Introducing English Linguistics

syllable
.
lexical cohesion:
A type of cohesion involving, for instance, the repetition of a word or the
use of a synonym, as in the two repetitions of the group in The leader of
the
group resigned. He thought the group was not supporting him.
lexical
See componential analysis.
decomposition:
Glossary
229

---

lexical semantics:
The study of the meaning of individual words in a language.
lexical verb
A verb that can occur alone or after one or more auxiliaries in the verb 
(or full verb):
phrase. In the verb phrase may have left, left is the lexical verb. Because lex-
ical verbs are an open class, there are many different lexical verbs in
English.
light syllable:
A syllable ending in a lax vowel.
linear structure:
How linguistic constructions are ordered relative to one another. For
instance, in English adjectives come before the head noun (e.g. the healthy
child). In contrast, in languages such as French or Spanish, adjectives tend
to come after the noun (e.g. French l’enfant en bonne santé ‘the child
healthy’). Compare with hierarchical structure.
linguistic context:
The larger body of words in which linguistic constructions occur,
often affecting the use of particular constructions. For instance, old
information
is often placed at the beginning of a clause, as is the 
case with He in the second sentence: The man committed a crime. He was
arrested.
linguistic
Examining existent languages that are known to be related so that an 
reconstruction:
ancestral language having no surviving records can be conjectured. Indo-
European, a proto-language, has been entirely reconstructed based on evi-
dence from languages for which surviving records do exist (e.g. English,
French, German, and other languages in the Indo-European language
family).
linking verb:
A verb occurring in the predicator of clauses containing a subject com-