stress-timed language n
a language (such as English) with a rhythm in which stressed syllables tend
to recur at regular intervals of time and the length of an utterance depends
on the number of stresses rather than the number of syllables.
For example, the phrase BILL WORKS HARDand the phrase BILL’s been
WORKing HARDtake roughly the same amount of time to say in English.
see also syllable-timed language
strong form n
the form in which a word is pronounced when it is stressed or spoken in
isolation. This term is usually applied only to words that normally occur
unstressed and with a weak form, such as to, a, the.
see also citation form
strong interface position n
see interface
strong verb n
(in English grammar) a term sometimes used to refer to a verb which forms
the past tense and the past participle by a change in a vowel (e.g. begin-
began-begun, sing-sang-sung). A regular verb which forms the past tense
and participle by adding -ed is known as a weak verb (e.g. open-opened).
structural ambiguity n
another term for grammatical ambiguity
structural description n
also SD
(in transformational generative grammar) a complete grammatical
analysis of a sentence typically in the form of tree-like structures (tree dia-
gram) or strings of labelled constituents. The structural description shows
the most abstract syntactic form of the sentence (deep structure) and the
changes made to it by various rules (“transformational rules”).
see also base component, transformational component
structural equation modelling n
a statistical procedure, combining path analysis and confirmatory
factor analysis, to test a researcher’s theoretical model that involves
both observed and unobserved (or latent) variables.
structural global method n
another term for audio-visual method
stress-timed language