Glossary - P

Participle
Words made from verbs that are used either with an auxiliary to create a verb tense (e.g. was eaten)…
Person
This grammatical term is used to describe pronouns. A pronoun always has a referent (i.e. a noun to…
Phonetics / Phonology / Prosody / Phoneme / Diphtong / Glide
Phonetics is the study of the way people physical produce and perceive the different sounds we use…
Phrase
A phrase is a key grammatical or syntactic unit. In terms of its meaning, a phrase is an individual…
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of how social context contributes to the meaning of language. It is…
Predicate
The grammatical predicate is all that is written or said in a sentence or clause about its…
Prefix
A prefix is a type of affix (i.e. a bound morpheme) that is added to the beginning of a word to…
Preposition
A preposition is a small word or phrase that begins a longer adverbial phrase (called the object of…
Progressive / continuous
A verb form created from the present (i.e. -ing) participle to tell of a continuing event, e.g. he…
Pronoun
A word used often – but not always – to replace a noun, e.g. Alex, when the teacher came into…
Purpose
Purpose is the reason why a text was created. This may be, for example, to entertain, explain,…

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