Glossary of Linguistic Terms

vocalic Pertaining to a vowel or vowels. Hence postvocalic means occurring after a vowel (e.g., r in car); prevocalic means occurring before a vowel (e.g., the in the phrase the apple); and intervocalic means between vowels (e.g., f in the OE hlaford ‘lord’, pronounced as [v]).
voice, grammatical The way in which the relationship between a verb and a subject is expressed. The active voice indicates that the subject is the agent of the action stated in the verb: e.g., they wrote the report. The passive voice indicates that the subject is the recipient of the action stated in the verb: e.g., the report was written by them. PIE and Gothic had the medio-passive voice.
voice, phonetic Refers to speech sounds produced with vibration of the vocal cords. Includes all vowels and many consonants. In PDE, voiced consonants include /b, d, g, v, z, ð/. Voiceless consonants included /p, t, k, f, s, θ/. See further “Note on Phonetic Symbols and Orthography.”
vowel Refers to speech sounds other than consonants: e.g., [i, u, æ, ɑ]. A vowel is produced without major restriction on the fl ow of air in the mouth and can comprise the center of a syllable. See further “Note on Phonetic Symbols and Orthography.”
word class A category referring to a group of words that share syntactic and morphological characteristics. Also called part of speech. Word classes in traditional English grammar include noun (e.g., tree, imagination), adjective (e.g., thin, indispensable), adverb (slowly, therefore, very), verb (to tell, to concentrate), pronoun (you, everyone, many), preposition (from, upon), conjunction (and, although, when).