An Introduction to Old English Edinburgh University Press

function word – word which has grammatical rather than lexical meaning.
geminate – a double or long consonant, similar to the medial sequence in PDE
hat-trick.
gender – syntactically and morphologically relevant classification of nouns,
present in Old English (as in modern German and French) but lost in modern
English. The gender to which an animate noun belongs may be determined
by sex, but for most nouns in Old English gender was semantically arbitrary.
genitive – grammatical case usually exhibited by a noun phrase when the phrase
is being used in a possessive function.
Germanic – one of the branches of Indo-European, from which are descended,
amongst others, the present-day languages English, Dutch, Frisian, German,
Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish.
government – process by which one phrase has control over another, for
example a verb may determine the case assigned to an object.
gradation, qualitative and quantitative – see ablaut.
head – element within a compound or derived word that determines the
syntactic status, or word class, of the whole word. Semantically, also, a
compound noun whose head is X usually denotes a type of X. For example,
‘house’ is the head of the compound ‘greenhouse’. Many linguists would also
GLOSSARY OF LINGUISTIC TERMS
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analyse some derivational affixes as heads, e.g. -er as the head of the noun
‘teacher’.
homophone – two words which are identical in pronunciation, for example
know and no.
hypotaxis – where one syntactic unit is linked to another by means of sub-
ordination.
iambic pentameter – metrical verse form where each line is based upon a
template of five feet, each consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by
a stressed syllable; naturally almost all poets vary the form of the line.