Delahunty and Garvey
and pragmatics. Each component is made up of rules.
composition text: a book designed for teaching the various skills of writing
at the junior high, high school and college level; may combine features of
prescriptive grammar and conventional rules. Also offers suggestions about
the process of writing.
convention, conventional, conventionality: the idea that the speakers
of a language agree on which meanings are associated with which sounds.
corpus linguistics: linguistic analysis based on collections of language
data, usually stored as computerized data bases and analyzed by computer
programs.
creativity of language: the capacity of language to express an infinite
number of sentences.
cultural transmission: the idea that human beings learn their native
language(s) from speakers around them, rather than by being genetically
preprogrammed with a language, as is the case with some animals.
descriptive linguistics: concerned with actual patterns of language and lan-
guage use.
diachronic linguistics: the study of historical change in languages.
dialect, dialectal, dialectology: (the study of) regional variation in a
language.
diminutive: a part of a word indicating smallness or youth, e.g., Billy.
duality of patterning: the idea that the smallest meaningful linguistic
units are composed of reusable, meaningless sounds.
explanation: linguistic rules that follow logically from general assumptions
about the nature of human language are regarded as explanations of the
phenomena they describe.
expressive meaning: meaning that indicates the emotional state of a speaker.
grammar (descriptive): (1) an overall systematic description of a language,
written by a linguist or some other person; (2) the syntactic part (compo-
nent) of the overall description, describing the systematic rules of sentence
structure; (3) linguistic competence, i.e., the unconscious but systematic
knowledge of the rules of one’s native language (also called “internalized
grammar”); (4) the systematic rules in one’s linguistic competence that ap-
ply to sentence structure.
grammar (prescriptive): an unsystematic list of language variations with
the claim that one of the variants is right/correct/proper and the others are
not.
grammar book: summary of the syntactic structures of a language, includ-
ing part of speech, word order, sentence structure, and sometimes rules of
usage.