Glossary

(The definitions of linguistic terms given here are often simplified, and refer exclusively to the way the terms are used in this book. For the definitive guide to linguistic terminology, see Matthews (1997), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics.)

ACCUSATIVE: The case of a direct object of the verb. In English, only some pronouns show a distinction between ‘nominative’ (the subject case, as in ‘he bit the dog’) and ‘accusative’ (the direct object case, as in ‘the dog bit him’). In some languages, however, nouns show the same distinction. In Latin, for example, the noun ‘consul’ would appear as consul in the nominative case (for instance in saying ‘the consul bit me’), but the form consulem would be used in the accusative case (for instance in saying ‘I bit the consul’).

ADJECTIVE: A syntactic category; a group of words that serve to modify a noun, and typically include properties (such as ‘big’ or ‘old’). See discussion in Appendix A: Flipping Categories on the nature of syntactic categories.

ADVERB: A syntactic category; a group of words that serve to modify a verb, as in ‘why are you going slowly?’ See discussion in Appendix A: Flipping Categories on the nature of syntactic categories.

APPENDAGE: Used in this book for elements which accompany a noun, provide additional information about it, and together with it build a phrase. The typical appendage is what is traditionally known as ‘modifier’, an element which is not obligatory in the sentence, and does not have a direct relation with any other element in the sentence except with the noun it modifies, for example the adjective ‘sharp’ in ‘sharp stones’. Under the term ‘appendage’ I also include other elements that accompany the noun, such as ‘determiners’ (for instance the definite article ‘the’ in ‘the sharp stone’) or quantifiers (for example ‘all’ in ‘all the sharp stones’).

APPOSITION: The juxtaposition on the same level of two elements of the same syntactic role, as in ‘my cousin’ and ‘the manager’ in the sentence ‘my cousin, the manager, hired me for the job’. Whole clauses can also be in apposition, as in ‘the world is round, I heard about it yesterday’.

ARTICLE: A grammatical word which can mark a participant as definite (‘the girl’) or indefinite (‘a girl’).

ASSIMILATION: A type of effort-saving sound change by which one sound becomes more similar (or identical) to another sound in its environment. For example, the original n was assimilated to the following r in inrelevant → irrelevant.

AUXILIARY: A syntactic category of ‘helping verbs’, which can accompany the main verb in the sentence and indicate nuances of the action such as tense (‘will go’) or modality (‘may have gone’, ‘must go’). See discussion in Appendix A: Flipping Categories on the nature of syntactic categories.

CASE: In some languages, nouns and pronouns can have different forms depending on their role in the sentence. These different forms (usually different endings) are called ‘cases’. Some English pronouns, for example, make a three-way distinction: he, him, his: ‘heNOMINATIVE threw himACCUSATIVE out of hisGENITIVE house’. In languages such as Russian, Tamil or Latin, such differences can be seen on nouns, not just on pronouns.

CLAUSE: A syntactic unit that can be identical to a (simple) sentence, or a part of a (complex) sentence. In English, a clause consists of one main verb together with all its participants and modifiers. A simple sentence, such as ‘this sentence is made up of just one clause’, is made up of just one clause. But a complex sentence, such as ‘this is a sentence which contains more than one clause’, contains two clauses: a main clause ‘this is a sentence’, and a subordinate clause ‘which contains more than one clause’.

CONJUNCTION: A word such as ‘and’, ‘if’, ‘when’, ‘because’, which introduces a coordinate or a subordinate clause.

CONSONANT: A sound (such as p, v, d, k) produced by obstructing the flow of air in some part of the mouth or throat.

COORDINATION: The juxtaposition of two clauses on the same level, usually with a conjunction such as ‘and’ between them (‘I came in and saw her’).

DATIVE: The ‘giving case’, or the case of the ‘indirect object’, typically used for the role of the recipient in the action of giving (‘she gave it to him’), or for roles modelled on that of a recipient (‘she showed it to him’).

DEFINITE ARTICLE: A grammatical element, such as English ‘the’, which typically marks a participant as having been already mentioned or as previously known to the hearer.

DIACHRONIC VARIATION: Changes in a language over the course of time.

DIRECT OBJECT: The grammatical role of the second core participant in an action. Patients of simple physical actions are the prototypical direct objects (for instance ‘the spear’ in ‘the man broke the spear’). But many other actions, such as ‘love’ or ‘see’ also take a direct object, although their second participant cannot strictly speaking be regarded as a ‘patient’.

FRICATIVE: A consonant such as f, v, or th that is produced without a complete blockage of the air, but through the friction produced by the air’s movement through some narrow passage, for example, between the lips (f, v), or between the tongue and the teeth (th).

GENDER: Any grammatical classification system of nouns. Gender can be based not only on sex (male vs. female), but also on other essential features, such as animacy (animate vs. inanimate).

GENITIVE: The case used for a noun or pronoun that modifies another noun, typically for the ‘possessor’. In English, the genitive can be marked with a suffix -s, as in George’s and manager’s in ‘George’s dog bit the manager’s daughter’.

GRAMMAR: The structure of a language. In linguistics, ‘grammar’ is not a synonym for ‘good grammar’ or for ‘speaking properly’. Studying the grammar of a language does not mean prescribing how people should speak it, but rather describing how they do.

GRAMMATICAL WORD: A word such as ‘than’, ‘a’, or ‘of’, which does not carry meaning on its own, but serves in a structural role of specifying the relations between content words. See discussion in Chapter 5 and Appendix A: Flipping Categories on the difference between content words and grammatical words.

ICONICITY: A reflection of reality in the organization of language. One example of iconicity is the principle by which the order of events in reality is mirrored in the order in which they are expressed in language.

INDEFINITE ARTICLE: A grammatical element, such as English ‘a’, which marks a noun as not definite. (See ‘Definite article’.)

INDIRECT OBJECT: The grammatical role which typically includes the recipient of a giving action (for instance George in ‘she gave the book to George’) as well as participants in other actions modelled on a giving action (‘she showed it to George’). (See also ‘Dative’.)

INDO-EUROPEAN: A language family that includes most of the modern languages of Europe (except Basque, Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian), as well as many languages from Iran to India. The prehistoric ancestor language, from which all modern Indo-European languages developed, is called Proto-Indo-European.

INFINITIVE: A form of the verb, found among others after auxiliary verbs such as ‘will’ or ‘can’, which does not mark person. In English, for example, third person singular is marked on verbs with a suffix −5, as in ‘she walks’. But after an auxiliary, the infinitive form ‘walk’ is used instead: ‘she can walk’, not ‘she can walks’.

INTRANSITIVE VERB: A verb such as ‘walk’ or ‘die’, which has only one core participant (called the subject), and does not take a direct object (as opposed to a ‘transitive verb’).

MODALITY: The expression of what the speaker thinks about an action (‘should happen’, ‘ought not to happen’) or knows about it (‘couldn’t have happened’, ‘must have happened’).

MORPHOLOGY: The internal structure of words.

NOMINALIZATION: The process of turning a verb into a noun. The nominalization endings -ing and -ion, for instance, turn verbs such as ‘build’ and ‘legislate’ into nouns: ‘building’, ‘legislation’.

NOMINATIVE: The subject case. (See ‘Case’, ‘Subject’, ‘Accusative’.)

NOUN: A syntactic category that typically includes all ‘things’ (people, animals, inanimate objects), and various other abstract concepts (such as ‘day’, or ‘movement’) that are represented in language as things. See discussion in Appendix A: Flipping Categories on the nature of syntactic categories.

OBJECT: Used in this book as a shorthand for ‘direct object’.

PARTICIPANT: Someone or something that is involved in an action. A participant can be expressed either by just one word, for instance [Sarah] and [cats] are the two participants in the sentence ‘[Sarah] breeds [cats]’. But a participant can also be expressed by a whole phrase, for example ‘[the woman next door] breeds [small Siamese cats with yellow spots on their foreheads]’. (See ‘Appendage’.)

PARTICIPIAL CLAUSE: A relative clause whose verb is a participle, or a ‘verbal adjective’. In ‘the lion running after the fox’, ‘running after the fox’ is a participial clause.

PARTICIPLE: A verbal adjective, that is, a verb that is used to modify a noun, as in ‘the crying girl’ or ‘my bleeding thumb’.

PASSIVE: A construction in which the direct object of a verb turns into the subject. The sentence ‘a bullet killed the soldier’ can be turned into a passive construction, by making the direct object ‘soldier’ the subject: ‘the soldier was killed by a bullet’.

PATIENT: The participant on which an action is performed (literally, the one that ‘suffers’ the action), as for instance the spear in ‘the man broke the spear’, or ‘the man threw the spear’.

PERSON: A distinction between forms referring to the speaker (‘I/we’), which are called ‘first person’, forms referring to the addressee (‘you’), which are called ‘second person’, and forms referring to people or objects that are neither the speakers nor the addressee (‘he/she/it/they/George/the cat), which are called ‘third person’.

POSTPOSITION: A grammatical word which performs the same function as a preposition but appears after a noun, rather than before it.

PREFIX: A grammatical element which is tagged on to the beginning of a word.

PREPOSITION: A syntactic category, a group of words which appear before a noun (or more accurately, before a ‘noun phrase’, that is, the noun together with its entourage of appendages), and specify various types of relations, such as spatial (in the house) or temporal (from January). Prepositions can also mark the precise role of a participant in an action, for instance ‘beneficiary’ (‘I did it for George’) or ‘agent’ (‘he was murdered by the butler’).

PRONOUN: Used in this book as a shorthand for ‘personal pronoun’, a category of words such as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘she’, ‘it’, which are said to take the place of a noun in the sentence (or more accurately, the place of a ‘noun phrase’, that is, the noun together with its entourage of appendages). Traditionally, personal pronouns are divided into ‘first person pronouns’ (‘I’, ‘we’, ‘us’), which refer to the speaker(s), ‘second person pronouns’ (‘you’, ‘your’), which refer to the addressee(s), and ‘third person pronouns’ (such as ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘them’) which are used to refer succinctly to other people or objects that have already been mentioned, or whose precise identity is clear from the context.

PROTO: (As in ‘Proto-Indo-European’, or ‘Proto-Semitic’) A designation for a presumed prehistoric language from which various attested descendants have sprung.

REFLEXIVE: A construction used when the two participants in an action are one and the same, as, for example, with the English reflexive pronoun ‘herself’ in ‘she hurt herself’.

RELATIVE CLAUSE: A subordinate clause that serves as an appendage to a noun. The clauses in subscript are relative clauses: ‘here is a subordinate clausewhich serves as an appendage to a noun’, or ‘a clausethat serves as an appendage to a nounis called a relative clause’.

ROOT: Used in this book for the form of the verb which supplies its basic meaning, and to which other elements can be added to indicate various nuances. In Latin, the root ed- gives the basic meaning ‘eat’, and various endings are used to indicate the nuances: edo ‘I eat’, edemur ‘we will be eaten’, etc. In the Semitic languages, the root is not a pronounceable string of sounds, but a group of only consonants, such as Arabic s-l-m ‘be at peace’.

SCHWA: A reduced vowel (transcribed ) found in English words like elephant, pronounced {elfnt}.

SEMITIC: A language family that includes among others Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as extinct languages such as Akkadian and Phoenician.

STEM: Used in this book to refer to a root which is a continuous and pronounceable string of sounds (such as Latin ed- ‘eat’ or dict- ‘say’), as opposed to the purely consonantal roots of Semitic (such as Arabic s-l-m ‘be at peace’).

SUBJECT: The grammatical role of the participant about which the main assertion is made, and in which the agent of simple actions such as ‘kick’ or ‘come’ typically appears, as in ‘the horse kicked a boy, or ‘the hoy will go to hospital’.

SUBJUNCTIVE: In English, a form of the verb (by now almost extinct) used in some types of subordinate clauses. For example, ‘I wouldn’t do it if I were you’, or ‘lest it be thought that…’

SUBORDINATE CLAUSE: A clause which cannot stand on its own, and which functions as an element of another clause. A relative clause is one type of subordinate clause.

SUFFIX: An ending. A grammatical element attached to the end of a word.

SYNCHRONIC VARIATION: Variation in a language at any given point in time.

SYNTACTIC CATEGORY: A group of words which have a similar distribution in the sentence, and appear in the same ‘slots’. For example, ‘nouns’ such as ‘nose’, ‘shoes’, or ‘egocentricity’ can all appear in the noun-slot X in ‘your remarkable X’. See discussion in Appendix A: Flipping Categories on the nature and definition of syntactic categories.

SYNTAX: The part of the grammar (that is, the structure) of a language which comprises the relations between words in the sentence (rather than the internal structure of words ‘morphology’, or the sound system of a language ‘phonology’).

TEMPLATE: Used in this book for patterns of mostly vowels in the Semitic language, into which the consonantal root is inserted. For example, the Arabic template forms the past tense in the third person ‘he’, so inserting into it the root s-l-m ‘be at peace’ gives (‘he was at peace’).

TENSE: The expression of the time of an action.

TRANSITIVE VERB: A verb (such as ‘kick’, ‘love’, ‘see’) that refers to an action with two core participants, the second of which is a direct object (as opposed to an intransitive verb such as ‘walk’ or ‘die’, which has only one core participant).

VERB: A syntactic category; a group of words that make the main assertion about the subject, and which typically denote actions. See discussion in Appendix A: Flipping Categories on the nature and definition of syntactic categories.

VOICED: A sound produced with the vibration of the vocal cords. The consonants d, b, v, for instance, are voiced.

VOICELESS: A sound produced without vibrating the vocal cords. The consonants t, p, f, for instance, are voiceless.

VOWEL: A sound (such as a, e, o) that is produced with little obstruction to the flow of air (as opposed to a consonant).