clitic – a small word which becomes attached to an adjacent and more import-
ant word.
coda – see syllable.
cognate – of words, derived from the same historical source. For example, the
English word ‘father’ and the French word ‘père’ are cognate, both being
descended (through Proto-Germanic and Latin respectively) from the same
Proto-Indo-European word.
comparison – grammatical category associated with adjectives. Many English
adjectives distinguish basic or ‘positive’, ‘comparative’ and ‘superlative’ forms
(e.g. hot, hotter, hottest).
complementary distribution – see distribution.
complementiser – a type of conjunction which is used to mark one clause as
dependent on another.
compound – word containing more than one root (or combining form).
concord – see agreement.
conjugation – a set of verbs which share the same paradigm.
content word – word which has full lexical meaning, see function word.
contrastive distribution – see distribution.
conversion – the derivation of one lexeme from another (e.g. the verb ‘father’
from the noun ‘father’) without any overt change in shape. Some linguists
analyse this phenomenon as zero-derivation.
coordination – where two syntactic units are linked together with equal status.
correlation – where a pair of structures are linked by parallel element order.
dative – grammatical case usually exhibited by a noun phrase often functioning
as the indirect object of the verb.
declension – a set either of nouns or of adjectives which share the same
paradigm.
definite ~ indefinite – Old English adjectives had two declensions; where
the adjective was preceded by a demonstrative or possessive it followed the
definite declension, and elsewhere it followed the indefinite declension.
deixis – a term used to refer to those features which relate to personal,
locational or temporal, where meaning is relative to that situation.
