Category: language

Words that introduce a noun are called determiners. There are various types which perform various tasks, including articles, quantifiers, demonstratives and possessives. Articles Definite article: the Indefinite articles: a, an. “A” is used before a consonant; “an” is used before a vowel. “The ducks flew away.” “If I had a hammer, I probably wouldn’t hammer…

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in speech that can be used to make one word different from another, such as -p, -d, -m or -v. Phonemes are divided into two major categories: consonants and vowels. Bid, bit; vat, van; tap, nap; hit, hip; ton, tan; vat, vet A digraph is a type…

A relative clause is a group of related words that defines or adds information about the noun immediately in front of it. These clauses come in two types: restrictive and non-restrictive. The clause begins with a relative pronoun; the “relative” pronoun “relates” to the noun it is speaking about and ties the relative clause to…

When used to refer to language and dictionaries, corpus (“corpus linguistics”) is an extensive collection of written or audio samples (“corpora”) used in the study of language. Early attempts to study language in this way were based on cultural and religious texts, such as Sanskrit, Hebrew and Arabic writings. Once gathered by hand, these collections…