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A fossil word is a word that is broadly obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom or phrase. [1] [2] An example for a word sense is 'ado' in 'much ado'. An example for a phrase is 'in point' (relevant), which is retained in the larger phrases 'case in point' (also 'case on point' in the legal context) and 'in point of fact', but is rarely used outside of a legal context.
These words were formed from other languages, by elision, or by mincing of other fixed phrases.
In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host. A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the form of affixes, but the distribution of function words.
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.
An idiom is a phrase or expression that usually presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase. Some phrases which become figurative idioms, however, do retain the phrase's literal meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiom's figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions.
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. For example, in the agglutinative language of Turkish, the word evlerinizden consists of the morphemes ev-ler-i-n-i-z-de-n. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted with isolating languages, in which words are monomorphemic, and fusional languages, in which words can be complex, but morphemes may correspond to multiple features.
In linguistics, a determiner phrase (DP) is a type of phrase headed by a determiner such as many. Controversially, many approaches, take a phrase like not very many apples to be a DP, headed, in this case, by the determiner many. This is called the DP analysis or the DP hypothesis. Others reject this analysis in favor of the more traditional NP analysis where apples would be the head of the phrase in which the DP not very many is merely a dependent. Thus, there are competing analyses concerning heads and dependents in nominal groups. The DP analysis developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it is the majority view in generative grammar today.
A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.
RAS syndrome, where RAS stands for redundant acronym syndrome is the redundant use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym in conjunction with the abbreviated form. This means, in effect, repeating one or more words from the acronym. For example: PIN number and ATM machine.
"Curiosity killed the cat" is a proverb used to warn of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation. It also implies that being curious can sometimes lead to danger or misfortune. The original form of the proverb, now rarely used, was "Care killed the cat". In this instance, "care" was defined as "worry" or "sorrow for others".
A word is a basic element of language that carries 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.
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.
Making a mountain out of a molehill is an idiom referring to over-reactive, histrionic behaviour where a person makes too much of a minor issue. It seems to have come into existence in the 16th century.
Timucua is a language isolate formerly spoken in northern and central Florida and southern Georgia by the Timucua peoples. Timucua was the primary language used in the area at the time of Spanish colonization in Florida. Differences among the nine or ten Timucua dialects were slight, and appeared to serve mostly to delineate band or tribal boundaries. Some linguists suggest that the Tawasa of what is now northern Alabama may have spoken Timucua, but this is disputed.
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.
Matsés, also referred to as Mayoruna in Brazil, is an Indigenous language utilized by the inhabitants of the border regions of Brazil-Peru. A term that hailed from Quechua origin, Mayoruna translates in English to mayu = river; runa = people. Colonizers and missionaries during the 17th century, used this term, to make reference to the Indigenous peoples that occupied the lower Ucayali Region, Upper Solimões and Vale do Javari. Matsés communities are located along the Javari River basin of the Amazon, which draws out the boundaries between Brazil and Peru, hence the term river people. It is important to note that this term, was previously used by Jesuits to refer to inhabitants of that area, but is not formally a word in the Matsés language. The language is vigorous and is spoken by all age groups in the Matsés communities. In the Matsés communities several other Indigenous languages are also spoken by women who have been captured from neighboring tribes and some mixture of the languages occur. Dialects are Peruvian Matsés, Brazilian Matsés, and the extinct Paud Usunkid.
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words. By another definition, an idiom is a speech form or an expression of a given language that is peculiar to itself grammatically or cannot be understood from the individual meanings of its elements. For example, an English speaker would understand the phrase "kick the bucket" to mean "to die" – and also to actually kick a bucket. Furthermore, they would understand when each meaning is being used in context.
In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. In an agglutinative language, words contain multiple morphemes concatenated together, but in such a manner that individual word stems and affixes can be isolated and identified as to indicate a particular inflection or derivation, although this is not a rule: for example, Finnish is a typical agglutinative language, but morphemes are subject to consonant alternations called consonant gradation.
The order of acquisition is a concept in language acquisition describing the specific order in which all language learners acquire the grammatical features of their first language. This concept is based on the observation that all children acquire their first language in a fixed, universal order, regardless of the specific grammatical structure of the language they learn. Linguistic research has largely confirmed that this phenomenon is true for first-language learners; order of acquisition for second-language learners is much less consistent. It is not clear why the order differs for second-language learners, though current research suggests this variability may stem from first-language interference or general cognitive interference from nonlinguistic mental faculties.
In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners or of nouns.
Willy-nilly is an English-language idiom and a slang which describes an activity, an action or event that is done in a disorganized, unplanned, or vacillating manner. The term is derived from Shakespearian expression "will ye, nill ye", which is a contraction that means “whether one wants to or not.” It has a very similar meaning to other reduplicates, that also pertain to 'disorderly' and 'disorganized', such as pell-mell, helter-skelter, hurry-scurry and higgledy-piggledy, all originating in the post-medieval period. Moreover, the idiomatic phrase to-and-fro, which originate in the 1820s, also have a similar sense of repetitive movement, instability and vacillation.
A word or other linguistic form preserved only in isolated regions or in set phrases, idioms, or collocations