(n.) Choice of words for the expression of ideas; the construction, disposition, and application of words in discourse, with regard to clearness, accuracy, variety, etc.; mode of expression; language; as, the diction of Chaucer's poems.
Example Sentences:
(1) The prose rhythm and colloquial diction here work against exaggeration, but allow for humour.
(2) The enigmatic patience of the sentences, the pedantic syntax, the peculiar antiquity of the diction, the strange recessed distance of the writing, in which everything seems milky and sub-aqueous, just beyond reach – all of this gives Sebald his particular flavour, so that sometimes it seems that we are reading not a particular writer but an emanation of literature.
(3) If you ever feel tempted to say "status quo" or "cul de sac", for instance, Orwell will sneer at you for "pretentious diction".
(4) Now 86, Daddy – the 11th Duke of Marlborough - has the garbled, sticky plum crumble diction of the irredeemably posh.
(5) He turns his attention to today's male movie stars and their penchant for mumbling (Hopkins has always prided himself on his diction).
(6) Discriminant analyses, using both untransformed and range-corrected data made excellent post-dictions of group membership.
(7) Americans don't have passports, we don't meet many foreigners, and we think proper English diction is an indicator of condescension or homosexuality.
(8) The diction of the original tells us that its author was, broadly speaking, a northerner.
(9) It's a beautifully musical film all the way through, in fact, partly an effect of Katie Johnson's delivery as Mrs W : incredible gentle diction, all sweet bleats and trilly intonation.
(10) Only his co-host, Loyd Grossman, had a voice and diction to, if anything, rival Frost's own.
(11) This section was presented by Loyd Grossman, whose diction and presenting style were even more distinctive than Frost's.
(12) Nor could the chosen diction of the American have been further from the socially diagnostic wit of Jane Austen or the stuffed-pudding plenitude of the young Dickens.
(13) In one letter (to her parents), she raved about Michael Redgrave's Hamlet saying it made Olivier's 'beautiful diction, dramatic pauses, loud music and despairing cries sound like pure unadulterated ham'.
(14) Diction and fractures of resin teeth were more common problems in maxillae; cheek and lip biting was a more frequent postinsertion complication in the treatment of mandibles.
(15) Sebald's seemingly passive prose was in fact – to borrow Marianne Moore's memorable phrase – "diction galvanised against inertia".
(16) With the Instagram posts showing no sign of stopping we’ve come up with a short guide to the Chechen ruler’s dramatic diction to help you understand who the “dastardly villains” are; what threat they pose to “the nation that rose from its knees”.
(17) But I never really responded to the antique diction and syntax - it struck me at times as even older than the original.
(18) Twain would have been apoplectic at the presumption: one of the letters he included in his drafts, reprinted in the autobiography's first volume, is a rebuke to an editor who dared to alter the great man's diction in his essay on Joan of Arc .
(19) He takes his 19th-century Gothic diction from the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter , and a fair amount of his obsessive extremism from the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard .
(20) The tennis player Annabel Croft, when meeting her genuinely homeless "buddy" David, said, with the immaculate diction of a woman regarding the drinks tray at a garden party: "I have been very nervous about who I was going to meet but I'm pleasantly surprised!"
Linguistics
Definition:
(n.) The science of languages, or of the origin, signification, and application of words; glossology.
Example Sentences:
(1) It is argued that exposure to a linguistic structure that induces the child to operate on that structure can lead to a reorganization of linguistic knowledge even though no direct feedback has been given as to its correct adult interpretation.
(2) Underperformance in reading, writing, and other linguistic skills as well as visuo-spatial excellence may result from these changes.
(3) The linguistic performances of 15 noninstitutionalized and 15 institutionalized retarded children were compared on usage of grammatical categories and structure of spoken language (Length--Complexity Index) and for underlying subskills (Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities).
(4) Fundamental frequency (F0) values are reported for 14 children between the ages of 11 and 25 months, an age period characterized by changes in physiological and linguistic development.
(5) It has been argued that linguistic usage pertaining to female sexuality generally is the product of a patriarchal value structure and, as such, reflects patriarchal prejudices about female sexuality.
(6) The search for the acoustic properties useful to the listener in extracting the linguistic message from a speech signal is often construed as the task of matching invariant physical properties to invariant phonological percepts; the discovery of the former will explain the latter.
(7) Much of the research dealing with linguistic dimensions in stuttering has emphasized the various aspects of grammar, particularly as these aspects contribute to the meaning of utterances.
(8) Prior to undertaking the exploration of phenomena in a research study with people from different cultures, certain elements must be addressed in order to bridge cultural and linguistic differences.
(9) The main effects and interactions of speech and gesture in combination with quantitative models of performance showed the following similarities in information processing between preschoolers and adults: (1) referential evaluation of gestures occurs independently of the evaluation of linguistic reference; (2) speech and gesture are continuous, rather than discrete, sources of information; (3) 5-year-olds and adults combine the two types of information in such a way that the least ambiguous source has the most impact on the judgment.
(10) The model is based on neural processes rather than linguistic or symbolic constructs.
(11) The literature suggests that cleft palate children and adults perform below their peers on both linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks.
(12) Broca's aphasia is characterized by disorders on the phonemic, syntactic and lexical level of linguistic description.
(13) Rozanne Colchester , a linguist who worked on Italian airforce codes and was an MI6 agent after the war, said: "There were a great many love affairs going on about which we did not speak in those claustrophobic days of the war.
(14) Linguistic analysis shows that the information is written in a difficult style with a median readability index of 48.2.
(15) Applicants were then required to provide strong evidence to the NSW crown solicitor’s office of connection to country, and included affidavits from traditional owners and reports by an anthropologist, historian and linguist.
(16) The speech problems of our patients seemed to indicate higher level motor encoding problems of linguistic information rather than peripheral articulatory deficits.
(17) This diversity approximated that found when linguistically unrelated groups were compared.
(18) These results differ from those obtained previously with noncorresponding pairs of linguistic-nonlinguistic dimensions.
(19) "This research is not only an extremely complex and interesting study of songbirds, it also gives us a unique insight into how brain development may contribute to human linguistic capabilities," said Prof Tamas Szekely of the Biodiversity Lab at the University of Bath's department of biology and biochemistry.
(20) Strong relationships appear between linguistic and fine motor skills in an age group not previously investigated and at higher levels than reported in studies of infants and very young children.