Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
A lexical set is a group of words that share a particular phonological feature.. A phoneme is a basic unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another. . Most commonly, following the work of phonetician John C. Wells, a lexical set is a class of words in a language that share a certain vowel pho
English function words may be spelled with fewer than three letters; e.g., 'I', 'an', 'in', while non-function words usually are spelled with three or more (e.g., 'eye', 'Ann', 'inn'). The following is a list of the kind of words considered to be function words with English examples. They are all uninflected in English unless marked otherwise:
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
In terms of phrase structure rules, phrasal categories can occur to the left of the arrow while lexical categories cannot, e.g. NP → D N. Traditionally, a phrasal category should consist of two or more words, although conventions vary in this area. X-bar theory, for instance, often sees individual words corresponding to phrasal categories ...
The knowledge of the 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse. [21] For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested [22] [23] and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are ...
The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν (lexikon), neuter of λεξικός (lexikos) meaning 'of or for words'. [ 1 ] Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock); and a grammar , a system of rules which allow for the ...
In lexicography [citation needed], a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). [ citation needed ] Examples are cat , traffic light , take care of , by the way , and it's raining cats and dogs .