How words and sentences make meaning

C2 · 100 entries · Five themes

How words and sentences make meaning

Created by , British English teacher.

Open a theme, then select a word or phrase for its meaning, example and pronunciation.

1. Word formation and borrowing (20 entries)
  1. borrowing
  2. derivation
  3. compounding
  4. lexicalisation
  5. a learned borrowing
  6. grammaticalisation
  7. prefixation
  8. coinage
  9. back-formation
  10. blending
  11. a fossilised form
  12. suffixation
  13. affixation
  14. reduplication
  15. derivational suffix
  16. initialism
  17. deverbal noun
  18. denominal adjective
  19. acronymy
  20. clipping
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2. Grammar and information structure (20 entries)
  1. a cleft construction
  2. an absolute construction
  3. a marked word order
  4. an expletive subject
  5. a restrictive relative clause
  6. a fronted adjunct
  7. a garden-path sentence
  8. a concessive subordinate clause
  9. indirect free speech
  10. an appositive phrase
  11. ellipsis of the verb phrase
  12. a non-restrictive clause
  13. subject-auxiliary inversion
  14. contrastive focus
  15. a discourse particle
  16. an embedded interrogative
  17. the scope of negation
  18. a non-finite clause
  19. a dangling participle
  20. corpus
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3. Meaning in context (20 entries)
  1. a semantic field
  2. a loan translation
  3. a near-synonym
  4. a lexical superordinate
  5. semantic broadening
  6. semantic narrowing
  7. a lexical gap
  8. a collocational restriction
  9. semantic prosody
  10. amelioration of meaning
  11. metonymic extension
  12. semantic bleaching
  13. hyponymy
  14. polysemy
  15. homonymy
  16. explicit
  17. a nonce word
  18. a neologism
  19. denote
  20. verbatim
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4. Ambiguity and implication (20 entries)
  1. fraught with uncertainty
  2. a foregone conclusion
  3. undetermined
  4. unerring
  5. indeterminacy
  6. ineluctable
  7. inescapable
  8. ambivalent
  9. beyond the bounds of possibility
  10. open-ended
  11. propositional knowledge
  12. ripe for reconsideration
  13. scope ambiguity
  14. a stipulative definition
  15. ambiguity
  16. dissolve a paradox
  17. an overdetermined outcome
  18. uncertainty premium
  19. paradoxical
  20. unadulterated
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5. Editing for precision (20 entries)
  1. nominalisation
  2. disambiguation
  3. pare a sentence back
  4. soften an overstatement
  5. ambiguous attachment
  6. disambiguate a pronoun
  7. break up a string of noun phrases
  8. substitute a precise verb
  9. misplaced modifier
  10. strip out a redundancy
  11. delimit
  12. unclear antecedent
  13. make the antecedent explicit
  14. qualify an absolute assertion
  15. cumulative sentence
  16. preserve the force of a contrast
  17. dangling modifier
  18. temper a categorical claim
  19. untangle a nested clause
  20. distillation
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