In our extensive Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms, you'll find a name for . . .
- a construction in which part of a sentence is omitted rather than repeated ("Gus prefers coffee, and Mary, tea"): gapping
- a type of direct question that repeats part or all of something which someone else has just said ("What do I want?"): echo question
- the alteration of a word in one language when used by speakers of another language (such as English dandelion--sometimes pronounced "dandy-line"--from Old French dentdelion, "the tooth of the lion"): Hobson-Jobsonism
- a verb form characteristic of African-American Vernacular English that's used to indicate a habitual and repeatable action ("He be working every day"): invariant "be"
- a face-to-face interaction in which one speaker talks at the same time as another speaker to show an interest in the conversation: cooperative overlap
- two successive letters that represent a single sound or phoneme (such as ai in rain): digraph
- the use of a verb phrase in the present tense to refer to an event that took place in the past ("So this guy walks into a bar . . ."): historical present
- a fragment of a word used in the formation of new words (such as -holic in shopaholic and chocoholic): splinter
You'll find examples and explanations of these and over 1,200 other language-related words and phrases in our ever-expanding Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms.
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