French Glossary Flashcards
Accent
A manner of pronunciation of a language which marks speakers as belonging to identifiable categories such as geographical or ethnic origin, social class or generation.
Accent Marks
Marks placed on a letter to indicate pronunciation, stress or intonation, or to indicate a different meaning or grammatical usage for the word within they appear, as in the following:
- Acute, e.g. café
- Grave, e.g. voilà
- Circumflex, eg château
- Cedilla, eg garçons
Adjective
A word that modifies or describes a noun or pronoun, e.g. Astonishing in “An astonishing discovery.”
Adverb
A word class that may modify or qualify a verb, an adjective or another adverb, e.g beautifully in ‘She sings beautifully’; really in ‘He is really interesting’; very and slowly in ‘She walks very slowly.’
Composing
A process of producing written, spoken, graphic, visual or multimodal texts. It also includes applying knowledge and control of language forms, features and structures required to complete the task.
Noun
A part of speech that includes all words denoting physical objects such as man, woman, boy, girl, car, window. These are concrete nouns. Abstract nouns express intangibles, such as democracy, courage, success, idea.
Pronunciation
A manner in which a syllable is uttered.
Register
A variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular situation, the variation being defined by use as well as user, e.g. informal register or academic register.
Verb
A part of speech which expresses existence, action, state or occurrence, e.g they ‘watch’ football; she ‘is’ exhausted; the day finally ‘came’.
Word Borrowing
A practice of incorporating words from one language into another. For example the use of French words such as croissant, chic in English and the use of English ICT terms in many languages.
