| Linguistic Competence | The knowledge one has of his language: different from linguistic perfomance |
| Linguistic Performance | The competence a speaker displays when speaking his language: opposed to linguistic competence |
| Descriptive Grammar | A grammar that describes a language as it is spoken |
| Prescriptive Grammar | A grammar that describes how a language ought to be spoken |
| Mental Grammar | The grammar speakers have in their brains |
| Dialect | A variety of speech within a given language |
| Prestige Dialect | A variety of a language that has more prestige |
| Standard Dialect | The dialect of a language that is good to know and speak for practical reasons |
| Universal Grammar (UG) | The rules that govern all language |
| Linguistic Theory | The quest for a universal grammar |
| Lexicon | A person's vocabulary |
| Language | A mode of communication unique to human beings: it is discrete and creative |
| Sapir-Whorf hypothesis | The idea that one's language moulds the way he thinks and sees the world |
| Linguistic Determinism | The strongest aspect of the Sapir-Whorf Theory |
| Neurolinguistics | The study of the biological and neural basis for language |
| Corpus Callosum | The fibrous bridge that connects the two spheres of the brain |
| Contralateral Brain Function | The concept that the right brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa |
| Localization | The idea that cranial functions are localized in the brain |
| Phrenology | The pseudoscience that states that bumps on the skull indicate personality traits and flaws in a person |
| Broca's Aphasia | Damage to the Broca area |
| Broca's Area | An area in the left brain that controls much of what speech is |
| Wernick's Aphasia | Damage to Wernick's area |
| Wernick's Area | An area in the left brain that controls grammar functions |
| Jargon Aphasia | A term referring to extreme Wernick's Aphasia |
| Anomia | A phenomenon in which one can never find the word he's looking for |
| Hemispherectomy | An impressive operation whereby a hemisphere is surgically removed |
| Dichotic Listening | A way of experimenting so as to determine what cranial functions are controlled by what cranial hemisphere |
| Specific Language Impairment | An impairment whereby a person's language capacity is damaged |
| Critical Period | There period of age in which a child must learn a language or be linguistically impaired forever |
| Critical-age Hypothesis | The theory that children must acquire a language by a certain age or be impaired for life |
| Monogenetic Theory of Language Origin | The theory that all languages have one origin |
| Cortex | The surface of the brain |
| Cerebral Hemispheres | The hemispheres of the brain |
| Orthography | A fancy word meaning "Spelling" |
| Lexicography | A fancy word for "Dictionary" |
| Content Words | Words that denote objects, things, stuff: as opposed to function words |
| Function Words | Words that are utilitarian, such as prepositions: as opposed to content words |
| Morpheme | The fundamental unit of meaning in words |
| Free Morphemes | Morphemes that can stand alone |
| Bound Morphemes | Morphemes that cannot stand alone |
| Affix | A morpheme tacked somewhere onto a word |
| Prefix | An affix tacked onto the beginning of a word |
| Suffix | An affix tacked onto the end of a word |
| Infix | An affix tacked into the middle of a word |
| Circumfix | An affix tacked onto the beginning and end of a word |
| Discontinuous Morpheme | A morpheme split up |
| Root | The basic unit in a word that has many components and affixes |
| Stem | A root with one or more affixes |
| Derivational Morphemes | Morphemes that morph a word into a different syntactical catagory |
| Derived Word | A word that has been derived in syntactical category by means of morphemes |
| Lexical Gap | A word that makes sense, yet isn't a word (e.g. exobvious) |
| Rule Productivity | Some rules are productive in producing words, while others aren't; this is called: |
| Antonym | A word that means the opposite of another word |
| Eponym | A word based upon a proper name |
| Back-formations | A word formed through a mistake, formed from a morpheme that actually is not free, but appears to be |
| Compound Words | Words formed from two other free-morphemes |
| Compound Head | The word in a compound that is closest to the right and that dominates the word |
| Blend | A word in which two words are blended together, rather than compounded |
| Clipping | The phenomenon whereby words are clipped to be shorter |
| Acronym | Initials of a word of several parts |
| Alphabetic Abbreviation | Acronyms that cannot be spoken easily as a word |
| Inflectional Morphemes | Morphemes that never change the syntactical category of the word, but only change its tense |
| Suppletive Forms | Verb forms that cannot be formed from the usual inflectional morphemes |
| Structural Ambiguity | A situation in which the sentence's tree structure is not apparent |
| Tree Diagram | A mode of showing the two-dimensional structure of a sentence |
| Syntactical Category | Types of words that can be interchanged without a compromise of grammaticality |
| Noun Phrase: NP | A noun, with or without a complement |
| Verb Phrase: VP | A verb, with or without a complement |
| Prepositional Phrase: PP | A preposition, with or without a complement |
| Determiner | A sort of article or definite article, such as "the" |
| Demonstratives | Words such as this, that, and every |
| Auxiliaries | Words that cannot stand alone, but must go along with verbs |
| Node | A point in a constituent structure tree |
| Sisters | Two nodes on a phrase structure tree that are of the same level |
| Embedded Sentence | A sentence embedded in a larger phrase structure tree |
| Complementizer | A word such as "that," allowing embedded sentences and recursivity |
| Recursivity | That phenomenon whereby sentences can be infinitely long |
| Head | The "verb" in every VP, the "noun" in every NP |
| Distransitive Verb | A verb that requires both an object an an indirect object |
| X-Bar Theory | A theory that gives a basic, fundamental, abstract scheme for sentence structure |
| Coordinate Structure | Structure in which two words of same syntactical type are connected with words such as "and" or "or" |
| Adjunction | An operation that allows for aux and transformations in sentence structure |
| Deep Structure (d-structure) | The basic structure of a sentence, before transformation rules are applied |
| Surface Structure (s-structure) | The derived structure from a sentence's d-structure |
| Syntax | The rules for sentence structure |
| Constituent | The component parts of a sentence (can be interchanged if they are the same type) |
| Constituent Structure | The structure of the component parts of a sentence |
| Modals | words such as may, might, and can |
| Functional Categories | Aux and Det are... |
| Tense Phrase (TP) | An alternative to S-bar theory and X-bar theory that some linguists use |
| Semantics | The study of linquistic meaning |
| Lexical semantics | The study of linguistic meaning in words |
| Phrasal semantics | The study of linguistic meaning in units larger than the word |
| Sentential semantics | The study of linguistic meaning in units larger than the word |
| Pragmatics | The study of how a word or phrase's situation determines and affects its meaning |
| Truth-conditional semantics | The study of semantics with regards to the truth |
| Truth value | How much truth (some, none, absolute) a sentence has |
| Truth conditions | Those conditions in which a sentence is true |
| Tautologies | Sentences that are always true |
| Contradictions | Sentences that are always false |
| Paradoxes | Sentences whose truth value is undefined and/or undeterminable |
| Entailment | The phenomenon whereby one sentence entails another |
| Synonymous | A condition in which two sentences are either true or false in the same contexts |
| Paraphrase | A synonymous sentence |
| Contradictory sentence | A sentence which is always true when another is false, and always false when the other is true |
| Reference | A word in a sentence that refers to a specific object in the world |
| Semantic anomaly | A situation in which a sentence doesn't make sense, even if it is grammatical (metaphor and idiom are types of this) |
| Metaphor | An expression in which the speaker does not mean the listener to take his words literally |
| Idiom | A semantic anomaly with a fixed meaning that would be otherwise uninterpretable |
| Idiomatic phrase | Another way of saying "idiom" |
| Referent | That which a word refers to, a component of the referential theory of semantics |
| Sense | A meaning that a word has, whether or not it exists in the real world |
| Synonym | A word that means the same thing as another word |
| Relational opposites | A type of antonym where two words are opposite in their relationship to eachother in their essence (i.e. teacher to student) |
| Homonyms | Two words with the same sound but different meaning and spelling |
| Homophone | Another word for homonym |
| Polysemous | An adjective designating words that have several meanings |
| Hyponym | A word in the same semantic family as another |
| Metonym | A word that may substitute for another |
| Classifier | A morpheme designating a noun subject, object, etc. |
| Count noun | A noun that can be counted (one car, two cars, three cars...) |
| Mass noun | A noun that cannot be counted (one milk, two milks, three milks...) |
| Negative polarity items | Expressions that require a negative element in the sentence to allow them to appear |
| Argument | An NP with a VP |
| Argument structure | The semantics and conjugation of a verb |
| Agent | He who is doing an action |
| Thematic roles | The roles played by subject and object in the context of a theme |
| Instrument | The instrument by which an agent carries out a theme toward a goal |
| Experiencer | A person receiving input through the eyes, ears, or other senses |
| Discourse analysis | The analysis of the broad structure of a speech, comprising multiple sentences |
| Reflexive pronouns | Pronouns that refer the verb back to the agent |
| Deixis | The phenomenon whereby the meaning of certain words (such as "he") are determined entirely by context |
| Maxims of conversation | The maxims that govern real semantics in conversation |
| Maxim of quantity | A speaker must not give more or less information than required |
| Maxim of relevance | The speaker must speak on the relevant topic |
| Maxim of manner | The speaker must be concise and neat in his speech, not opaque or ambiguous |
| Maxim of quality | Do not speak false things |
| Implicatures | Inferences with respect to pragmatics |
| Speech acts | Acts done in a word (e.g. I hereby proclaim you sentenced to death) |
| Performative sentence | A sentence containing a speech act |
| Illocutionary force | The intent of a speech act |
| Performative verbs | The type of verbs that are involved in speech acts |