Adjective:

"The part of speech that modifies a noun or other substantive by limiting, qualifying, or specifying and distinguished in English morphologically by one of several suffixes, such as -able, -ous, -er, and -est, or syntactically by position directly preceding a noun or nominal phrase." (American Heritage Dictionary)


Collocation:

A sequence of words which co-occur more in a statistically significant frequency with a specific term

For more information, see: Collocation (WIKIPEDIA)


Frequent Phrase Frame (FPF):

A particular phrase with a high statistical frequency that occurs in a significant number of variants in a text.

Examples:

• the * of
  • the face of
  • the heart of
  • the president of
• * need to
  • we need to
  • they need to
  • the need to
• the American *
  • the American dream
  • the American people

Hedge:

Hedges are terms or phrases that modify the meaning of words, sentence parts or statements, to lessen their impact or emotional content.

Examples:

• My oppononent slightly underestimates the impact of his policies.
• These polls are somewhat influenced by the biased media coverage.

For more information, see: Hedge (linguistics) (WIKIPEDIA)


Intensifier

Intensifiers are terms that amplify the meaning of words, sentence parts or statements, usually to heighten or lower their impact or emotional content.

Examples:

• My oppononent's foreign policy statements are very dangerous.
• These polls are extremely encouragung for our campaign.

For more information, see: Special Issue on English Intensifiers, English Language and Linguistics (2008)


Lemma:

A lemma (a.k.a. headword) can be described as the word stem/root unit of a lexeme, the set of all the forms of one word that have the same meaning.

Example:

The lemma go is represented by its inflected forms go, goes, went, gone.

The lemma change is represented by its inflected forms change, changing, changed and the corresponding noun change/changes.

A lemma is also commonly the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries are listed.

For more information, see: Lemma (linguistics) (WIKIPEDIA)


N-gram:

A sequence of particular words from any given sentence. The various sizes of N-grams are, for example, "unigrams" (a 1-word-unit), "bigram" (a 2-word-unit), or "trigram" (a 3-word-unit).

Examples Trigrams:

• in this election
• as president I
• I believe that

Noun:

"The part of speech that is used to name a person, place, thing, quality, or action and can function as the subject or object of a verb, the object of a preposition, or an appositive." (American Heritage Dictionary)


Personal Pronoun:

A pronoun designating the person speaking (I, me, we, us), the person spoken to (you), or the person or thing spoken about (he, she, it, they, him, her, them). (American Heritage Dictionary)


Relative Frequency Factor (RFF):

Indicates how often a word is used by one speaker (relative frequency) in comparison to another speaker (relative frequency factor).

If a speaker's relative frequency factor for a particular word is 1.5, then he/she uses this word 1.5-times more on average than the speaker that he/she is compared to.


Significance Level:

Indicates the probability with which a speaker uses a particular word in comparison with another speaker; in other words, how idiosyncratic this word is for one speaker's rhetoric.

If the level of significance is, for example, 0.01, then the probability of the speaker using this particular word is 99.99 % (highly significant).

This means the lower the significance level, the higher the statistical evidence that the use of this particular word is not a coincidence.

In statistics, you differentiate between the following three significance levels:

• p ≤ 0,05: significant (probability of error/coincidence smaller than 5%)
• p ≤ 0,01: very significant (probability of error/coincidence smaller than 1%)
• p ≤ 0,001: highly significant (probability of error/coincidence smaller than 1‰)

For more information, see: statistical significance (WIKIPEDIA)


Tag Question

A tag question is a grammatical structure that is added at the end of a statement or command (as a mini-question), usually to express the need for confirmation or emotional connection.

• The thing that's troubling the middle class right now is the economic crisis, isn't it?
• My opponent has a record of raising taxes, hasn't he?

For more information, see: Tag Question (WIKIPEDIA)