A Skeletal Introduction to English Grammarglossary.
clause: grammatical unit composed of two phrases—subject and predicate.
direct object: the phrase traditionally viewed as representing the “recipi-
ent” of the action denoted by the main verb, or as representing the entity/
ies directly affected by the event denoted by the main verb. Typically occurs
after the main verb.
discourse: coherent, cohesive, contextualized, and purposeful communica-
tive activity.
form: an expression’s observable characteristics, including actual and po-
tential inflections, actual derivational endings, stress, potential position in
grammatical structures, and potential for grammatical operations.
function: the roles an expression plays in a sentence. Functions include
Subject, Predicate, Direct Object, Indirect Object, Object of a Preposition,
Complement, Adjunct, Modifier, Head.
head: main element in a grammatical construction.
letter: graphic unit, which in an alphabet, approximately represents a phoneme.
lexeme: the basic form of a word; the form that you would look up in a
dictionary (see word form).
meaning: definition of an expression or the information potentially com-
municated by an expression, studied in semantics and pragmatics.
modifier: an expression qualifying the head of a grammatical construction.
morpheme: the smallest linguistic unit that has a meaning or grammatical
function; composed of one or more phonemes.
phoneme: a contrastive sound unit, more or less adequately represented by
one or more letters of the alphabet.
phrase: a grammatical unit composed of one or more words.
relationship: the role or function of a word or phrase in a sentence.
sentence: the largest unit to which the grammatical rules of a language ap-
ply; may be composed of one or more clauses.
text: language produced during discourse; can be produced as written doc-
uments or as recordings of spoken communication.
word: a grammatical unit composed of one or more morphemes.
word form: an inflected form of a word (see lexeme).