The Principal Glossary

This glossary contains the major terms of the course.

Browse the glossary using this index

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C

Competence

Competence refers to a person's internalised grammar (knowledge) of his language. This means a native speaker's ability to produce and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before. It also includes a person's knowledge of what are and what are not sentences of a particular language.

Constituent

A constituent is a group of words or morphemes with closer relationships between one another than between the elements of the other groups or constituents within the same sentence.