Glossary ablaut

infinitive, inflected – special form of the Old English infinitive which occurswhen governed by the preposition to￣.

inflectional morphology – area of morphology concerned with changes in word shape (e.g. through affixation) that are determined by, or potentially affect, the grammatical context in which a word appears. See also lexeme.

instrumental – a case used when the noun phrase exhibits functions such as‘association with’, but such functions often shown by the dative rather thanthe instrumental. The instrumental is also used in a variety of idiomaticexpressionism.

language family – a set of languages which are cognate, as in the case of Indo-European.

lexeme – word seen as an abstract grammatical entity, represented concretelyby one or more different inflected word forms according to the grammaticalcontext. For example, the verb lexeme ‘perform’ has four inflected wordforms: ‘perform’, ‘performs’, ‘performing’ and ‘performed’.

lexicon – inventory of lexical items, seen as part of a native speaker’s knowledgeof his or her language.

loan word – a word from another language which is taken into English.

macron – a mark placed above a vowel by editors in order to show that the vowelis long.

mood – a set of semantic contrasts signalling the attitudes of the speaker andin Old English shown by three different moods, indicative, subjunctive andimperative.

morpheme – minimal unit of grammatical structure. (The morpheme is oftendefined as the minimal meaningful unit of language but that definition leadsto problems.

morphology – area of grammar concerned with the structure of words and withrelationships between words that involve the morphemes that composethem.