Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 355elective mutismmutismelement of styleAny linguistic element that determines the stylistic features of a text. In addition toparticular stylistic devices like figures of speech, any linguistic phenomenon can have astylistic function. There are phonetic elements of style, (alliteration, phonostylistics),lexical elements of style (nominalization, archaism), morphological elements of style(genitive ending ‘s), syntactic elements of style (sentence complexity, length ofsentence), and textual and pragmatic elements of style (types of cohesion, theme-rheme,thematic development).stylisticsReferenceselementary phoneticsMethod of researching the structure of speech sounds, based exclusively on what the(trained) human ear is capable of distinguishing. This approach has been largelysurpassed by the development of experimental phonetics and instrumental phonetics.( also auditory phonetics)phoneticsReferenceselision [Lat. elidere ‘to force out’]In phonetics and phonology. the loss of a vowel, consonant, or syllable. Elisioncommonly occurs in complex consonant clusters (e.g. clothes ~[klo:z]), inunstressed ( stress) syllables (e.g. probably [prabli]) or syntactically ( syntax)