A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

24 anacoluthon
greater the intensity of a sound, and (along with other factors, such as fundamental
frequency and duration) the greater the sensation of loudness.
anacoluthon (n.) A traditional rhetorical term, sometimes encountered in linguistic
studies of conversational speech. It refers to a syntactic break in the
expected grammatical sequence within a sentence, as when a sentence begins
with one construction and remains unfinished, e.g. The man came and – are
you listening? ‘Anacolutha’ have come to be especially noticed in linguistic
studies as an area of performance features which a grammar of a language
would aim to exclude.
analogical (adj.)
see analogy
analogy (n.) A term used in historical and comparative linguistics, and
in language acquisition, referring to a process of regularization which affects
the exceptional forms in the grammar of a language. The influence of the
regular pattern of plural formation in English, for example, can be heard in
the treatment of irregular forms in the early utterances of children, e.g. mens,
mans, mouses: the children are producing these forms ‘on analogy with’ the
regular pattern. dialects also often illustrate analogical processes at work,
which the standard language has so far resisted, e.g. goed/seed/knowed for
went/saw/knew, etc., and this process is, of course, common in the errors of
foreign learners of the language. Processes of analogical creation are one of the
main tendencies in the history of languages, as when verbs which had an
irregular past-tense form in Old English came to be produced with the regular
-ed ending, e.g. healp becoming helped. See also exemplar, levelling.
analysable (adj.) A term used in generative grammar to refer to the characteristic
of a string in relation to a transformation. If the string meets the
structural description (SD) of the transformational rule, it is said to be
‘analysable’, and the rule is thereby applicable. For example, for the passive
rule to operate (in one formulation), the following SD is required: NP–Aux–V–
NP. A string such as the boy is kicking the ball would thus be ‘analysable’, with
respect to this rule; the boy has gone, on the other hand, would not meet the SD
of the rule, and would thereby be unanalysable.
analysis-by-synthesis (n.) A theory of speech perception which credits listeners
with an internal, language-specific mechanism that responds to incoming speech
by selecting certain acoustic cues, and then attempting to synthesize a replica
of the input. When this is achieved, the synthesis has, in effect, carried out an
analysis of the input. Such a procedure, it is argued, has the merit of being
able to explain how listeners resolve the acoustic variability in signals, stemming
from the differences between speakers, contexts, etc. See also motor
theory.
analytic (adj.) (1) A term which characterizes a type of language established
by comparative linguistics using structural (as opposed to diachronic)
criteria, and focusing on the characteristics of the word: in analytic languages,
all the words are invariable (and syntactic relationships are shown primarily