Glossary of linguistic terms

Adjective

• Word class describing qualities (of nouns): big, democratic

Article

• Also called determiner, accompanies a noun or adjective: a(n), the

Articulation

• The movement of speech organs such as tongue, lips, jaw, vocal folds etc to produce speech sounds.

Broca, Paul

• See next step

Characters

• Written element of language, representing syllables or whole words

Grammar

• The set of rules of a language that defines how sentences are build to form a unit

Letters

• Written element of alphabet, representing sounds

Neurolinguistics

• Discipline of linguistics that is concerned with the neural basis of language in the human brain

Noun

• One of the universal word classes, denoting people, places, event, substances…, often marked for gender, number and case: table, elephant, democracy

Preposition

• Word class denoting spatial or temporal relation of two entities: under, in

Verb

• Second universal word class, denoting actions or states, often marked for person, number, tense, aspect, mood and various other linguistic features: walking, thinking, voting

Wernicke, Carl

• See the next step

Word finding difficulties

• A phenomenon that accompanies several aphasias, but can happen in the healthy brain as well. The situation of searching for a specific content word (noun, verb or adjective), while being able to produce the rest of the sentence