Introducing English Linguistics

interrogative
, imperative, and exclamatory.
sentence stress:
The assignment of stress across phrases and clauses. In a tone unit, usu-
ally one syllable of one word (the tonic syllable) will receive the greatest
stress.
signs:
In semiotic theory, a unit consisting of the signifier (form) and the signi-
fied (the meaning associated with the form). In speech, the signifier of a
word such as desk is the series of phonemes /dεsk/ associated with this
word; the signified would be the meaning (a table on which work can be
conducted) that these phonemes evoke.
slang:
Highly informal language usually associated with younger speakers of a
language. It tends to have a short lifespan and falls out of use quickly as
the speakers who use it become older. For instance, words such as groovy
and far out, which are associated with the 1960s, are not heard much any-
more, and date the people who speak them.
social context:
The larger cultural context in which language takes place. A dinner con-
versation involves not simply linguistic constructions formed by particu-
lar linguistic rules. Instead, the constructions that are used and how they
are formed are determined by the individuals speaking: their relation-
ships with one another; the past experiences they have had speaking with
one another; and additional factors, such as their age, gender, social class,
and level of education.
social distance:
How close a social relationship individuals have. Intimates will have very
little social distance between them, whereas a teacher and students will
have a greater social distance separating them.
social marker:
A usage of language (e.g. ain’t) that associates an individual with a specific
social class.
spatial deixis:
A type of deixis that locates something spatially relative to the speaker in
space, as there does in the sentence The book is over there.
speaker turn:
In a conversation, a speaker’s individual time speaking. All dialogic
speech is divided into speaker turns: one person speaks, then another,
then another, and so forth. There are conventions for how speakers take
turns speaking. For instance, one speaker can ask another speaker a ques-
tion, selecting this speaker to be the next speaker.
speaker variables:
Variables, such as age, gender, level of education, ethnicity, and social
class, that affect how people speak.
specific reference:
Reference to an individual entity rather than to the class to which that entity 
belongs. In the sentence Please pass me the salt, the noun phrase the salt has
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specific reference because it refers to a particular instance of salt.
Compare with generic reference.
speech acts:
Statements of speaker intentions. For instance, the sentence Leave is a