In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender; the values present in a given language are called the genders of that language.
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.
A noun is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.
In grammar, a phrase—called expression in some contexts—is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consist of a single word or a complete sentence. In theoretical linguistics, phrases are often analyzed as units of syntactic structure such as a constituent.
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions, are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations or mark various semantic roles.
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words that make it up. This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated.
In grammar, an antecedent is an expression that gives its meaning to a proform. A proform takes its meaning from its antecedent; e.g., "John arrived late because traffic held him up." The pronoun him refers to and takes its meaning from John, so John is the antecedent of him. Proforms usually follow their antecedents, but sometimes they precede them, in which case one is, technically, dealing with postcedents instead of antecedents. The prefix ante- means "before" or "in front of", and post- means "after" or "behind". The term antecedent stems from traditional grammar. The linguistic term that is closely related to antecedent and proform is anaphora. Theories of syntax explore the distinction between antecedents and postcedents in terms of binding.
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when two or more words or signs are joined to make a longer word or sign. A compound that uses a space rather than a hyphen or concatenation is called an open compound or a spaced compound; the alternative is a closed compound.
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.
Wiyot or Soulatluk (lit. 'your jaw') is an Algic language spoken by the Wiyot people of Humboldt Bay, California. The language's last native speaker, Della Prince, died in 1962.
In morphology and lexicography, a lemma is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme, with break as the lemma by which they are indexed. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of a single word, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Russian. The process of determining the lemma for a given lexeme is called lemmatisation. The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the principal parts, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary.
In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context and those which are not. The prototypical definite noun phrase picks out a unique, familiar, specific referent such as the sun or Australia, as opposed to indefinite examples like an idea or some fish.
In lexicography, a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words (catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are cat, traffic light, take care of, by the way, and it's raining cats and dogs. Lexical items can be generally understood to convey a single meaning, much as a lexeme, but are not limited to single words. Lexical items are like semes in that they are "natural units" translating between languages, or in learning a new language. In this last sense, it is sometimes said that language consists of grammaticalized lexis, and not lexicalized grammar. The entire store of lexical items in a language is called its lexis.
A phraseme, also called a set phrase, fixed expression, idiomatic phrase, multiword expression, or idiom, is a multi-word or multi-morphemic utterance whose components include at least one that is selectionally constrained or restricted by linguistic convention such that it is not freely chosen. In the most extreme cases, there are expressions such as X kicks the bucket ≈ ‘person X dies of natural causes, the speaker being flippant about X’s demise’ where the unit is selected as a whole to express a meaning that bears little or no relation to the meanings of its parts. All of the words in this expression are chosen restrictedly, as part of a chunk. At the other extreme, there are collocations such as stark naked, hearty laugh, or infinite patience where one of the words is chosen freely based on the meaning the speaker wishes to express while the choice of the other (intensifying) word is constrained by the conventions of the English language. Both kinds of expression are phrasemes, and can be contrasted with ’’free phrases’’, expressions where all of the members are chosen freely, based exclusively on their meaning and the message that the speaker wishes to communicate.
In linguistics, an inflected preposition is a type of word that occurs in some languages, that corresponds to the combination of a preposition and a personal pronoun. For instance, the Welsh word iddo is an inflected form of the preposition i meaning "to/for him"; it would not be grammatically correct to say *i fe.
A coverb is a word or prefix that resembles a verb or co-operates with a verb. In languages that have the serial verb construction, coverbs are a type of word that shares features of verbs and prepositions. A coverb takes an object or complement and forms a phrase that appears in sequence with another verb phrase in accordance with the serial construction. A coverb appears to be subordinate to a main verb and fulfills a function similar to that of a preposition.
Odia grammar is the study of the morphological and syntactic structures, word order, case inflections, verb conjugation and other grammatical structures of Odia, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia.
In linguistics, a catena is a unit of syntax and morphology, closely associated with dependency grammars. It is a more flexible and inclusive unit than the constituent and may therefore be better suited than the constituent to serve as the fundamental unit of syntactic and morphosyntactic analysis.
In the traditional grammar of Modern English, a phrasal verb typically constitutes a single semantic unit composed of a verb followed by a particle, sometimes combined with a preposition. Alternative terms include verb-adverb combination, verb-particle construction, two-part word/verb or three-part word/verb and multi-word verb.
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