ablative	See case.
accusative	See case.
active	A category of voice. See passive.
adjective	Traditionally, the part of speech which qualifies a noun. But in Spanish, adjectives are often used as nouns (el viejo 'the old man'), and in colloquial register sometimes as adverbs (va muy rápido 'it goes very quickly').
adstrate	Pertaining to the language of a culture which is equal in status: English loanwords in Spanish may be said to be an instance of adstrate influence.
adverb	Traditionally, the part of speech which qualifies a verb: some important semantic classes of adverbs are manner, time, place. Adjectives are often said to be qualified by adverbs too: e.g. muy bien.
affective	Used of suffixes in Spanish which express an attitude, such as affection or pejorativeness.
affix	A general term for a bound morpheme. An affix may be word-initial (prefix), eg desafortunado, word-internal (infix), eg cantaría, or word-final (suffix), eg fácilmente.
affricate	A combination, or coarticulation, of a plosive and a fricative, eg Spanish ch.
agent	The performer of a verbal action: in an active sentence, the agent is typically the subject of the sentence; in a passive sentence, the agent (the subject of the corresponding active sentence) is usually introduced by by in English and by por in Spanish.
aguda	An oxytone (q.v.).
allomorph	Cf. allophone. A variant form of a morpheme: -s and -es are allomorphs of the Spanish plural morpheme.
allophone	Cf. allomorph. A variant form of a phoneme. Allophones are in complementary distribution, i.e., they never form oppositions with one another. Allophones are determined by the phonetic context in which the phoneme appears: e.g. the /d/ phoneme in Spanish has the allophone [d] in initial position and the allophone [ð] in intervocalic position.
alveolar	Pertaining to the alveolum, or ridge between the upper teeth and the palate.
alveolum	See alveolar.
analogy	Parallel development of a form. Analogy is particularly apparent when an irregular form regularizes, ie, develops in parallel with the regular (productive) forms of the language, eg vencer now has the past participle vencido rather than the medieval vençudo. However, analogy can sometimes result in the irregularising of a regular form: andar has developed the irregular Preterite form anduve, presumably by analogy with other irregular Preterites in -u-e (tuve, supe, etc).
analytic	See periphrastic.
antecedent	See relative clause.
antonym	An opposite: bueno and malo are antonyms.
apical	Pertaining to the tip of the tongue. The [s] of standard Spanish is an apico-alveolar sound. The tongue is often very slightly curved back ('retroflex').
apocope	The loss of final sounds. Primer is an apocopated form of primero.
apodosis	The part of a conditional sentence which expresses the consequence: si tengo dinero compraré el libro.
archiphoneme	Oppositions between phonemes are neutralized in certain phonetic environments, eg the opposition of /n/ and /m/ before /p/. In such circumstances an archiphoneme is said to occur.
article	A somewhat arbitrary grammatical category: a class of determiners, which have a complex range of semantic functions. Spanish and English have a definite and an indefinite article, respectively el/the and un/a.
aspect	Impressionistically, relating to the way in which an action or state is viewed: continuous, repeated, within fixed limits, etc. The difference between the Imperfect and Preterite tenses in Spanish is usually thought of as an aspectual difference, though several other verb-forms, and especially the periphrastic verb-forms, have aspectual values.
assibilated	Articulated as a sibilant: /r/ is so articulated (approximating to [z]) in a number of dialects.
assimilation	Making similar: sounds in close proximity often assimilate features of one another, and this can be an important factor in sound change. /n/ before /p/ is usually realised as [m] because it assimilates the labial features of the following consonant.
atelic	See telic.
atonic	Unstressed.
binary	See opposition.
bound	See morpheme.
broad	A kind of phonetic transcription which gives only minimal phonetic detail.
case	Semantic definition: the kinds of relationship that nouns have with the verb (eg subject, direct object, indirect object, instrument, etc.) or, in the case of the genitive, with other nouns. Morphological definition: the distinctive inflected forms of a noun which correlate with such semantic functions. Latin is generally considered to have distinguished six morphological cases: nominative (subject of the verb), vocative (address form), accusative (direct object of the verb), genitive (expressing possession), dative (indirect object of the verb), ablative (agentive, instrumental). Prepositions also govern morphological cases.
ceceo	Neutralization of the opposition between /s/ and /[theta]/ and its realisation as /[theta]/.
clause (oración)	A constituent of a sentence that is itself like a sentence in that it contains a verb.
cleft sentence	A sentence in which a constituent (usally an object or adverbial phrase) is introduced by the verb to be/ser and the rest of the sentence is introduced by a relative element, eg Conocí a Juan en Madrid (simple), Fue en Madrid donde conocí a Juan / Donde conocí a Juan fue en Madrid (cleft).
clitic	Attached: used of the personal pronouns of Spanish which cannot occur on their own but which must cooccur with a verb, eg me, te. Clitic pronouns are also known as unstressed, atonic or conjunctive pronouns.
coda	The end of a syllable.
cognate	A parallel form, eg French hiver is cognate with Spanish invierno.
comment	See topic.
complement	Traditionally, the 'object' of a copular verb, eg Juan es médico. In modern linguistics, the term is used to denote a clause (or a clause-equivalent such as an infinitive or gerund) which functions as the subject, object or prepositional object of a verb.
complementary distribution	See allophone.
compound	Used of a verb-form which consists of more than one word, eg the Spanish and English Perfect (has seen/ha visto).
conjoin	To connect together. Juan y Pablo is a conjoined noun phrase.
conjugation	A form-class of verbs characterised by inflectional patterns.
conjunction	One of the traditional parts of speech the function of which is to connect two grammatical elements. When a conjunction links two like elements, it is said to be coordinating; when it introduces a subordinate clause it is said to be subordinating: María y yo fuimos anoche al cine (coordinating); Conseguí salir sin que nadie me viese (subordinating).
conjunctive	Connected. See clitic.
connotative	Many words can be said to have both denotative (literal, direct) meaning and connotative (additional, suggested) meaning: in Latin America, the compounds of coger have indecent connotative meaning because of the meaning of coger 'to screw'.
contrastive stress	When a word or morpheme is given extra stress, to indicate that it is thought of as contrasting with another, similar, element, eg John passed the exam, but Harry didn't. Contrastive stress as a device for topicalization is used much more extensively in English than in Spanish.
consecutive clause	A term used in Latin grammar to denote clauses expressing the notion 'so...that'.
consonant	One of the basic categories of speech sound. Consonants typically (a) are characterised by constriction or closure of the vocal tract, (b) are the onsets or codas, never the nuclei, of syllables.
continuant	A speech sound whose articulation does not involve complete closure of the vocal tract; the opposite of continuant is stop or plosive.
coordinate	Linked grammatical elements which have equal status: two clauses may be coordinate (Fui al parque y comí un bocadillo) or one may be subordinate to the other (No dije nada al chico que me preguntó la hora).
copula	Connecting: ser and estar are the copulas, or copular verbs, of Spanish. Copular verbs have complements rather than objects.
coronal	Pertaining to the blade of the tongue. English [s] (and Latin American [s]) are articulated coronally.
countertonic	A syllable which receives a secondary stress, eg internacional (-al receives the primary stress in this word).
dative	See case.
declension	A form-class of nouns characterised by inflectional patterns. Classical Latin is traditionally considered to have had five declensions; Spanish has so few noun inflections that distinguishing declension types is unnecessary.
definite article	See article. The definite article of Spanish has many other functions besides expressing definiteness.
deixis	Reference to the personal, temporal or locational characteristics of a situation. Pronouns, articles and other determiners are deictic elements.
demonstrative	A pronoun or adjective which expresses proximity to or remoteness from the speaker (eg Spanish este, ese, aquel).
denotative	See connotative.
dental	Pertaining to the teeth.
determiner	A grammatical element qualifying a noun which expresses a very general notion of number, quantity or deixis. Articles, numerals, demonstratives, quantifiers and possessives belong to this category.
devoiced (sordo)	An unvoiced allophone of a phoneme which is normally voiced; the devoicing is often caused by assimilation, eg the /r/ of martes is usually devoiced because of assimilation to the following (voiceless) /t/.
diachronic	Pertaining to the development of language through time, as opposed to synchronic.
dialect	Linguistically it is impossible to distinguish meaningfully between the notions of language and dialect. The notion 'dialect of' is perhaps useful in referring to a regional or social variety of what is perceived to be the 'same' language (eg working-class Sevillian speech is a 'dialect' of Spanish). By this definition all speakers of a language speak dialects of that language, and the speech of the middle classes of Burgos is no less a 'dialect' of Spanish. The standard language usually evolves as a prestige dialect for essentially political reasons.
diminutive	A form which indicates smallness (eg Spanish -ito).
diphthong (diptongo)	A sequence of two vowels in the same syllable. Either the first or the second vowel will be treated as a semivowel.. The combination of semivowel + vowel is a rising diphthong; the combination of vowel + semivowel is a falling diphthong.
direct object	See object.
disjunctive	Freestanding: used especially of personal pronouns like mí, tú, etc. which are not conjunctive or clitic.
dissimilation	Making different. A sound occurring in close proximity to a similar sound may change to achieve better differentiation, eg Latin ROTUNDU > Sp redondo.
dorsal	Pertaining to the body of the tongue.
doublet	A pair: cualidad and calidad is a doublet development (see also under learned).
durative	An aspectual category indicating inherent duration. The verb dormir in Spanish is inherenty durative. The imperfect inflection in Spanish is often associated with durativeness.
elision	Omission or abbreviation: used particularly of the loss of sounds in fast speech or in historical development. In the pronunciation [de:so] of de eso, one of the [e] sounds is elided.
epenthesis	The introduction of an extra medial sound, eg /b/ in hombre.
esdrújula	A proparoxytone (q.v.).
existential	Pertaining to existence or being: the Spanish verb haber and English there is, there are are existential expressions.
final clause	A term used in Latin grammar to denote clauses expressing purpose.
finite	A verb-form which can be the basis of a complete sentence. In Spanish, finite verbs are inflected for person and number. Non-finite forms of the verb are the infinitive, the gerund and the past participle.
flap	The single rapid contact of two organs of speech, eg the movement of the tongue across the alveolar ridge in Spanish [r].
foregrounding	Bringing into prominence: moving an object to the front of a sentence in Spanish (eg el libro lo leí ayer) is a means of foregrounding the object. Topicalization is a kind of foregrounding.
fortis	See lenition.
fricative	A class of consonants produced by the organs of speech coming into close proximity, so that there is an acoustic impression of friction produced in their articulation.
gender	Semantically significant inflectional categories of nouns; in many languages there is a more or less regular relation between gender and sex.
genitive	See case.
gerund (gerundio)	In Spanish, the gerundio is the form in -ndo. (In English, the cognate form in -ing is traditionally variously known as a gerund, a gerundive or a present participle depending on its function.)
given	See topic.
glide	Movement of the organs of speech towards (on-glide) or away from (off-glide) another sound; semivowels are glides.
grave	A paroxytone (q.v.).
head	The main element in a phrase, on which other elements depend. The noun phrase los otros problemas acuciantes has the noun problemas as its head.
hiatus	Two vowels occurring sequentially but belonging to different syllables are said to be in hiatus, eg beata.
homonyms	Words that sound the same although spelt differently (eg Eng bow/bough). Also known as homophones.
homorganic	Articulated with the same organs of speech: [b] is homorganic with [m], since both are labial consonants.
idiolect	The speech of an individual.
idiom	A set phrase (eg a trancas y barrancas). The syntax and semantics of idioms is often idiosyncratic, and idioms are hence most appropriately viewed as linguistic units in their own right.
imperative	A modal category associated with the expressions of commands. Sometimes applied morphologically to the forms ¡canta!, ¡cantad! of Spanish because these forms are not used in any other function. However, many other verb forms can express an imperative modality, eg the Present Indicative in Me da un kilo de patatas.
imperfective	An aspectual category: the opposite of perfective. Imperfective aspect does not envisage the beginning or end of an action or state, but envisages it as being in progress. This is one of the characteristic functions of the Spanish Imperfect tense.
indefinite	Having vague reference. Alguien is an indefinite pronoun; un is the indefinite article.
indicative	A modal category: the opposite of subjunctive. The indicative is often associated with assertion or statement.
indirect object	See object.
infinitive	One of the non-finite forms of the verb. The infinitive often functions as a verbal noun, and as such can be the complement of another verb.
infix	See affix.
inflection	A suffix or ending. Spanish has a highly inflected verb system.
interrogative	Associated with a question. ¿Quién? in Spanish is an interrogative pronoun.
intervocalic	Occurring between vowels.
intransitive	Traditionally, a verb which does not take a direct object.
IPA	International Phonetic Association. Click here to follow a link to the IPA home page.
isogloss	A boundary between geographical areas which exhibit different linguistic features.
labial	Pertaining to the lips. [m] is a labial consonant.
lateral	Sound produced by the passage of air around the sides of the tongue. [l] is the most commonly occurring lateral consonant.
learned (culto)	In the context of the history of Spanish, learned words are those which have not had a continuous descent from spoken Latin but which have been borrowed directly from Latin as a result of learned awareness of Latin from the Middle Ages on. Such words are minimally adapted to the sound pattern of Spanish, eg artículo < ARTICULUS (compare the popular form artejo, which is derived directly from Latin).
lenis	See lenition.
lenition	A sound change in which a relatively strongly articulated (fortis) consonant becomes weakened to its lenis counterpart, eg a voiceless intervocalic consonant weakening to a voiced consonant, such as [t]>[d].
lexicalize	To become a member of the lexicon, typically used to describe a change in which a periphrastic construction comes to be thought of as a single word or when a word with a suffix comes to be thought of as a word in its own right. An example of the former process is the Future tense of Spanish, which was originally a paraphrase consisting of the Infinitive + a form of the Latin verb HABERE and is now thought of as a single word (CANTARE + HABET > cantará). Examples of the latter process may be seen in Spanish where affective suffixes have ceased to have any identifiable meaning: tela 'cloth' + -ón 'large' > telón 'theatre curtain'.
lexicon	The stock of lexical items, or words, in a language.
lexis	Study of the lexicon and lexical structure.
liquid	A class of continuant consonants which are not fricative and impressionistically have a 'flowing' sound: [l] and [r] are the most obvious members.
llana	A paroxytone (q.v.).
locative	Pertaining to place: allí is a locative adverb.
manner	See adverb.
marked	A term often used to denote the more 'unusual' of a pair of features: the unmarked feature may be thought of as the 'default'. A clear case of markedness would be an irregular verb, which is marked by comparison with regular verbs, but there is room for considerable debate over which is the marked term of other featural oppositions (eg masculine and feminine gender).
metathesis	Exchange of places by two sounds, eg Lat PARABOLA > Sp palabra.
middle	A category of voice with something of both the active and passive idea, eg 'to get seen'. Spanish has no middle voice inflection as such, but the reflexive often expresses a middle voice function, eg me cansé 'I got tired'.
minimal pair	A pair of words which contrast in only one phonological segment, eg risa/rasa.
modality	A type of meaning concerned with attitudes, eg supposition, command, politeness.
mood	A morphological category loosely correlating with modality. Indicative, Subjunctive and sometimes also Imperative are moods which are traditionally distinguished for Spanish. However, many verb forms have a range of modal meanings.
morpheme	'Grammatical' definition: the smallest contrastive unit of grammar. 'Semantic' definition: the smallest contrastive unit of meaning. Morphemes can be free, ie actually or potentially freestanding (verdaderamente) or bound, ie obligatorily attached to another morpheme (verdaderamente).
morphology	The study of word structure.
narrow	A type of phonetic transcription which represents a high degree of phonetic detail.
nasal	Pertaining to the nose. Nasal sounds are those in which the air passes through the nasal cavity rather than the oral cavity.
native speaker	A person whose first language, or mother tongue, is the language in question.
negative	Denoting denial or contradiction: Spanish nadie is a negative pronoun.
neologism	A recently created word or expression.
neutralization	Loss of a contrast (opposition), either diachronically or synchronically. Ceceo and seseo represent the neutralization of the opposition between /s/ and /[theta]/.
nominative	See case.
non-finite	See finite.
noun (nombre, sustantivo)	One of the traditional parts of speech. Nouns typically denote things, people, animals or abstract concepts; they function as subjects and objects of verbs.
noun phrase	A phrase which has a noun as its head.
nucleus	The centre of a syllable.
number	A grammatical category correlating with the notion of number. Spanish and English distinguish singular and plural number morphologically.
object	In semantic terms, an element of a sentence that is affected by the verb. Traditionally, direct object and indirect object are distinguished: indirect objects appear with verbs like 'give' ('Mary gave Joe [indirect object] a book [direct object]'). The direct object covers a number of meanings depending on the verb: 'Fred kicked the ball [direct recipient of action]', 'Fred opened the door [= caused the door to open]', 'Fred liked the new house [attitude]'. There are other kind of object which are not traditionally distinguished, eg 'The meal cost four pounds', 'We walked five miles'. In Spanish, it is sometimes difficult rigorously to distinguish between direct and indirect object, since the preposition a may introduce either, and the forms of the third person pronouns, which are apparently inflected for direct and indirect object (le/lo), do not always obviously correlate with these notions. Prepositions are also said to have objects.
onset	The beginning of a syllable.
opposition	A contrast, eg the opposition between voiced and voiceless consonants. Many oppositions identified in language are binary (ie involving two terms), such as singular/plural, masculine/feminine, etc.
oral	Pertaining to the mouth.
organs of speech	The organs involved in the production of speech sounds, principally the tongue, teeth, lips, alveolum, palate and velum.
oxytone	A word stressed on the last syllable.
palatal	Pertaining to the hard palate.
palatalized	A sound in the course of whose articulation there is a movement towards the palatal area.
paradigm	A structured set of forms, especially used of inflected forms, eg the verb paradigm.
paradigmatic	Relating to the notion of paradigm. Paradigmatic relations have to do with oppositions between members of the same form-class, eg nouns, adjectives, verbs. Contrast syntagmatic.
paroxytone	A word stressed on the next to the last syllable.
participle	One of the non-finite forms of the verb, used in compound forms of the verb and adjectivally. English has a past participle (opened) and a present participle (interesting); Spanish has a past participle (abierto). The Spanish forms in -ndo are not adjectival, and are usually called the gerund; the term present participle is sometimes used for Spanish adjectives in -nte (interesante), but not all verbs have forms in -nte (eg abrir has no form *abriente): ie, the -nte forms are only semiproductive in Spanish.
parts of speech	Functional classes of words: tose traditionally distinguished are nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and conjunctions.
passive	A syntactic or morphological category of voice. In English and Spanish, the passive is formed syntactically by making the object of the active verb its syntactic subject; the subject, if expressed, appears in a prepositional phrase introduced by English by and Spanish por respectively: it is known as the agent of the passive sentence. Morphologically, the form traditionally known as the passive in Spanish is formed from the verb ser + the past participle of a transitive verb.
pejorative	A form which has an unfavourable or disparaging meaning. Some of the affective suffixes of Spanish are pejorative.
perfective	An aspectual category which typically expresses the completion of an action.
periphrastic	Use of more than one word to express a grammatical notion, eg the periphrastic Future in Spanish (ir a + infinitive). Periphrastic forms are also known as analytic. The use of a single word inflected form to express a grammatical notion, eg the Spanish Future form in -é, etc, is also known as a synthetic form.
person	A category, typically of personal pronouns and verb inflections, indicating relationship to the speaker ('I' = first person, 'you' = second person, 'they' = third person).
phoneme	The smallest contrastive unit of sound in a language.
phonetic transcription	A means of representing pronunciation, usually by use of a phonetic alphabet such as the IPA.
phonetics	The study of speech sounds. Articulatory phonetics is concerned with the organs of speech involved in the production of sounds, acoustic phonetics with the physical properties of the sounds produced.
phonology	The study of the sound system (the phonemes) of a language.
place	See adverb.
plosive	A consonant whose articulation is characterised by a complete closure of the vocal tract. See continuant.
popular (vulgar)	See learned.
postpose	To place after: in hablarme the personal pronoun me is postposed to the infinitive hablar.
pragmatic	Concerning the situational use of language and knowledge of the real world. The factors governing the choice between tú and usted in Spanish are often described as pragmatic, because they have to do with what speakers know about their relationship to their interlocutors.
prefix	See affix.
preposition	Traditionally, the part of speech that governs nouns, pronouns and other elements used nominally, expressing notions such as direction, instrument, agent, etc.
productive	A form-class which is continuing to add to its membership through analogy or neologism: the -ar verb conjugation of Spanish may be described as productive because many new verbs (eg formatear, privatizar) are constantly being added to it. A form-class which has typically shown expansion at some point in the history of the language (eg the u-e 'strong' Preterites of Spanish) may be said to be semiproductive.
progressive	An aspectual category indicating an ongoing action. The estar + gerund form of Spanish is often called the Progressive.
pronoun	One of the traditional parts of speech; an item, usually of rather vague reference, which can be used in substitution for a more precise full noun (eg él for Juan). The main categories of pronouns are personal, demonstrative, indefinite, possessive, interrogative.
proparoxytone	A word stressed on the antepenultimate (next but one to the last) syllable. See esdrújula.
protasis	The part of a conditional sentence which expresses the condition: si tengo dinero compraré el libro.
prothesis	The introduction of an extra initial sound, eg Lat SCHOLA > Sp escuela.
punctual	An aspectual category indicating that an action takes place at a single moment of time.
quantifier	An item (adjective or pronoun) expressing a quantity: Spanish todo, dos, cada, ninguno, etc.
received pronunciation	The 'standard' pronunciation of British English.
redundant	Not logically necessary: in Spanish Le saludé a Juan the pronoun le is logically redundant. Redundancy is very common in natural language.
reference	The relation between a linguistic form and its real world meaning. Sometimes used to refer to the real world meaning itself.
register	A socially defined variety of language, eg colloquial, legal, journalistic, etc.
rehilamiento	The articulation of Spanish ll with an element of frication, which in its most extreme form reaches the voiced fricative of English pleasure.
relative clause	A dependent clause which refers to a noun in the main clause. The noun in the main clause is the antecedent of the relative clause.
retroflex	See apical.
roll	See trill.
semantics	The study of linguistic meaning.
semiconsonant	Another term for a semivowel.
semiproductive	See productive.
semivowel	A vowel-like sound which functions in a consonant-like way as the onset or coda of a syllable. The semivowels of Spanish are [j] and [w].
seseo	Neutralization of the opposition between [s] and [] and its realisation as [s].
sibilant	A category of consonants which give the acoustic impression of hissing, such as [s], [z], etc..
sinaeresis (sinéresis)	The running together of two sounds into one, typically used of two vowels forming a diphthong. Sinaeresis usually occurs in the rapid pronunciation of Spanish ahora as [ao-ra] (2 syllables) rather than [a-o-ra] (3 syllables). A special case of this in Spanish is when the two vowels concerned are separated by a word-boundary, a situation which is more accurately referred to as synaloepha (sinalefa).
synaloepha (sinalefa)	See sinaeresis.
speech community	A group of people who speak what they recognise to be the same language or dialect.
stop	Another term for a plosive.
stress	The degree of force with which a syllable is uttered. Syllables may be stressed (tonic) or unstressed (atonic) (see also countertonic).
subject	In semantic terms, traditionally, an element of a sentence which performs the action of the verb (though this definition is problematic). Syntactically, in English and Spanish, the subject is the element with which the verb agrees in person and number.
subjunctive	A modal category: the opposite of indicative. The subjunctive is associated with a number of meanings, especially commands, hypothesis, denial and emotive attitude.
subordinate	Of secondary importance: a subordinate clause is one which depends on another. Subordinate clauses function as consituents of their main clause: the function can be nominal (in which case they are called complements), adjectival (eg relative clauses) or adverbial (eg temporal clauses).
substrate	Pertaining to the language of a culture which is inferior in status: Basque is said to be a substrate to Latin during the Romanization of the Iberian Peninsula.
suffix	See affix.
superstrate	Pertaining to the language of a culture which is superior in status: Germanic is said to have had a superstrate influence on Latin in the Dark Ages.
syllable	An element of speech that acts as a unit of rhythm.
synchronic	Pertaining to one chronological stage of a language, as opposed to diachronic.
syncope	The loss of medial sounds, eg Lat VIRIDEM > Sp verde.
synecdoche	A figure of speech in which the name of a part refers to the whole, eg las faldas referring to 'women'.
synonym	A word meaning the same as another. However, it is doubtful whether a pair of words are ever completely synonymous, and it is usually safer to speak of 'near synonyms' (eg pueblo and aldea).
syntagmatic	Referring to the linear relationship of elements in an utterance. The notions of 'subject of', 'object of', are syntagmatic relationships.
syntax	The study of sentence structure.
synthetic	See periphrastic.
telic	An aspectual category indicating an action which necessarily has a final point (eg drown) as opposed to one which is open-ended (eg play); the latter is referred to as atelic.
temporal clause	A dependent clause which functions as an adverb of time.
tense	A morphological category relating to time reference, eg the Present Tense. Tense is also used more generally to denote the different forms of a verb (eg we speak of the Imperfect Tense and the Preterite Tense, though these two forms are differentiated aspectually rather than temporally).
time	See adverb.
time reference	See tense.
tonic	Stressed.
topic	The element of an utterance which is the focus of the speaker's attention and about which something is said (the comment). The topic of a sentence is often information which is already known about (given information).
topicalization	A syntactic or other device to bring an element in a sentence into prominence, particularly noticeable when that element is not the subject of the sentence.
transitive	Traditionally, a verb which takes a direct object.
trill	A sound made by the rapid tapping of two organs of speech together (eg Spanish [rr]). Alternatively known as a roll.
triphthong	A group of three vowels in the same syllable. In Spanish, this only happens in cases of sinalefa (eg de hoy).
unmarked	See marked.
unvoiced	A sound in which the vocal cords do not vibrate.
velar	Pertaining to the velum or soft palate at the back of the mouth.
verb	Traditionally, the part of speech which expresses an action, event or state.
verb phrase	A group of words which have the same function as a verb, eg seguimos cantando.
vocal cords	Two muscular folds in the larynx that vibrate to produce voice.
vocalic	Having the properties or value of a vowel: in English, the consonant [l] is often vocalic (eg the second [l] in little).
vocative	See case.
voice	A syntactic category having to do with the relations of subject and object to the verb: see active, passive and middle.
voiced	A sound in which the vocal cords vibrate.
voiceless	See unvoiced.
voseo	Use of the pronoun vos instead of 'standard' tú to express the familiar second person singular. In River Plate Spanish, there are special forms of the verb associated with vos .
vowel	One of the basic categories of speech sound. Vowels typically (a) are characterised by there being no constriction or closure of the vocal tract, (b) are the nuclei of syllables.
yeísmo	Neutralization of the opposition between /j/ and /[zh]/ as /j/.