The Minor Parts of Speechmodality.
case form: one of the inflectional variants of a noun, pronoun, adjective, or
(in some languages) article.
common case: the uninflected form of English nouns found in subject and
object functions.
conjunct: a grammatical element connected by a coordinating or subordi-
nating conjunction to another grammatical element.
conjunction: a function word that joins grammatical elements either as
coordinate to each other or as one subordinate to the other.
content word: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. See chapter on Major
Parts of Speech.
coordinating conjunction: a function word such as and, but, or, etc. that
connects grammatically equal elements. See subordinating conjunction.
co-reference: property of noun phrases denoting the same entity; applies
to a pronoun and its antecedent or to two noun phrases.
correlative conjunction: a multiple-word coordinating conjunction, e.g.,
both...and, either...or.
declarative (also called indicative): in traditional grammar, the mood of a
sentence used to make an assertion.
definiteness: property of some NPs (and the (pro)nouns and articles they
contain), which denote a speaker’s assumption that their referent can be
readily identified. See indefiniteness.
deictic: words like the demonstratives, whose referents depend upon the
situations they occur in, and which change from use to use.
demonstrative: the deictic words this, that, these, and those. See deictic.
function words (also called structure words): words such as preposi-
tions, auxiliaries, and articles that are used frequently in a language to signal
recurrent semantic and grammatical information.
gender: linguistic category distinguishing words or the entities they denote as
masculine, feminine, or neuter; signaled by pronouns and suffixes. Languages
other than English may signal gender by adjective inflection, articles, verb agree-
ment, etc.
generic: property of an article whereby it designates an entire class. See
specific.
generic pronoun: pronoun that makes no gender distinction, e.g., one.
genitive: case signaled by ’s and s’, indicating a variety of semantic relations,
including possession, authorship, involvement with, and many less specific
relations. Also called the possessive case.
imperative: in traditional grammar, the mood of a sentence used to give a com-
mand.