Tag Archives: term of art

“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.

“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.