neurolinguistics nneurolinguistic adj
the study of the function the brain performs in language learning and
language use. Neurolinguistics includes research into how the structure of
the brain influences language learning, how and in which parts of the brain
language is stored (see memory), and how damage to the brain affects the
ability to use language (see aphasia).
neuter adj
see gender^2
neutralization n
when a contrast that is normally made in a language is not marked, this is
called neutralization. For example, in phonology, the high tense vowel of
bean(/bipn/) and the lax vowel of bin(/bin/) are normally in contrast (they
are phonemes), but there is no contrast between these vowels before a velar
nasal, as in the suffix –ing. In morphology, English normally contrasts
singular and plural forms of nouns (e.g. cat, cats), but in a few cases (e.g.
fish, sheep) this contrast is neutralized.
New Rhetoric n
in the teaching of composition, an approach advocated by a group of genre
theorists and researchers particularly in the US that argue for a redefinition
of traditional notions of rhetoric to focus on the social, cultural, political
and ideological assumptions and underpinnings that underlie the formal
features of texts. In the analysis of texts a new rhetoric approach focuses on
the social and ideological realities that underlie the regularities of texts, and
employs ethnographic methods to identify the relations between texts and
contexts.
node n
(in generative grammar) each position in a tree diagram where
lines (“branches”) meet. At each node is a symbol for a grammatical
category^2.
For example, in the tree diagram for a noun phrase, the child:
neurolinguistics