Glossary

synonym: internal change
A morphological process that changes the vowel in the stem.

Developing a skill, habit, or ability subconsciously, by instinct, instead of consciously.

When the first letter or two of each word in a phrase is combined to form a new word, which is pronounced as a whole.

A clause where there is an agent in subject position. The opposite of the passive voice.

An optional modifying phrase. The opposite of an argument.

A preposition or a postposition. A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase.

A bound morpheme that attaches to a stem.

bound morphemes that are attached to a stem, usually linearly.

A language with one meaning per morpheme and multiple morphemes per word.

A procedure, process, or system of rules used to solve a problem.

A variant form of a morpheme.

When the form of a morpheme varies depending on context.

synonym: initialism
When the first letter or two of each word in a phrase is combined to form a new word, which is pronounced as a string of letters.

A language change process whereby one word form adopts a pattern used by another word form.

A language with a low degree of synthesis. In other words, a language with few morphemes per word.

The study of the relationship between language and culture.

An argument is something that is selected for and required by the head of a phrase. Arguments include grammatical roles like "subject, object, indirect object, etc."

Verbal inflectional that indicates the internal time structure of an event, such as indicating that an action is complete, ongoing, repeated, etc.

A word or construction that exists in a particular corpus, or, more generally, that has been observed in use in a natural setting.

A process whereby a language user reanalyzes a monomorphemic word to be polymorphemic and removes the additional morphemes.

When a word that already exists is claimed to be an acronym.

A word without any inflectional morphemes applied to it, or the simplest form in a paradigm.

The portion of a word that hosts an affix.

A word formed by combining portions of two or more roots. At least one of the roots must be truncated in order to be a blend.

When a word from one language is adopted by another language.

A morpheme that must attach to a stem.

A representation using brackets to indicate constituents and categories in morphology or syntax.

A borrowed phrase which is a direct translation of a phrase in another language.

A morphology property of nouns in many languages. Case can either be structural, and indicate the grammatical role (subject/object) or semantic, and indicate the thematic role of the noun.

A pattern or rule with no exceptions.

Any theories or models that are based on the work of Noam Chomsky.

An affix that is inserted on both sides of the stem.

The attribution of quotes and information to their original sources.

The word form used to refer to a lexeme.

The formation of a new word by shortening an existing one.

Parts of speech that cannot easily have new words added to them.

The study of the mind.

A noun that does not refer to a specific entity by name, but rather refers to a type of entity.

An inflectional form of adjectives meaning "to a greater degree of X."

Having acquired the rules of grammar in a particular language, regardless of the ability to produce grammatical language in a particular instance.

When the distributions of two elements are opposites. Each element always appears in contexts the other element can never appear in.

A word containing two or more morphemes.

The observation that the meaning of a sentence is derived by the meaning of its parts and the way that they are combined.

A word with two or more roots.

The study of how we can model and process language with computers.

Morphological processes that result in a linear string of morphemes, such as prefixation or suffixation.

The tendency for humans to look for evidence that is consistent with their belief system.

A group of words or morphemes that behave as a unit.

A language designed for a particular purpose, as opposed to a natural language.

Changing the part of speech of a word without changing its form.

A word used to introduce non-verbal predicates, including adjectival (I am happy), nominal (I am a teacher), and prepositional (I am down the street) predicates. It has roughly the meaning of an equal sign. In English, the verb BE is used to form copular constructions.

plural: corpora
A body of language data collected from real-world use.

A critical approach to the study of linguistics from the approach of disability studies, studying how people with differing abilities communicate, without taking a deficit approach.

When multiple meanings are encoded in a single morpheme.

A morphological process that creates a new lexeme.

A set of rules that describe how language is used based on observation.

A model that accounts for all observed data, plus also speaker judgments.

Describing how something (such as language) has changed over time.

An argument of the verb, the entity which undergoes the action.

The study of how multiple sentences are combined and interact, including turn-taking in conversation.

Words or morphemes used to manage the structure and flow of discourse.

A model of grammar developed in the early 1990s with three main hypotheses: (a) Late Insertion, the idea that syntax is constructed using abstract items, and vocabulary items are inserted late in the process; (b) Underspecification, the idea that vocabulary items are inserted based on being the best match to the features, and do not have to be a perfect match; and (c) Syntactic Hierarchical Structure All the Way Down, the idea that morphological rules aren't separate from syntax, but that instead, syntactic rules are used to construct both words and sentences.

Having three arguments, usually a subject, direct object, and indirect object.

A ditransitive construction where both objects are NPs and the indirect object comes first, as in I gave you a book.

External language.
The forms of language that are produced by individuals or in a community.

A clause that is included inside of a complex sentence, as a modifier or dependent on the main clause.

People who study the historical development of words.

The study of the historical origins of words and morphemes, including change over time in their form and/or meaning.

A model that accounts for all observed data and speaker judgments, as well as provides an explanation for how language is acquired.

A scale indexing how many meanings can be combined into a single morpheme.

A hypothesis which is possible to be proven wrong by some test.

A commonly believed etymology of a word that is not historically accurate.

A morpheme that can stand on its own.

Parts of speech that encode grammatical functions, such as determiners, complementizers, and conjunctions.

A scale indexing the degree to which morphemes are phonologically separable from their stems.

A language which tends to combine multiple meanings into a single morpheme.

Any model of grammar that uses rules to generate or "build" a language structure. This model should be able to produce all of the grammatical sentences in the language and no others.

When a brand name becomes the common name for all similar items.

Case marking possession.

Provide a morpheme-by-morpheme translation of linguistic data

A head is the main word in the phrase which determines the properties of the phrase as a whole. In syntax, it is typically a terminal node, and is realized as a morpheme or word.

The organization of elements into ranks or levels, where each level contains or is in charge of the lower levels.

The study of how language changes over time.

When two or more words have the same form but different meaning.

The over-application of a rule to additional contexts.

A proposed analysis or explanation made based on the observation of data, to be tested over the course of scientific investigation.

Internal language.
The system of grammatical rules that an individual language user has in their mind.

A phrase with non-compositional meaning.

An argument of the verb, the goal or endpoint of an action.

An affix that is inserted internally to the stem.

A morphological process that adds grammatical information, such as number, tense, gender, or case.

synonym: alphabetism
When the first letter or two of each word in a phrase is combined to form a new word, which is pronounced as a string of letters.

synonym: ablaut
A morphological process that changes the vowel in the stem.

An internationally recognized set of symbols developed in order to transcribe speech sounds with a one-to-one correspondence between sound and symbol.

Not having an object.

Most commonly used to describe verbs that have only a single argument, the subject, although other parts of speech are also occasionally described as being transitive or intransitive.

A language with more or less one morpheme per word.

The study of how children and adults acquire and learn language.

a word in the abstract sense, including all of its different inflected forms

When a word or sentence is ambiguous because one of the morphemes has a homonym.

synonyms: part of speech, syntactic category
We classify words into part of speech based on their syntactic function. Some examples of part of speech include noun, verb, adjective, and preposition.

When allomorphy is triggered by the lexical properties of the stem, such as its semantics. This also includes allomorphy which is not predictable from a pattern.

Parts of speech that encode the meaning of the sentence, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

A person who compiles a dictionary.

The part of our memory where we store the vocabulary we have learned.

Working with a user of a language to collect linguistic data from that language, through asking them to translate sentences to and from the language or by asking them to describe different situations or contexts in the language.

The study of the classification of languages according to their structural properties.

The scientific study of language.

A borrowed phrase which is a direct translation of a phrase in another language.

A word that has been borrowed from another language.

the language being used to discuss the object language.

IPA: /məˈtæθəˌsɪs/
The reordering of phonological segments.

The variety of English spoken after the Norman invasion of England in 1066 until approximately the year 1500.

A research program/framework in generative syntax, beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the present day, with the goal of modeling a maximally efficient computational system to account for the attested syntactic patterns of the languages of the world.

The type of signal through which language is transmitted and perceived, such as spoken or signed.

A scientific model is a representation of a system, an organism, a process, or a phenomenon.

The varieties of English spoken from approximately the year 1500 until the present day.

The smallest meaningful unit in language.

When allomorphy is triggered by morpological context, usually inflectional features of the stem.

The study of the structure of words; the study of the systematic co-variation of form and meaning.

The grammatical properties of a word, morpheme, or syntactic head which are relevant to its morphology or syntax.

The study of the structure of words, phrases, and sentences. The intersection of the fields of morphology and syntax.

When speakers from two different language varieties can understand each other.

Someone who has been speaking the language in question from early childhood.

The process of a borrowed word adopting the phonology and possibly the morphology of the language it is borrowed into.

Language that arose out of use in a community, rather than a language that was designed or constructed.

Evidence that must be the case if your hypothesis is true.

Agreement between multiple negative words in a sentence.

Evidence that something is not possible, does not occur, or is absent.

The coining of a new word.

The study of how language is related to the anatomy of the brain.

Any point where multiple branches meet in a syntax tree, as well as the endpoint of any branch.

Case marking that appears on the subjects of finite clauses.

A word or phrase with meaning that is not predictable from the combination of its components.

Morphological processes that do not result in a linear string of morphemes, such as suprafixes, transfixes, or ablaut.

synonym: infinitive
Not marked for tense.

A made-up word for one-time use.

the language under discussion or being analyzed.

A model that accounts for all observed data.

The variety of English spoken before the Norman invasion of England in 1066.

Parts of speech that can easily have new words added to them.

Research that involves the creation, discovery, or documentation of new knowledge and ideas.

The writing system of a language.

The process of applying a rule in contexts where it should not apply, common in child speech.

The collection of all the word forms in a lexeme is called the paradigm for that lexeme, or the set of all the inflected forms of a word.

A phenomenon in which one meaning or group of meanings is encoded simultaneously by more than one morphological element or process.

synonyms: lexical category, syntactic category
We classify words into part of speech based on their syntactic function. Some examples of part of speech include noun, verb, adjective, and preposition.

Case used to mark a variety of meanings including partialness and incompleteness.

A grammatical structure in which the subject of a clause is deleted or included in an optional 'by'-phrase, and the object of the clause is promoted to subject position.

A form of the English verb used in the perfect (e.g., have sung or have eaten) or in the passive (e.g., was sung or was eaten).
The past participle is often marked with -en or shares the same form as the past tense, but there are also many verbs with an irregular past participle.

A process where a piece of scholarship is reviewed by peers of the author. In the context of academic sources, the author and the author's peers would be expected to be experts on the topic.

The perfect aspect is used to indicate an event which is completed by the indicated tense. Thus, in the "present perfect," the event of the verb has been completed by the present moment. In the "past perfect," the event of the verb has been completed at some past moment. In English, perfect is expressed using a form of the auxiliary verb HAVE and the past participle form of the following verb, e.g., "John has eaten sushi."

The production of language that conforms to the rules of grammar of a particular language, regardless of whether the rules in question have been acquired by the language user.

The study of the physical properties of language, including how it is produced and perceived.

Allomorphy that is predictable based on phonological context.

When allomorphy is triggered by phonological context.

The study of the systematic rules and constraints that characterize human speech sounds and signs in and across languages.

Any grammatically well-formed string of words.

Containing multiple morphemes.

A language which combines many morphemes into a single, complex word, which often corresponds to an entire sentence.

A word formed by combining portions of two or more roots. At least one of the roots must be truncated in order to be a portmanteau.

A grammatical marking indicating possession.

A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase and that occurs after the noun. See also adposition.

An argument used to support Universal Grammar based on the observation that language is infinite and the premise that infinite systems are unlearnable.

The study of the meaning of language in context.

The part of a clause that describes the event that applies to the subject. Typically the verb phrase, but non-verbal predicates also exist.

A morpheme that attaches to the beginning of a stem.

A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase and that occurs before the noun. See also adposition.

A ditransitive construction where the direct object comes first as an NP and the indirect object comes second as a PP, as in I gave a book to you.

A phrase with a preposition as its head, frequently modified by a noun phrase.

A set of rules that describe someone's opinion of how language should be used.

An inflectional form of verbs used in the progressive aspect, formed by suffixing -ing to a verb stem.

The property of language that allows language users to create novel utterances and have those utterances be understood by others.

The progressive is an aspectual category that indicates an incomplete or ongoing action with respect to a particular event at a time. In English, progressive aspect is expressed using a form of the verb BE and the present participle form of the verb, e.g., 'John is eating sushi.'

A noun that refers to a specific entity by its name.

A statement that can be true or false.

The patterns of stress and intonation in a language.

The study of how language is processed and planned.

Iteratively applying a rule to its own output.

A morphological process involving the full or partial copying of the stem.

A historical process of language change whereby irregular forms adopt the majority pattern.

Research that can be repeated in different contexts with similar results.

The core morpheme of a word.

Coining a word without basis on any previously existing words.

A way of forming words common in Semitic languages, in which words are formed by adding transfixes to triconsonantal roots. The transfixes determine the arrangement of the consonants and the vowels that are inserted in between the three consonants of the root, and also sometimes additional consonants.

The method of inquiry used in science whereby researchers observe data, and then formulate, test, and revise hypotheses based on their observations.

The part of the sentence that is modified by a semantic operator.

(of a word) Broken up into morphemes.

The requirements of a head for what it must combine with. The head selects the type, number, and semantic role of what it combines with. There is semantic selection (s-selection) and category selection (c-selection).

The study of the conventional meaning of language, including the meaning of individual words (lexical semantics) and how meaning is derived from their combination (compositional semantics).

A grammatically well-formed string of words that communicates a complete thought.

A construction where the predicate consists of a string of multiple verbs.

High-pitched consonant pronounced with the tongue tip, such as /s z ʃ ʒ t͡ʃ d͡ʃ/.

A word containing only a single morpheme.

The study of societies.

The study of how language is used in its social context, including variation based on broad social categories like age, gender, and region, and the intersection of language and identity.

The portion of a word that hosts an affix.

Allomorphy which is not predictable based on phonological context and has no phonological similarity to other forms in the paradigm.

When a word or sentence can be associated with more than one hierarchical structure, each resulting in different possible meanings.

What a sentence is about. Usually a noun phrase. In English, a subject will appears before the verb and triggers agreement on the verb.

When an auxiliary verb appears in front of the subject, usually in order to form a question. Formally, this is analyzed as T-to-C movement.

Evidence that demonstrates your hypothesis is true.

A morpheme that attaches to the end of a stem.

An inflectional form of adjectives meaning "to the highest degree of X."

Allomorphy which is not predictable from phonological context.

An affix that is encoded through the prosodic structure of the stem, such as through stress, length, or pitch.

Describing something (such as language) at a particular point in time.

A word that shares the same or similar meaning with another word in the same language.

synonyms: lexical category, part of speech
We classify words into part of speech based on their syntactic function. Some examples of part of speech include noun, verb, adjective, and preposition.

The study of the structure of sentences and phrases; the study of how we combine words and encode the relationships between them.

A scale indexing how many morphemes are contained in a word.

The coining of a word in order to avoid use of a word that is socially unacceptable.

Verbal inflection that indicates when the event took place, such as past, present, or future marking.

An affix that is interwoven among the segments of the root, such as in root-and-pattern morphology in Semitic languages.

A root consisting only of three consonants, as is common in root-and-pattern morphology in Semitic languages.

The formation of a new word by shortening an existing one.

A pattern or piece of data that doesn't show up in our data source.

the form of a word or morpheme before phonological processes have been applied to it

Chomsky's theory that there is an innate, language-specific genetic component underlying the human capacity for language.

Pronounced with vocal fold vibration.

Pronounced without vocal fold vibration.

Allomorphy that is not predictable from phonological context but nonetheless has some similarity with other forms in the paradigm.

A set of words related by derivation.

A particular form of a lexeme, one of the possible inflected forms of a lexeme.

a particular occurrence of a word

An experimental study design whereby participants manipulate novel word forms, testing whether a word formation rule is productive.