“A minimal unit of grammar into which a sentence or a word within a sentence can be divided. E.g. Come inside can be divided into the minimal units come, in, and side; distasteful into dis, taste, and ful.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“A term used to distinguish anything out of its proper time. Shakespeare’s references to cannons in King John, a play which takes place before cannons came into use, to clocks in Julius Caesar, and to billiards in Antony and Cleopatra, are examples of anachronisms. In literature, anachronisms are sometimes used deliberately as comic devices to emphasized universal timelessness.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Any systematic account of the structure of the language; the patterns that it describes; the branch of linguistics concerned with such patterns.
Often restricted to the study of units that can be assigned a meaning. Distinguished in that light from phonology, e.g. singing is a grammatical unit as are sing and –ing, while s or the syllable si are phonological. Also opposed, thought not always, to a dictionary or the lexicon. E.g. the meanings of sing belong to its entry in the lexicon; the functions of -ing to grammar, where they are described for verbs in general. When limited in both of those ways, the study of grammar reduces to that of morphology and syntax.
Chomsky’s term in the 1960s for the knowledge of a language developed by a child who learns to speak it. A grammar in the widest sense was thus at once a set of rules (32) said to be internalized by members of a speech community, and account, by a linguist, of such a grammar. This internalized grammar is effectively what was later called I-language.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“A nominal form of verbs in Latin: e.g. pugnando (“fight-gerund-abl.sg”) “by fighting.” Hence a term available for verb forms with a noun-like role in other languages: e.g. English fighting is traditionally a gerund in Fighting used to be fun, as opposed to the participle, also in –ing but with a different syntactic role, in people fighting.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“No so the fanatic. Chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hated present to high heaven. He glories in the sight of a world coming to a sudden end. To hell with reforms! All that already exists is rubbish. He justifies his will to anarchy with the plausible assertion that there can be no new beginning so long as the old clutters the landscape. He shoves aside the frightened men of words, if they are still around, though he continues to extol their doctrines and mouth their slogans. He alone knows the innermost craving of the masses in action; the craving for communion, for the mustering of the host, for the dissolution of cursed individuality in the majesty and grandeur of a mighty whole. Posterity is king; and woe to those, inside and outside the movement, who hug and hang on to the present.”
Excerpted from: Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951.
“Choice of words with respect to clarity, variety, taste, etc.; aptness of vocabulary and phrasing; correctness of pronunciation; enunciation. Adjective: dictional; adverb: dictionally.
‘It is destructive enough to the novel’s texture to hear this “historical” Arthur speak in the diction of a mod labor candidate or an American president standing for re-election.'”
Alan Cheuse, The New York Times
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“The theory of universals that sees them as shadows of our grasp of concepts. Conceptualism lies midway between out-and-out nominalism, holding that nothing is common to objects except our applying the same words to them, and any realism which sees universals as existing independently of us and our abilities.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“The general system of concepts which shape or organize our thoughts and perceptions. The outstanding elements of our everyday conceptual scheme include spatial and temporal relations between events and enduring objects, causal relations, other persons, meaning-bearing utterances of others, and so on. To see the world as containing such things is to share this much of our conceptual scheme. A controversial argument of Davidson’s urges that we would be unable to interpret speech from a different conceptual scheme as even meaningful; we can therefore be certain a priori that there is no difference of conceptual scheme between any thinker and ourselves. Davidson daringly goes on to argue that since translation proceeds according to a principle of charity, and since it must be possible for an omniscient translator to make sense of us, we can be assured that most of the beliefs formed with the commonsense conceptual framework are true.”
Excerpted from: Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
“The figurative or symbolic use of the name of one thing for that of another with which it is associated, or of an attribute for the whole, e.g., ‘brass’ for military officers. Adjective: metonymic, metonymical; adverb: metonymically; noun: metonym.
‘A full set would also have included the brazen Perelman pun (‘My choler wilted’ for ‘My anger subsided’)…the Perelman micro-metonymy (‘Hanna listened to the veins throbbing in my temple’ for ‘I was speechless with anger at Hanna’) and the Perelman extrapolation of cliché into metaphor (‘The whole aviary in my head burst into song’ for ‘I was bird-brained’).’” Tom Wolfe, The New York Times
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“A traditional term for a VERBAL NOUN, in English a word ending in –ing: visiting in They appreciate my visiting their parents regularly. Like a noun, it can be introduced by the genitive my (compare I visit their parents). Some object to the non-genitive usage and avoid at least for names and pronouns, preferring They appreciate Bill’s visiting their parents to They appreciate Bill visiting their parents and They appreciate my visiting their parents to They appreciate me visiting their parents.”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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