Concept
Interjection
Related concepts (16)
Word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition.
Inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody (ˈprɒsədi,_ˈprɒzədi) is the study of elements of speech that are not individual phonetic segments (vowels and consonants) but which are properties of syllables and larger units of speech, including linguistic functions such as intonation, stress, and rhythm. Such elements are known as suprasegmentals. Prosody may reflect features of the speaker or the utterance: their emotional state; the form of utterance (statement, question, or command); the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus.
Filler (linguistics)
In linguistics, a filler, filled pause, hesitation marker or planner (sometimes called crutches) is a sound or word that participants in a conversation use to signal that they are pausing to think but are not finished speaking. These are not to be confused with placeholder names, such as thingamajig, whatchamacallit, whosawhatsa and whats'isface, which refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown. Fillers fall into the category of formulaic language, and different languages have different characteristic filler sounds.
Discourse marker
A discourse marker is a word or a phrase that plays a role in managing the flow and structure of discourse. Since their main function is at the level of discourse (sequences of utterances) rather than at the level of utterances or sentences, discourse markers are relatively syntax-independent and usually do not change the truth conditional meaning of the sentence. Examples of discourse markers include the particles oh, well, now, then, you know, and I mean, and the discourse connectives so, because, and, but, and or.
Function word
In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus they form important elements in the structures of sentences.
Ideophone
An ideophone is any word in a certain word class evoking ideas in sound imitation (onomatopoeia) to express an action, manner, or property. The class of ideophones is the least common cross-linguistically; it occurs mostly in African, Australian, and Amerindian languages, and sporadically elsewhere. It is globally the only known word class exotic to English. Ideophones resemble interjections but are unclassifiable as such owing to their special phonetic or derivational characteristics, and based on their syntactic function within the sentence.
Speech disfluency
A speech disfluency, also spelled speech dysfluency, is any of various breaks, irregularities, or non-lexical vocables which occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech. These include "false starts", i.e. words and sentences that are cut off mid-utterance; phrases that are restarted or repeated, and repeated syllables; "fillers", i.e. grunts, and non-lexical or semiarticulate utterances such as huh, uh, erm, um, and hmm, and, in English, well, so, I mean, and like; and "repaired" utterances, i.e.
English phonology
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants (stops, affricates, and fricatives).
Proto-Indo-European language
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age.