4.1 Reading responses

The linguistic concepts that most of you had trouble with were the following.

1. substitution/substitutability.

The following graph visualizes how adjectives can be substituted for other adjectives:

This is what is called a paradigmatic relationship between adjectives (another commonly mentioned term). In contrast, the horizontal arrows represent syntagmatic relationships. Another common idea is substitution tests which are common concepts in syntax and regularly part of introductory classes.

2. idiosyncratic/idiosyncrasy

These are related to idioms, idiomatic expression and idiolect, and we’ll talk about idiomaticity in the future. In a nutshell: a structure is idiosyncratic if it doesn’t show many regularities and is very restricted in the amount of examples you can find for it. Consider the past form of go, which is the suppletive form went. This is an idiosyncrasy of the lexeme go in terms of past tense formation.

3. pronominalization and anaphora

Anaphora is the reference to a preceding element, mostly a noun phrase. Most commonly anaphora comes in the form of pronominalization. Consider the following example:

27. This is [a pretty big pickle]. I wanna eat [it]!

The highlighted noun phrase in the first sentence is replaced by a pronoun in the subsequent sentence.

These following words were also quite common in your responses, but were used in an ordinary English sense in the text, so a good dictionary is your friend.

1. reciprocal
2. (language) acquisition
3. proximity
4. ratio
5. encompass

Note that reciprocal has a specific use in linguistics, e.g. with reciprocal pronouns (myself, yourself, …) but this is not what is meant here.