A posteriori

GRÁGAS LAWBOOK (Old Norse "greygoose"): A section of the Codex Regius text that deals with wergild and Icelandic law--an important source for understanding the conflict in Icelandic sagas.

GRAMMATICAL FUNCTION: A category for words in inflected languages--typical examples include aspect, mood, and tense for verbs; person and case for pronouns; case and definiteness for articles, and number, case, and gender for nouns.

GRAPHEME: In a writing system, the smallest written mark or symbol that has meaning, and which cannot be subdivided into smaller markings recognized as symbols in a particular written form of language. For example, in English, the marking for the letter "a" involves two diagonal lines that slant upward and one horizontal line. If any one of those three lines are removed, the markings are no longer recognizably a letter. Thus, the letter is a grapheme that cannot be further subdivided into smaller symbols. Linguists indicate graphemes and written words by placing them in chevrons or carroted brackets in order to distinguish the markings from phonemes when discussing the sounds of the spoken word. For phonetic transcription, they would place the symbols for the sounds in slashes like /this/. Thus, the markings and would indicate the way English speakers write the words "kitten" and "cat," respectively, but linguists would use phonetic transcription /kitin/ and /kæt/ respectively to indicate the way English speakers pronounce the words aloud. See also phoneme and morpheme.

GRAMMATICAL GENDER: See gender.