definite ~ indefinite – Old English adjectives had two declensions; where the adjective was preceded by a demonstrative or possessive it followed the definite declension, and elsewhere it followed the indefinite declension.
deixis – a term used to refer to those features which relate to personal,locational or temporal, where meaning is relative to that situation.
derivational morphology – area of morphology concerned with the way inwhich lexemes are related to one another (or in which one lexeme is derivedfrom another) through processes such as affixation.
digraph – the combination of two letters to represent a single sound, as in the
of this.
distribution – in a sound system there are sets of sounds which contrast witheach other, and such sounds are said to be in contrastive distribution; there areother sounds with do not contrast but appear in different positions in theword – for example for many speakers of English the first sound in littleis different from the last sound, but this has no effect on the sound system,because they two sounds are not contrastive, but rather complementary.