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In linguistics, a modifier is an optional element in phrase structure or clause structure [1] which modifies the meaning of another element in the structure. For instance, the adjective "red" acts as a modifier in the noun phrase "red ball", providing extra details about which particular ball is being referred to.
Colloquialism (also called colloquial language, colloquial speech, everyday language, or general parlance) is the linguistic style used for casual and informal communication. It is the most common form of speech in conversation among persons in friendship, familial, intimate, and other informal contexts. [1]
In linguistics, a neologism (/ n i ˈ ɒ l ə ˌ dʒ ɪ z əm /; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. [1] Most definitively, a word can be considered a neologism once it is published in a dictionary. [2]
Adianoeta – a phrase carrying two meanings: an obvious meaning and a second, more subtle and ingenious one (more commonly known as double entendre). Alliteration – the use of a series of two or more words beginning with the same letter. Amphiboly – a sentence that may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous structure.
Some pleonastic phrases are part of a language's idiom, like tuna fish, chain mail and safe haven in American English. They are so common that their use is unremarkable for native speakers, although in many cases the redundancy can be dropped with no loss of meaning.
A phraseme, also called a set phrase, fixed expression, multiword expression (in computational linguistics), or idiom, [1] [2] [3] [citation needed] is a multi-word or multi-morphemic utterance whose components include at least one that is selectionally constrained [clarification needed] or restricted by linguistic convention such that it is not freely chosen. [4]
Oxymorons in the narrow sense are a rhetorical device used deliberately by the speaker and intended to be understood as such by the listener. In a more extended sense, the term "oxymoron" has also been applied to inadvertent or incidental contradictions, as in the case of "dead metaphors" ("barely clothed" or "terribly good").
This phenomenon refers to how we classify the grammatical category of phrases, where the grammatical category of the phrase is dependent on the grammatical category of one of the words within the phrase, called the head. For example, in the phrase "buy the books", the verb "buy" is the head, and we call the entire phrase a verb-phrase.