A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

108 contact assimilation
restricted sense, languages are said to be ‘in contact’ if they are used alternately
by the same persons, i.e. bilinguals. The term contact language or contact vernacular
is also sometimes used to refer to a pidgin.
(2) A term used by some grammarians to describe a type of relative clause
with no relative pronoun, and where the clause is thus directly ‘in contact’
with the head noun (e.g. the book I bought): a contact clause or contact
relative. In the context of generative grammar, these clauses have no overt
complementizer nor an overt WH-phrase.
(3) A term used in phonetics to refer to any point in the process of articulation
where one articulator touches another. The blade of the tongue,
for example, makes contact with the alveolar ridge during the articulation
of [t].
contact assimilation
see assimilation
containment (n.) A principle in certain versions of optimality theory whereby
the output contains the input. No deletion is allowed.
content (n.) The general sense of this term – referring to the meaning of an
expression – is found pre-theoretically in linguistics, but some linguists have
given it a technical status, by analysing language into two major dimensions,
distinguishing a content plane from an ‘expression plane’ (analogous to the
Saussurean distinction between the meaning and form of linguistic signs).
More specifically, some approaches to word classification recognize a class
of content words or contentives, defined as words which have stateable lexical
meaning – the majority of words in the language, in fact, apart from the few
function words, whose role is primarily to express grammatical relationships.
Alternative terms include lexical and full words. In semantic studies
of demonstratives and indexicals, the term is often used to designate the
meaning of an expression relative to a particular pragmatic context; it
contrasts with character.
contentive (n.)
content word
see content
see content
context (n.) (1) A general term used in linguistics and phonetics to
refer to specific parts of an utterance (or text) near or adjacent to a unit
which is the focus of attention. The occurrence of a unit (e.g. a sound, word)
is partly or wholly determined by its context, which is specified in terms
of the unit’s relations, i.e. the other features with which it combines as a
sequence. The everyday sense of the term is related to this, as when one ‘puts
a word in context’ (contextualizes), in order to clarify the meaning intended,
as in dictionary entries. Providing a context in this way is referred to
as contextualization. Words, it is suggested, have meaning only when seen in
context.
Variants of sound, grammar, etc., which are dependent on context for their
occurrence are sometimes called contextual variants (or ‘conditioned variants’);
an example is the allophone (see allo-). An analysis in these terms is sometimes