Tag Archives: term of art

Term of Art: Affective

Posted on August 25, 2020 | Leave a comment

“affective: (Function, meaning) having to do with the speaker’s feelings. E.g. one might say, as a neutral statement, ‘I have finished it’; or one might say, with triumph or amazement, ‘I have actually finished it.’ What is said is in other respects the same, but the utterances differ in affective meaning. Also of the intonations themselves or of other individual units: e.g. beastly is an affective form in This is a beastly nuisance.

Also called ‘emotive,’ ‘expressive.’ Affective meaning has been distinguished variously from cognitive meaning, propositional meaning, or the representational or referential function of language.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Historical Term: Bourgeoisie

Posted on August 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

“bourgeoisie: (Fr. citizen class) Term used by Marxists to indicate those persons other than the agricultural capitalist who do not, like the proletariat, live by the sale of their labor. They include, on the one hand, industrialists, financiers and members of the liberal professions; on the other, small artisans and shopkeepers who are described as the ‘petty” bourgeoisie, although their standard of living may not be appreciably higher, and may even be lower, than that of the proletariat. According to Marxist theory, the bourgeoisie arose with modern industrialization, breaking feudal patterns of society and replacing the feudal lords of the ruling class; the petty bourgeoisie will gradually become proletarianized and the proletariat will then succeed its remaining members as masters of society.”

Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.

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Term of Art: Modal Auxiliaries

Posted on August 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Modal Auxiliaries: Any of the verbs that combine with the main verb to express necessity (must), obligation (should), permission (may), probability (might), possibility (could), ability (can), or tentativeness (would). Mary might wash the car.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Term of Art: Parallelism

Posted on August 24, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Parallelism: In rhetoric, a device in which a formula or structural pattern is repeated, as in the Latin sequence veni, vidi, vici and its English translation I came, I saw, I conquered. It occurs in sayings and proverbs (such as Now you see them, now you don’t and Out of sight, out of mind) and in verse and poetic prose (‘My mother groaned, my father wept—/ Into the dangerous world I leapt’ (William Blake, Songs of Experience)).”

Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Term of Art: Main Clause

Posted on August 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Main Clause: An independent clause, which can stand alone as grammatically complete sentence. Grammarians quibble.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Term of Art: Teacher Talk

Posted on August 19, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Teacher Talk: A semi-technical term in educational research and applied linguistics for the characteristic (often simplified) style of speech of teachers. In general terms, this may be prompted by the social setting of the classroom, with repetition, rephrasing for the sake of clarity, and patterns of stereotyped interaction with learners, such as question, response, and evaluation. For teachers of English as a foreign language, speech may be slower and clearer than is usual, avoiding and minimizing elided usages such as must’ve/musta and ‘sno good y’-know, repeating the same thing in several ways, and using expressions particularly associated with education, classrooms, and textbooks.”

Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Term of Art: Loose Sentence

Posted on August 19, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Loose Sentence: A sentence that begins with the main idea and then attaches modifiers, qualifiers, and additional details: He was determined to succeed, with or without the promotion he was hoping for and in spite of the difficulties he was confronting at every turn.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Term of Art: Adverb

Posted on August 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

“adverb: A word of a class traditionally defined as a modifying a verb, e.g. badly in He wrote it badly, seen as a modifier of wrote.

One of the parts of speech established in antiquity. In the grammar of English, the words called adverbs are in practice those whose primary roles is a s modifier of something other than a noun. Thus an adverb such as utterly modifies a verb or verb phrase in They destroyed it utterly, and an adjective in This is utterly crazy. Very modifies an adjective, as in a very big house, or an adverb, as in very badly. Then has its primary role in e.g. I did it then, though it can also modify a noun, e.g. in her then husband. The case for lumping such words together is that many have been formed with the suffix -ly, and their roles often overlap.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Term of Art: Linking Verb

Posted on August 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Linking Verb: A verb that joins the subject of a sentence to its complement. Professor Chapman is a philosophy teacher. They were ecstatic.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Term of Art: Dyslexia

Posted on August 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Dyslexia: An impairment in the ability to read, not resulting from low intelligence. It was first described in 1877 by the German physician Adolf Kussmaul (1822-1902), who coined the term word blindness to refer to it. See also acquired dyslexia, alexia, attentional dyslexia, catalexia, central dyslexias, cognitive neuropsychology, deep dyslexia, developmental dyslexia, neglect dyslexia, phonological dyslexia, spelling dyslexia, surface dyslexia, visual word-form dyslexia. Also called alexia, hypolexia, and word blindness. See also reading disorder, strephosymbolia. Compare hyperlexia. Dyslexic adj.”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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