About the Glossary

This online glossary provides explanations of fundamental linguistics terms that students typically find confusing and/or difficult to grasp. It will be useful to undergraduate students primarily, but more advanced students might also find it useful when moving into an unfamiliar area within the field.  As the entries are textual, visual, animated and narrated, and employ both examples and questions, it is anticipated that students will actively engage in visualizing and constructing their own understandings of concepts that can be difficult to learn and/or remember otherwise. 

The glossary spans the main areas of linguistics with terms from phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics included. Entries have been carefully selected by the authors to fulfill the common needs of linguistics students, i.e., only those terms that students often have questions about are included. Each entry is, in essence, a narrated and animated PowerPoint slideshow typically lasting from 5-7 minutes. Accompanying notes are available for printing.

The project's purpose is twofold ¨C to provide a dynamic, easy to use, self-learning tool for students, and to provide a teaching support tool for faculty who can use it to supplement lectures, tutorials, and to free up classroom and consultation time spent on explaining terminology.

An Animated and Narrated Glossary of Terms used in Linguistics is an open-access resource, available at http://linguisticglossary.hkbu.edu.hk/.

About the makers

Lian-Hee Wee is Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University. He holds a PhD from Rutgers University (USA) in linguistics and has published four books (either as co-author or co-editor) and numerous articles on linguistics, particularly phonology.

Dianne Cmor is Assistant Librarian at the Hong Kong Baptist University. She holds a MLIS from McGill Unviersity (Canada) and a MA (English) from York University (Canada). She was also librarian at Cornell Medical College (Doha, Qatar), Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada) and Trent University (Canada).

Winnie H.Y. Cheung is presently a PhD student at the Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut (USA). She has worked extensively on the phonology of Hong Kong English. She holds a BA (English Language and Literature, first class honours) from Hong Kong Baptist University.

(updated on 28 October 2009)