Glossary of linguistic terms

Similarly to our first glossary, this one is dedicated to the linguistic terms that will be needed to understand the content of the following weeks. Here is a list of the terms that were introduced and their definitions.

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