Glossary Terms

• Abstract Nouns Refer to ideas and concepts and ideas that only exist in the mind
• Accent The distinct pronunciation patterns of a group of people
• Accomodation Where a speaker adapts to another speaker's accent, dialect or sociolect
• Acronomy Abbreviation using the first letter of a group of words and pronounced as a single word eg OPEC, NASA, RAM
• Active voice Clause construction where the subject is also the actor (they are doing or have done something to somebody/something)
• Adjacency pair A pair of utterances in a conversation that go together (greeting and reply, question and answer etc...)
• Adjective A word that modifies a noun (e.g. the orange sky)
• Adverb A word that modifies a verb telling you how, where or when an action takes place; can also modify adjectives, telling you how much (eg 'I am really delighted')
• Adverbial words, phrases or clauses which act as adverbs and which identify where, when and how when modifying the verb
• Affordance Linguistic and behavioural choices provided by technology
• Agenda setting where a speaker sets up the main topic of conversation
• Analogical overextension associating objects which are unrelated but which have one or more features in common (eg both being the same colour)
• Anchored relationship an online relationship where two participants know each other in the offline world
• Article a determiner such as 'a' or 'the
• Asymmetrical power an imbalance or power between people
• Asynchronous unlike synchronous, there is a delay between utterance and respons. Responses posted on a forum, which may occur months or even years after the original post, are an example of discourse that is asynchronous
• Audience The person or people reading or hearing the text
• Auxiliary verb assists the main verb; primary auxiliary verbs do, have and be denote changes of tense
• Avatar An image used by a user that accompanies a username
• Backchannelling supportive terms such as 'oh' and 'really
• Bald-on-record where a speaker is completely blunt and direct (eg sit down)
• Bias A form of prejudice in favour of or against an idea, person or group, expressed through language/images and so on. It can take obvious or implicit forms, or a mixture of the two, and can arise from what is omitted as well as from what is stated or shown
• Bidialectism a speaker's ability to use two dialects of the same language
• Categorical overextension the most commonly occurring form of overextension in a child's language, and relates to confusing a hypernym (broad category, eg fruit) with a hyponym (specific example)
• Catenative chain-like structure in a sentence ('so we...' 'and then we...')
• Chaining A speaker responds and sets up the other speaker's next utterance in a chain that runs on past an adjacency pair
• Child-directed speech (CDS) speech patterns used by parents and cares when communicating with young children
• Clause a structural unit that contains at least one subject and one verb - it can include other features as well such as object, complemen and adverbial
• Closer spoken expressions which are designed to close
• Codification a process of standardizing a language
• Cohesion the many parts of a text that help to draw it together into a recognisable whole. (For example, the headline, picture and caption in a news article will all have words/images that link together in terms of the meaning and subject matter of the article)
• Collocation two or more words that are often found together in a group or phrase with a distinct meaning (eg 'over the top' 'fish and chips' 'back to front')
• Comparative adjective the form of an adjective that designates comparison between two things, generally made by adding the suffix -er to its base form (eg 'this is a faster car')
• Complement a clause element that tells you more about the subject or the object
• Complex sentence has two or more clauses, one of which is a subordinate clause
• Compound sentence has two or more clauses, usually joined to the main clause by the conjunctions 'and' or 'but' and depends on the main clause to exist
• Compound-complex sentence a sentence that has three or more clauses, one of which will be a subordinate clause and one of which will be a coordinate clause
• Concrete nouns refer to things we touch or can experience physically (eg snow, butter)
• Conditioning the process by which humans (and animals) are taught or trained to respond, and learn by positive reinforcement (eg praise from an adult) for whatever is deemed to be appropriate learning within that specific context - for choosing the correct word or for politeness for example
• Conjunction a word that joins clauses together