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Language

Of of pertaining to any method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way, whether united in a system specific to a country or region.

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Language > Terminology

duality of patterning

Language; Terminology

A structural principle of human language whereby larger units consist of smaller building blocks, the number of such blocks being limited but the combination being almost ...

displacement

Language; Terminology

One of the key characteristics of human language which enables it to refer to situations which are not here and now, e.g. I studied linguistics in London when I was in my ...

convention

Language; Terminology

An agreement, usually reached unconsciously by speakers in a community, that relationships are to apply between linguistic items, between these and the outside world or to apply ...

extralinguistic

Language; Terminology

Any phenomenon which lies outside of language. An extralinguistic reason for a linguistic feature would be one which is not to be found in the language itself.

descriptive

Language; Terminology

An approach to linguistics which is concerned with saying what language is like and not what it should be like (prescriptivism).

diachronic

Language; Terminology

Refers to language viewed over time and contrasts with synchronic which refers to a point in time. This is one of the major structural distinctions introduced by Saussure and ...

creativity

Language; Terminology

An accepted feature of human language — deriving from the phenomenon of sentence generation — which accounts for speakers’ ability to produce and to understand a theoretically ...