ENG508 Glossary

1. Anthropologist :An anthropologist is a person engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of various aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology, and philosophical anthropology study the norms and values of societies.
2. Aspect :Tense is a category which allows a speaker to relate situations to time whereas aspect system allows speaker to relate situation and time and to view an event in various ways such as complete or incomplete.
3. Collocation :Collocation is a familiar grouping of words.
4. Compositional Semantics :Compositional semantics deals with the way that the meanings of lexical items combine to give phrase and sentence meaning.
5. Davidsonian Semantics :Davidsonian semantics argues that we can do semantics without possible worlds. Davidsonian Semanticists agree with other formal semanticists that the meaning of a sentence consists in its truth-conditions, but think that possible worlds and the like are not the right way to think about truth conditions.
6. Deontic Modality :Deontic Modality is where the verbs mark the speaker’s attitude to social factors of obligation, responsibility and permission.
7. Epistemic Modality :Epistemic Modality expresses the degree of knowledge that how sure is the speaker in his communication.
8. Evidentiality :Evidentiality is a semantic category which allows a speaker to communicate his/her attitude to the source of his/her information.
9. Formal Grammar :The study or the use of rules about how words change their form, and combine with other words to express meaning.

10. Hyponym :A hyponym includes the meaning of a more general word. For example, sister and mother are hyponyms of ‘woman’. 11. Idioms :Idioms are expressions "whose meaning cannot be inferred from the meaning of its parts”. 12. Moneo :‘Money’ is related to Latin ‘moneo’ (warn) because money was made in the temple of the goddess Juno Moneta. 13. Non-literal meaning :Non-Literal Meaning are instances where the speaker deliberately describes something in untrue or impossible terms in order to achieve special effects. 14. Paradigm :A paradigm is a set of linguistic or other units that can be substituted for each other in the same position within a sequence or structure. 15. Phrasal verb :A very common type of idiom in English is ‘phrasal verb’ the combination of verb plus adverb of the kind. 16. Pragmatics :Pragmatics concerned with the transmission of meaning through language in use. 17. Presupposition :Presupposition refers to the assumptions implicitly made by the speakers and the listeners. 18. Principle of compositionality :This says that the meaning of a piece of language is based solely on the meaning of its parts, and the way they are put together. Here the infinity and creativity of language are comprehensible. 19. Signification :This process of creating and interpreting symbols is called signification - far wider than language. 20. Signified :The concept that a signifier refers to is called signified. 21. Syntagmatic relations :Syntagmatic relations hold between two or more words co present in a sequence. 22. Thematic roles :Thematic roles mean the roles that referents of the arguments of a verb play in the event or as the state that the verb denotes. 23. Traditional logic :Logicians tend not to talk about ‘ideas’ though; the basic unit of traditional logic is the ‘proposition’; a significant term in the discussions of meanings. 24. Utterance :An utterance is an instance of the production of a sentence or a fragment of a sentence.