Stinky Pinkies, Apodioxis, and Denominal Nouns: There's a Name for It (#23)

In our extensive Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms, you'll find a name for . . .

• a noun formed from another noun, usually by adding a suffix--such as New Yorker (from New York) and booklet (from book): denominal noun


• a rhyming epithet, such as glad dad for a happy father, or wild child for an uncontrollable youngster: stinky pinky


• the use of would or was/were going to to refer to the future from the perspective of some point in the past: future-in-the-past


• the tendency of participants in a conversation to use a common vocabulary and similar sentence structures: linguistic style matching


• the four syntactic characteristics that distinguish auxiliary verbs from lexical verbs in English (negation, inversion, code, emphasis): NICE properties


• the rejection of an opponent's argument or accusation as absurd or inconsequential: apodioxis


• the dialectal use of the adverb anymore (or any more) in positive constructions to mean "at this time" (e.g., "I tire easily anymore"): positive "anymore"


• the tendency of speakers and writers to express known information (the "given") before previously unknown information (the "new") in their messages: given-before-new principle

More Words About Words:

• Dummy "It," Existential "There," and a Slip of the Ear (#22)
• Semantic Transparency, Moses Illusion, and Singular They (#21)
• Sluicing, Diazeugma, and Telicity (#20)