Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

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Part of speech Another term for word class, referring to the linguistic units that

realise sentence elements. 

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Class

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541 Index for individual terms not in the Glossary

Glossary | 913

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Passive

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Active

Perfect A type of aspect that gives information about a speaker’s perspective on

the relationship of events to the moment of speaking or to some other point in

time. It is realised by auxiliary have + -ed participle of a lexical verb. 

The present perfect relates events or states taking place in the past to a

present time orientation:

I

’ve made a lot of friends since I moved here. 

The past perfect relates situations or events anterior to a time of orientation in

the past:

She 

had been unhappy for years and so decided to join the slimming class.

Performative A term that refers to a type of utterance that performs a speech act

simply by saying it (I name this ship ‘Victory’; I apologise). 

Person A grammatical category which indicates the choice of personal reference

and number. Three kinds of contrast exist: first person (which includes the

speaker/writer, e.g. I, my, we, our), second person (which refers to the

addressee, e.g. you, yours), and third person (which refers to a third party, e.g.

he, she, it, they, him, her, its

). These distinctions apply to personal, possessive

and reflexive determiners and pronouns.

Phatic Communication where participants are less concerned to convey

information than to build a relationship or to make social contact; for example,

talking about the weather is phatic in several cultures.

Phonetics, phonology Phonetics is concerned with the study of physical

properties of speech sounds in a language, and the actual articulation or

production of speech sounds. Phonology is the study of the sound system in a

language. 

Phrasal verb, phrasal-prepositional verb

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Multi-word verb

Phrase A word or group of words which form grammatical units such as noun

phrase, verb phrase or adjective phrase. Phrases are the constituents of clauses.

Pitch Refers to the way in which speakers vary their sound level. Pitch movement

is denoted by a rising or falling tone as a result of the vibration of the vocal cord. 

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Intonation

Plural A grammatical category in number that refers to more than one, in the

case of nouns (tables, computers), verbs (they come), pronouns (we, they), etc. 

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Singular

Polarity (adjective = polar) A term used to mark affirmative/negative contrasts in

a clause:

The children are lovely.

(affirmative)

914 | Glossary

Cambridge Grammar of English

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They 

don’t do it during the summer.

(negative)

Polar (or yes-no) questions demand the answer yes or no:

Are you a teacher?

(yes or no?)

Position (front, mid, end) Refers to the ‘location’ of a grammatical element in a

clause. The three possible positions are front, mid and end positions. For

example, adjuncts can occupy a variety of positions in a clause:

In the morning we had to pretend nothing happened. 

(front position)

We 

sometimes go to Rochester. 

(mid position)

That young guy seems to deliver the post 

quite often these days. 

(end position)

Objects and predicative complements have slightly less flexibility and

occasionally occur in less typical positions for reasons of emphasis.

Compared with written English, positioning in spoken conversation is generally

more flexible (Are my keys in the door still?/Are my keys still in the door?).

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Focus

Possessive A word or part of a word that describes possession: possessive

determiner (my, your, his, her, its, our, their); possessive pronoun (mine, yours,

his, hers, ours, theirs

); genitive (cow’s milk, men’s jacket); the of construction

(the rules of the school, a student of this class).

Post-head Refers to the dependent elements that come after the head in a phrase.

They can be complements and postmodifiers. Complements complete the

meaning of the head and they precede postmodifiers: