantics of the connective in question (these are the truth-functional connectives); the connectives are conjunction, disjunction, implication and equivalence.

consonant

in phonetics, a sound articulated such that the air stream is perturbed so that turbulence or blockage is produced; in phonology, a phoneme which cannot appear (in most languages) in the syllable nucleus.

constituency

the fundamental syntactic relation, specified by Phrase-Structure Rules and indicated by dominance relations in tree diagrams.

constituent

in syntax, a category A is a constituent of another category B just where a continuous set of branches can be traced from A to B going consistently ‘upward’ in the tree diagram; the inverse of dominance.

constituent structure

the core set of relations in syntax, generated by Phrase-Structure Rules and represented equivalently by labelled bracketings or tree diagrams.

conventional

the arbitrary relation between sound and meaning for the vast majority of words and morphemes in all languages.

conventional implicature

in Gricean pragmatics, the case of implicature where the implicature is conventionalised, perhaps as a lexical property of a given word or morpheme, e.g. but is logically synonymous with and but carries a conventional implicature of contrast.

Co-operative Principle

in Gricean pragmatics, the general principle that speakers and hearers interact rationally in order to communicate effectively; the conversational maxims (Quality, Quantity, Manner and Relevance) are cases of this principle.

covert prestige

in sociolinguistics, the form of prestige which arises from (sometimes conscious) use of low prestige forms, particularly prevalent among lower middle-class and upper working-class males.

denotation

a general term for the semantic value of a term (a category, word or phrase).

derivation

in phonology, a series of ordered rules leading from the underlying form to something close to the observed phoneme sequence, in morphology, the process of adding suffixes which change a word's category.

design feature of language

a seemingly fundamental aspect of language which distinguishes language from many other aspects of cognition; duality of patterning and discrete infinity are good candidates.

determiner

a functional category (D), which modifies or quantifies over the rest of the noun phrase it is part of; definite and indefinite articles and many quantifiers are examples.

direct object

a noun phrase which typically marks the ‘undergoer’ of an action described by a verb, and forms part of the verb phrase with the verb, e.g. the pizza in Mary [_VP ate the pizza].

distinctive features

in phonology, the system of features which allows phonemes to be broken down into smaller units reflecting natural classes; phonological rules are formulated using distinctive features.

dominance

in syntax, the inverse of constituency: a category A dominates another category B just where a continuous set of branches can be traced from A to B going consistently ‘downward’ in the tree diagram

duality of patterning

a possible design feature of language: the fact that language seems to involve two distinct combinatorial systems, one combining meaningless phonemes to make meaningful morphemes, and another one combining morphemes, words and phrases to make a potentially unbounded number of higher-order units (notably sentences), whose meaning can be compositionally computed from the way in which the constituent elements combine.

E-language

language seen as external to the individual, in contrast to I-language, competence and performance.

entity

in type theory, one of the two fundamental logical types, typically denoted by proper names, e.g. Clover.

equivalence

in logic, a connective linking two propositions such that the resulting proposition is true just where the connected propositions are either both true or both false; also known as a biconditional; standardly written ‘↔’; read as ‘if and only if’, written ‘iff’.

exclusive disjunction

in logic, the kind of disjunction which is true where only one of the disjuncts is true, false otherwise, roughly corresponds to ordinary English ‘either . . . or’, standardly written ⊕.

existential quantifier

in predicate logic, one of the two canonical quantifiers, written ‘∃’; the meaning of ‘∃x’ roughly corresponds to ‘for some x’.

expressive aphasia

another term for Broca’s aphasia or agrammatic aphasia. Not preferred as there is evidence that typical Broca’s aphasics have comprehension difficulties in addition to their production difficulties.

felicity conditions

in speech-act theory, the conditions for the successful execution of a performative, so that it has the desired illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects.

First Germanic Sound Shift

the series of systematic changes in the Germanic consonants which demonstrates the regular relationship between the Germanic languages and Proto Indo-European, also known as Grimm’s Law.

free morpheme

a morpheme which is capable of standing alone, as opposed to a bound morpheme.

free variation

in phonology, when more than one allophone of a given phoneme alternates with another with no conditioning, in opposition to complementary distribution, or when two phonemes freely vary in given context with no contrast (as in the two possible pronunciations of the first vowel of economics).

fricative

an obstruent consonant which is not a stop, involving approximation of articulators in the vocal tract such that turbulence is produced, but without complete blockage.

generalised conversational implicature

in Gricean pragmatics, the case of implicature where the implicature is not fully conventionalised but is nonetheless quite commonly used, in opposition to particular conversational implicatures, which are ad hoc in nature; like the other kinds of implicature, they are computed using the conversational maxims in combination with Theory of Mind under the Co-operative Principle.

generate

in syntax, the operation of building constituent structure by means of Phrase-Structure Rules.

genitive

one of the case forms found in Latin, Sanskrit and of any other languages. It roughly translates as ‘of’ and so typically marks possession among other things.

glottal stop

the sound produced by closing the vocal cords and then releasing them, causing a rush of higher-pressure air from the lungs; IPA [ʔ], found in many (particularly British) English pronunciations of intervocalic <t>.

Grimm’s Law

the series of systematic changes in the Germanic consonants which demonstrate the regular relationship between the Germanic languages and Proto Indo-European, also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift.

hard palate

corresponds roughly to what is colloquially known as the ‘roof the mouth’, the area from the alveolar ridge to the soft palate or velum; consonants pronounced with the tongue raised towards the hard palate are palatalised.

head

in both morphology and syntax, the most important element of a complex category, the one responsible for determining the category of the complex, e.g. the noun in a noun phrase, the verb in a verb phrase, etc.

high

in phonetics, a vowel pronounced with the body of the tongue raised towards either the hard or the soft palate, the main high vowels in English being /i:, ɪ, u:, ʊ/; in phonology, a distinctive feature whose positive value characterises the high vowels as well as consonants whose articulation involves raising the tongue in the manner just described: /ŋ, w, r, j, k, g/ in English.

historical linguistics

the study of how languages change over time.

I-language

language seen as internal to the individual, a cognitive capacity, in contrast to E-language; competence is close to synonymous with I-language, and performance involves the interaction of I-language with other cognitive capacities.

illocutionary force

in speech-act theory, the aspect of a performative which leads to an illocutionary act.

immediate constituent

in syntax, a category A is an immediate constituent of another category B just where a continuous set of branches can be traced from A to B going ‘upward’ in the tree diagram, and there is no category C such that A is a constituent of C and B is not a constituent of C; the inverse of immediate dominance.

imperfect

a set of tense forms found in various languages (notably Latin and the Romance languages) which indicates ongoing action in the past, roughly translating ‘Mary was verbing/Mary used to verb’.

implication

in logic, a connective linking two propositions p and q such that the resulting proposition is false just where p is true and q is false and true otherwise; standardly written ‘→’; read as ‘if p then q’.

implicational universal

in language typology, a relation between two potentially variant features of a language p and q such that where p holds q must hold, but not necessarily vice-versa.

implicature

the core concept in Gricean pragmatics: one utterance may implicate another where one interlocutor is able to infer, using the Co-operative Principle and Theory of Mind, that the other interlocutor intended q by uttering p under the relevant conversational conditions; there are three types of implicature: conventional implicature, generalised conversational implicature and (particular) conversational implicature.

inclusive disjunction

in logic, a connective linking two propositions p and q such that the resulting proposition is true where either or both of p and q are true and false otherwise; standardly written ‘v’; read as ‘p and/or q’, to be distinguished from exclusive disjunction.

indefinite article

a determiner whose meaning corresponds roughly to the existential quantifier, e.g. English a(n).

infinitive

the canonical non-finite form of the verb in many languages, including English, where it is almost always preceded by to, as in To sing is fun.

inflection

one way of forming complex words, which involves adding a bound morpheme to a root without changing its category, but indicating grammatical information, such as tense on verbs and case on nouns.

interdental

a place of articulation of fricatives, involving placing the blade of the tongue either in between the upper and lower teeth or behind the upper teeth; English has the voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives written with IPA [ð] and [θ] respectively.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

the standard system of phonetic and phonemic transcription, endorsed by the International Phonetics Association.

isogloss

an imaginary line drawn on a map, separating areas which are linguistically distinct in some way.

labelled brackets

in syntax, one of the standard ways of indicating constituent structure, along with tree diagrams (which are equivalent).

labio-dental

a place of articulation of fricatives, involving placing the lower lip behind the upper teeth; English has the voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives written with IPA [v] and [f] respectively.

language types

groups of languages which share some salient structural property or properties, in principle independently of any historical relationship among them; implicational universals can be used to define language types.

language typology

the study and establishment of language types and other similarities and differences among the languages of the world; may involve simply cataloguing what is found where.

lateral

a class of sonorant formed by blocking the central flow of the air stream (in English, at the alveolar ridge) and lowering the sides of the tongue so that the air passes out that way; English has the one lateral, IPA [l].

lexicon

the mental dictionary, the repository of at least all idiosyncratic information (including the arbitrary sound-meaning relation and the morphosyntactic category) of the morphemes of a competent speaker’s native language.

liquid

a class of sonorants including laterals and rhotics; English has /l/ and /r/.

locutionary act

in speech-act theory, the actual spoken sentence or utterance, which carries illocutionary force.

logic

the study of the laws of valid inference, relevant for semantics since sound inferences are truth-preserving, and truth provides a way to elucidate meaning in truth-conditional semantics.

logical form

the formal aspects of a sentence that are important for understanding how that sentence conveys a proposition with particular logical properties; propositional logic and predicate logic provide different ways of presenting aspects of logical form in coherent and well-understood notations.

long vowel

a vowel pronounced with extra duration; in English, a long vowel may constitute a stressed syllable on its own (as in I, pronounced /aɪ/), but a short vowel may not (there is no stressed syllable consisting only of /ɪ/).

low

in phonetics, a vowel pronounced with the tongue low in the mouth, in or close to its at-rest position, e.g. English /æ, ɑ: ɔ: ɒ/; in phonology, a distinctive feature whose positive value distinguishes low vowels from all others.

low prestige

in sociolinguistics, a form which lacks social value, except in terms of covert prestige.

minimal pair

the principal way of identifying distinct phonemes, as in English pit vs bit which show that /p/ and /b/ are distinct phonemes.

mood

a type of verbal inflection found in many languages (e.g. Latin and the Romance languages) which indicates whether the action described by the verb is assumed to really take place, or whether there is some doubt about this; the chief moods in European languages are the indicative and the subjunctive; in English mood is indicated by auxiliaries rather than by verbal inflection.

morpheme

the minimal unit of meaning in language; morphemes may be smaller than words (as in bake + (e)r), or a word may be a single morpheme (as in bake); morphemes may be free or bound.

morphology

the study of the internal structure of words.

nasal

in phonetics, the class of sounds whose articulation involves lowering the velum so that the air stream can pass out through the nasal cavity, while there is a blockage to the air stream in the oral cavity, the nasal consonants of English are /m, n, ŋ/; in phonology, the distinctive feature whose positive value distinguishes /m, n, ŋ/ from all the other English phonemes.

nasal cavity

the part of the vocal tract through which the air stream passes when the velum is lowered, giving rise to a nasal consonant if there is blockage in the oral cavity, and a nasalised vowel if the air stream is also allowed to pass through the oral cavity.

natural class

in phonology, a class of sounds or phonemes described by a set of distinctive features, e.g. voiced phonemes (described by [+voice]) or nasals (described by [+nas]).

negation

in logic, a constant applying to a single proposition so as to change its truth value from true to false or from false to true, standardly written ‘¬’, read as ‘not’; in morphology and syntax, a morpheme or word expressing something approximating to logical negation, e.g. the English word not or the prefix un-, as in unlawful.

negative concord

the phenomenon, found in French and many other languages, whereby the co-occurrence of two negative morphemes in a sentence does not give rise to logical double negation (¬¬p = p), but rather either an intensified negation, or just normal negation; found in many varieties of non-standard English, and illogically stigmatised.

node

in syntax, a position in a tree diagram from which either at least one branch emanates ‘downwards’ (a non-terminal node), or a site of lexical insertion (a terminal node).

nominative

one of the case forms found in Latin, Sanskrit and many other languages. It typically marks the subject of a verb.

non-rhotic

a variety of English in which <r> is not pronounced after a vowel in the same syllable, hence car is pronounced /kɑ:/. Standard British English, as well as Australian and New Zealand English, are non-rhotic.

non-terminal node

in syntax, a node in a tree diagram from which at least one branch emanates ‘downwards’, and hence which dominates at least one other node.

nucleus

the central, most ‘sonorous’ part of a syllable; in many languages, only vowels can be nuclei, but in English nasals and liquids can be (as in one pronunciation of button as /bʌtn/).

number

the inflectional category which distinguishes singular from plural, marked on nouns in many languages, and on verbs in quite a few (in English only in the present tense); some languages, e.g. Mandarin, have no obligatory number marking (either on nouns or verbs); others have a dual in addition to singular and plural, marking two of something, in this case, plural means ‘three or more’.

obstruent

a natural class of consonants defined as involving audible turbulence in the vocal tract, i.e. the stops and fricatives; defined by distinctive feature [-son].

organs of speech

the organs of the oral cavity (tongue, lips, teeth, velum), pharynx and larynx which contribute to the articulation of the sounds of speech (also known as the speech organs or vocal tract).

overt prestige

positive social value associated with a sociolinguistic variable.

performance

putting competence into practice in production and comprehension, involves competence combined with short-term memory, attention and other non-linguistic cognitive capacities.

performative

an utterance which performs a speech act, opposed to a constative, which has a truth value.

perlocutionary effect

the result of a successful performative, whose illocutionary force has this effect.

person

the inflectional category which distinguishes among first, second and third, marked on pronouns in very many languages, and on verbs in many languages (in English only in the third person of the present tense).

phoneme

the basic contrastive unit of phonology; phonemic distinctions are established by the principle of contrast among minimal pairs.

phonetics

the study of the sounds of speech; there are three main branches: articulatory phonetics is the study of how the organs of speech produce those sounds, acoustic phonetics deals with the physical aspects of the perturbations to the ambient air caused by the articulatory movements of the organs of speech, and perceptual phonetics deals with how those sounds are perceived and processed in the ear and the brain.

phonology

the branch of linguistics dealing with how speech sounds are organised in linguistic systems.

phonological rule

a rule, standardly formulated using distinctive features, which applies during a derivation describing systematic changes in the realisation of the underlying forms of phonemes and other phonological material.

phrase

in syntax, a unit of organisation of morphemes and words, intermediate between the word/morpheme level (indicated by terminal nodes) and the sentence, indicated by non-terminal nodes.

Phrase-Structure Rules

the rules which generate constituent structure, whose output is indicated equivalently by tree diagrams or labelled brackets.

place of articulation

for consonants, the position where an obstruction to the air stream of some kind takes place; for vowels, the area(s) in the vowel space to which the body of the tongue moves during articulation.

plosive

the natural class of obstruents whose articulation involves total blockage of the air stream at some place of articulation; in distinctive-feature terms, plosives are characterised as [-cont], also known as stops.

post-alveolar

a place of articulation just behind that of the standard alveolar consonants; in distinctive features, this natural class is characterised as [+cor, -ant]; the English post-alveolar fricatives are /ʃ/ (voiceless) and /ʒ/ (voiced).

pragmatics

the branch of linguistics which deals with how interlocutors manage to convey more than what is actually said in typical interactions; the key concept is speaker meaning as opposed to sentence meaning.

predicate

in predicate logic, the class of constants associated with arguments, typically corresponding to adjective or verb phrases in syntax (although they may correspond to nouns too), standardly written in capitals, with the arguments in lowercase in parentheses following them.

predicate logic

the branch of logic which breaks propositions down into predicates and arguments; a key aspect of predicate logic is its ability to represent quantification.

prestige form

a linguistic form with positive social value.

proposition

a semantic representation of a sentence, usually in logical form, which bears a truth value.

propositional logic

the branch of logic dealing with logical relations among propositions, the key relations being realised by the connectives.

Proto Indo-European

a proto-language at the origin of almost all of the languages of Modern Europe and many of those of South-West Asia and Northern India.

protolanguage

a hypothesised language at the origin of a given language family, whose existence is established by comparative reconstruction.

psycholinguistics

the branch of linguistics dealing with questions common to linguistics and psychology, primarily language acquisition and learning, language disorders and language processing/comprehension.

quantification

in predicate logic, a mode of representation expressions of generality which are not predicated of individuals, which involves a relation between a quantifier and a variable functioning as the argument of a predicate inside the immediately following parenthesis; one of the principal advantages of predicate logic.

quantifier

in predicate logic, involved in the representation of expressions of generality which are not predicated of individuals: a quantifier binds a variable functioning as the argument of a predicate inside the immediately following parenthesis; there are two quantifiers, the existential quantifier and the universal quantifier; in syntax quantifiers are often determiners.

recursion

the property of Phrase-Structure Rules that allows them to apply to their own output and thereby create an unbounded number of well-formed sentences, underlies discrete infinity, which may be a design feature of language.

reference

in semantics, the relation between a word, especially a noun or noun phrase, and the thing(s) it names; intuitively, one of the core aspects of meaning, along with sense.

relative clause

a complex modifier of a noun or noun phrase which contains a disguised sentence, as in The woman [_{RelativeClause} who I met yesterday]; since relative clauses contain sentences, and occur inside noun phrases inside sentences, this can be seen as one instance of recursion, illustrated by the nursery rhyme The House that Jack Built.

rhotic

(i) a general term for a subclass of liquids involving ‘r-like’ articulation; (ii) a variety of English in which <r> is pronounced after a vowel in the same syllable, hence car is pronounced /kɑr/. Standard American English as well as most varieties of Scottish and Irish English are rhotic.

rhoticity

the property of a variety of English as being rhotic or non-rhotic; rhoticity has social value in many parts of the English-speaking world, being an overt prestige form in New York, for example, but a low prestige form in many parts of England.

root

in a complex word consisting of (in English) a potentially free morpheme, to which derivational and/or inflectional suffixes are added, the potentially free morpheme is the root, e.g. bake in bake+r+s.

rounded vowel

a vowel pronounced with the lips rounded, or pursed; in English the rounded vowels are /u: ʊ, ɔ:, ɒ/, all rounded vowels are back vowels in English.

rule

in phonology, the ordered sequence of operations expressed using distinctive features, which constitutes the phonological derivation; in syntax, an operation which builds (or possibly permutes) constituent structure.

scalar implicature

in Gricean pragmatics, an implicature which involves always giving the ‘strongest’ statement compatible with the situation to be described, e.g. if I have two children, although the statement I have one child is true, it carries the scalar implicature that I have exactly one child, which is false.

schwa

an unrounded, mid, central vowel found in many unstressed syllables in English (e.g. in the first syllable of about), IPA [ə].

semantics

the study of meaning, particularly sentence meaning.

semi-vowel

a sound which is phonetically a vowel, in that it does not involve obstruction of the air stream passing through the vocal tract, but phonologically a consonant, in that it never appears in the syllable nucleus; English is normally described as having two semi-vowels, /j/ and /w/.

sense

the aspect of the meaning of an expression that, intuitively, makes it mean what it means, that gives it the power of reference to whatever it refers to; expressions referring to non-existent entities may have sense but no reference, e.g. unicorn.

sentence meaning

the meaning of a sentence; following compositional semantics, the meaning of a sentence is computed from the meanings (or denotations) of its parts; sentence meaning can be expressed in terms of the truth conditions borne by the proposition the sentence expresses; contrasts with speaker meaning.

short vowel

a vowel which is not long; in English short vowels cannot form syllables on their own, but must be accompanied by preceding and following consonants known technically as an onset and a coda; the English short vowels are /ɪ, ε, æ, ɒ, ʊ, ə, ʌ/.

sign languages

languages transmitted through the visual-gestural rather than the oral-aural medium, mostly used by deaf communities; sign languages are now known to be languages in every sense of the word, having all the salient structural properties (and design features) of oral-aural languages.

social value

the property of a sociolinguistic variable of having high or low prestige.

sociolinguistics

the branch of linguistics dealing with questions common to linguistics and sociology, primarily the social stratification of speech, language and gender, etc.

soft palate

also known as the velum, the region of the ‘roof of the mouth’ behind the hard palate; raising the soft palate allows air to pass through the nasal cavity, giving rise to nasal or nasalised sounds; consonants articulated in this region are velars; English has two velar stops, /k/ and /g/.

sonorant

a sound articulated without audible turbulence in the air stream; includes vowels and non-obstruent consonants, in English /m, n, ŋ, l, r, j, w, h/; defined by the distinctive feature [+son].

sound change

a phonetic or phonological change taking place over time; on the basis of Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law, sound change is usually thought to be regular, i.e. without exceptions.

speech act

a performative act, with associated illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects.

speech organs

the organs of the oral cavity (tongue, lips, teeth, velum), pharynx and larynx which contribute to the articulation of the sounds of speech (also known as the organs of speech or vocal tract).

stop consonant

the natural class of obstruents whose articulation involves total blockage of the air stream at some place of articulation; in distinctive-feature terms, stops are characterised as [-cont], also known as plosives.

structure dependency

the property of certain kinds of syntactic rules (e.g. auxiliary inversion in English) such that they appear sensitive to the constituent structure of sentences, possibly a design feature of language.

subject

a noun phrase which typically marks the agent of an action described by a verb phrase, e.g. Mary in Mary ate the pizza.

subjunctive

a mood usually marked on verbs, signifying that the action described is not necessarily assumed to actually take place, that there is some doubt as to the reality of the action.

suffix

a bound morpheme (inflectional or derivational) attached to a root to form complex word.

syllable

a phonological unit consisting of at least a nucleus, usually a vowel, possibly flanked a sequences of consonants and/or semi-vowels; the sequence preceding the vowel is the onset, and that following the vowel is the coda; the vowel and the coda are sometimes said to form a unit known as the rime.

syntactic rules

rules that generate constituent structure, typically Phrase-Structure Rules; there are also rules that permute parts of constituent structure, e.g. auxiliary inversion.

syntax

the study of the structure of sentences.

synthetic compound

a compound formed by combining one or more roots and a bound morpheme (usually derivational) as in truck+drive+r.

tense

a type of verbal inflection found in many languages, including English, which indicates in the basic cases the time of the action described by the verb in relation to the time the sentence containing the verb is used; the main tenses in English and many other languages are present (or non-past) and past; other languages, e.g. Latin and the Romance languages, have a richer system of tenses including the future (in English the future is indicated by auxiliaries rather than by verbal inflection).

terminal node

in syntax, a node in a tree diagram which dominates no other node; the site of lexical insertion.

Theory of Mind

our intuitive theory of the contents of other people’s minds, i.e. what their thoughts, beliefs and desires may be; crucial for the Co-operative Principle and other aspects of Gricean pragmatics.

tone

phonemic tone distinguishes words and morphemes by the pitch with which they are pronounced; the best-known tone language is Mandarin, but there are many others in East Asia, Africa and the Americas.

tree diagram

in syntax, one of the standard ways of indicating constituent structure, along with labelled brackets (which are equivalent).

truth conditions

the standard way of understanding sentence meaning; the central idea is that to know the meaning of a (declarative) sentence is to understand what the world would have to be like for the sentence to be true; may run into problems with non-declarative sentences.

truth-conditional semantics

the approach to semantics based on the idea that to know the meaning of a (declarative) sentence is to understand what the world would have to be like in order for the sentence to be true.

truth-functional

a feature of the connectives of standard propositional logic and predicate logic; truth-functional connectives work in such a way that the truth of the complex proposition formed by combining two propositions can be directly computed as a function of the truth of the two constituent propositions.

truth table

a way of presenting the workings of a given truth-functional connective, showing the precise effects of combining the constituent propositions using that connective.

truth value

true or false, according to whether a proposition corresponds to the way world is (true) or not (false); in type theory, one of the two fundamental logical types, typically denoted by sentences.

type theory

in compositional semantics, a way of assigning denotations to, in principle, any syntactic category; there are two basic types: entity <e> and truth value <t>, which may combine to form more complex types, such as <e, t> for predicate.

underlying form

the starting point of a phonological derivation, in which the ‘real’ forms of morphemes (i.e. those which are entered in the lexicon) appear, which may then be modified by the operation of the phonological rules.

Universal Grammar

the set of invariant syntactic forms, categories and rules which may be common to all languages and form part of what the child brings to first-language acquisition, given the argument from the poverty of the stimulus.

universal quantifier

in predicate logic, one of the two canonical quantifiers, written ‘∀’; the meaning of ‘∀x’ roughly corresponds to ‘for all/every x’.

unrounded vowel

a vowel pronounced with the lips unrounded, or spread; in English the unrounded vowels are /i: ɪ, ε, æ, ɑ: ʌ, ɜ: ə/, no unrounded vowel is back in English.

variable

in predicate logic, an argument of a predicate bound by a quantifier.

velum

also known as the soft palate, the region of the ‘roof of the mouth’ behind the hard palate; raising the soft palate allows air to pass through the nasal cavity, giving rise to nasal or nasalised sounds; consonants articulated in this region are velars; English has two velar stops, /k/ and /g/.

vocal folds

two pieces of cartilage inside the larynx which are kept apart in normal breathing to allow the air to pass through to and from the lungs; may be drawn together so as to close the glottis, release gives rise to the glottal stop; if drawn closely enough together so as to vibrate in the air stream, the effect is to produce voicing; other positions of the vocal folds may give rise to whisper and to creaky voice.

vocal tract

the organs of the oral cavity (tongue, lips, teeth, velum), pharynx and larynx which contribute to the articulation of the sounds of speech (also known as the organs of speech or speech organs).

voiced

in phonetics, a sound with the property of voicing; in phonology, a phoneme with the distinctive feature [+voice].

voicing

the result of drawing the vocal folds closely enough together so as to vibrate in the air stream.

vowels

in phonetics, sounds produced without obstruction or blockage of the air stream passing through the vocal tract; in phonology, phonemes which can only appear in a syllable nucleus.

Wernicke’s aphasia

also known as receptive aphasia, one of the two main kinds of aphasia, characterised by poor comprehension, fluent but somewhat incoherent speech with many content words paraphrased in rather confused fashion, speech is spontaneous but not always controlled or understood by the speaker; involves damage to Wernicke’s area.

Wernicke’s area

a region of the brain in the posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus in the left hemisphere; damage to this area leads to Wernicke’s aphasia.