Introducing English Linguistics

is have you over next week or What you needed was a long vacation. Such con-
structions are used for purposes of emphasis and tend to occur primarily
in informal speech.
recursion:
A property of human language whereby linguistic constructions can be
endlessly embedded in other constructions. See also embedding.
reference:
The property of words to refer to other words within or outside a text. In
the sentence The manager spoke with her employees, the pronoun her refers
back in the text to The manager. The words manager and employees refer to
individuals outside the text in the external world.
referent:
What a word refers to. In Because the car wouldn’t run, I took it to be repaired,
the pronoun it has as its referent the car. See also reference.
referential deixis:
A type of deixis in which expressions refer to something or someone. For
instance, in The computer is broken, the noun phrase The computer refers to a
specific computer in the external world.
register:
A type of speech or writing that is characterized by a specific hierarchical
structure and a set of linguistic constructions. For instance, a lab report
would open with an abstract and contain sections discussing the method-
ology used to conduct the experiment being discussed and the results of
the experiment. Such a report would not contain the pronouns I or you,
but would contain nominalizations and passives.
regular verbs:
Verbs that do not change form when verb inflections are added to the