





A category of text, referring to the type of the text and indicating the purpose of the text. 'Genre' traditionally refers to types of written text, so we can talk about a recipe being a subtype of an instructional genre, or stories being found within a narrative genre. If it is applied to types of spoken text, the term register is often used instead.


See grapheme-phoneme correspondence.




This is a term used in linguistics to recognise that on the one hand there are typical and less typical members of grammatical categories (this is called subsective gradience), and on the other hand that the boundaries between grammatical categories may not be absolutely fixed (this is called intersective gradience).

For example, let’s look at the fuzziness or gradience of the noun category. Cat, table and apple are all deemed to be ‘prototypical’ members of this category. They are physical objects; they take a possessive form; they can be plural or singular, and they can appear after a determiner.

But news and information are more peripheral examples of nouns. The former is always in the plural, and the latter cannot take a plural ending.


The study of word and clause structure. It has two main branches: morphology, concerned with the internal structure of words, and syntax, concerned with how words are combined into sentences.


See ungrammatical.

grammatical form

The structural categories we can assign an element or group of elements to, such as word classes, phrases, and clauses. Form is distinct from the grammatical function that an element or group plays within a larger structure. For example, a group of words with the form of a noun phrase can have different functions in the clause, such as Subject or Direct Object. The term 'form' is also used to refer to the 'shape' or morphology of words.

grammatical function


grammatical word

A word whose main role is to express grammatical relationships or meanings, e.g. of, and and whether. These words contrast with content words like laugh or chair, which have separate, stateable meaning content. Grammatical words are usually closed-class words. Another term for grammatical word is function word.


A letter, or combination of letters, that corresponds to a single phoneme within a word.

  • The grapheme t in the words ten, bet and ate corresponds to the phoneme /t/.
  • The grapheme ph in the word dolphin corresponds to the phoneme /f/.

grapheme-phoneme correspondence

The links between letters, or combinations of letters (graphemes) and the speech sounds (phonemes) that they represent.

In the English writing system, graphemes may correspond to different phonemes in different words.

  • The grapheme s corresponds to the phoneme /s/ in the word see, but…
  • …it corresponds to the phoneme /z/ in the word easy.

Grice's maxims

Paul Grice (1975) contends that speakers ideally observe the co-operative principle in conversation by adhering to four sets of conversational maxims. These maxims are general principles which underlie an optimally efficient, cooperative use of language. The four categories are:

1 quantity: make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange - don't say too much or too little

2 quality: try to make your contribution one that is true

3 relation: be relevant

4 manner: be perspicuous - avoid unneccessary obscurity and ambiguity
