Terminology

Terminology

Terminology is the meaning of terms and thier use.

Contributors in Terminology

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 infinite. For instance all ...

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 twenties.

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 in the use of rules ...

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 which is used to ...

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 infinite number of ...