A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

140 descriptive adequacy/grammar/linguistics
an account of a corpus of data, as would be intended by the earlier use of
‘description’).
descriptive adequacy/grammar/linguistics
see description
descriptivism, descriptivist (n.)
see description
desiderative (adj./n.) A term used in the grammatical classification of
sentence types, and usually seen in contrast to indicative, imperative, etc.,
moods. Desiderative utterances (or ‘desideratives’) refer to verb forms or
sentence/clause types used for the expression of wants and desires – approximately
translatable by ‘I want +sentence’, but often lexicalized, e.g. to want to
eat ⇒ to hunger.
designated terminal element (DTE) A term used in metrical phonology for
the most prominent element in a string, dominated only by relatively strong
(s-)nodes. For example, egg is the DTE in the phrase the hard-boiled egg.
destressing (n.)
see stress
deterioration (n.) In historical linguistics, a term used in the classification
of types of semantic change, referring to the development of a sense of disapproval
in a lexical item; also called pejoration, and opposed to amelioration.
An example of the way words deteriorate is notorious, which once meant ‘widely
known’, and now means ‘widely and unfavourably known’.
determiner (n.) (det, DET, D) A term used in some models of grammatical
description, referring to a class of items whose main role is to co-occur with
nouns to express a wide range of semantic contrasts, such as quantity or
number. The articles, when they occur in a language, are the main subset of
determiners (e.g. the/a in English); other words which can have a determiner
function in English include each/every, this/that, some/any, all of which have a
distribution which includes the article position, e.g. the/this/some . . . cake.
Some linguists extend the application of this term to include other types of
word within the noun phrase (e.g. adjectives, predeterminers), and sometimes
even to include modifiers in other parts of the sentence. In some generative
grammar theories, determiner is regarded as the head in combination with a
noun, to produce a determiner phrase (DP). The DP hypothesis is the proposal
that noun phrases are projections of the determiner.
determinism (n.)
development (n.)
see relativity
see acquisition
developmental linguistics A term occasionally used for the branch of linguistics
concerned with the study of the acquisition of language in children. The
subject involves the application of linguistic theories and techniques of analysis
to child language data, in order to provide a precise description of patterns of
development and an explanation of the norms and variations encountered, both