Cambridge IAL English Language flashcards
Cambridge IAL English Language · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Directed response task
- A Paper 1 task in which you rewrite source material for a new purpose, audience or genre, keeping the source's content and viewpoint intact while changing register and form.
- Register
- The variety of language chosen according to audience, purpose and social setting, describable through formality, lexical choice, syntactic complexity and terms of address rather than as simply formal or informal.
- End-focus
- The tendency in English to place new or important information at the end of a clause, where it receives the most communicative weight and emphasis.
- Fronting
- Moving a clause element other than the subject to the initial position for emphasis or cohesion, as in 'That book, I never finished it'.
- Asyndetic tricolon
- Three parallel items listed without conjunctions between them, a compact persuasive pattern that creates rhythm and a sense of completeness.
- Cleft sentence
- A construction splitting one clause into two to highlight information, typically 'It was X that...' (cleft) or 'What X did was...' (pseudo-cleft).
- Audience positioning
- The way a text's language constructs an implied reader through assumed knowledge, address forms, tone and level of explanation, which the analysis should identify explicitly.
- Genre conventions
- The recurring structural and linguistic features expected of a text type, such as a verdict in a review or direct address in a speech, which shape how readers interpret it.
- Discourse markers
- Words or phrases such as 'however', 'so' and 'meanwhile' that signal relationships between stretches of discourse, guiding the reader through addition, contrast, sequence or consequence.
- Lexical chain
- A network of related words across a text, formed by repetition, synonymy, antonymy or collocation, which creates cohesion and sustains a topic.
- Hypophora
- A rhetorical device in which the writer or speaker raises a question and then immediately answers it, controlling the reader's attention and steering the argument.
- Anaphora
- Repetition of the same word or phrase at the start of successive clauses or sentences, producing rhythm and reinforcing a key idea.
- Antithesis
- Placing contrasting ideas in parallel grammatical structures so the opposition is sharp and memorable, as in 'not by words but by deeds'.
- Register clash
- An inconsistency in formality within one text, such as slang inside a formal proposal, which disrupts the constructed relationship with the intended reader.
- Comma splice
- Joining two independent clauses with only a comma, an accuracy error that weakens the style mark even when the intended meaning is clear.
- Hedging
- Language that softens a claim or reduces commitment, such as 'sort of', 'perhaps' or 'it might be', often serving politeness or epistemic caution in speech.
- Backchannel
- A short verbal response such as 'mm' or 'yeah' from a listener that signals attention and participation without claiming a full turn.
- Adjacency pair
- Two successive turns by different speakers forming a conventional sequence, such as question and answer or greeting and greeting, with a preferred and a dispreferred second part.
- Dispreferred response
- The structurally marked second part of an adjacency pair, such as a refusal or disagreement, typically delayed, hedged or preceded by an account.
- Convergence
- Accommodation in which a speaker shifts style, accent or formality towards an interlocutor to reduce social distance and signal solidarity.
- Positive facework
- Politeness strategies that attend to a person's desire to be approved of, such as compliments, inclusive pronouns and claiming common ground.
- Negative facework
- Politeness strategies that attend to a person's desire not to be imposed on, such as hedging, indirect requests and apologies for the imposition.
- False start
- An abandoned beginning of an utterance followed by a restart or self-repair, a common feature of unplanned speech shown in transcription.
- Vague category marker
- A phrase such as 'and stuff' or 'or something' that ends a list without naming further members, relying on shared knowledge between participants.
- Instrumental power
- Power held by virtue of a role or institution, enabling a speaker to act, direct or constrain others through language such as imperatives and procedural rules.
- Influential power
- Power exercised through persuasion and appeal rather than authority, aiming to shape beliefs or behaviour without overt coercion.
- Semantic derogation
- The historical process by which a word's meaning acquires negative connotations, frequently documented in terms for women such as 'hussy' or 'spinster'.
- Lexical asymmetry
- A pairing where one term is marked and the other unmarked, such as 'actor' and 'actress', so the marked form signals deviation from a default.
- Broadening
- Semantic change in which a word's meaning extends to cover more referents than before, as 'bird' once named a specific nestling.
- Narrowing
- Semantic change in which a word's meaning becomes more restricted, as 'meat' once meant food in general and now means animal flesh.
- Kachru's three circles
- A model dividing World Englishes into the inner circle of norm-providing native varieties, the outer circle of institutionalised postcolonial varieties, and the expanding circle of foreign-language use.
- Holophrastic stage
- An early stage of child language acquisition in which single words carry the meaning of whole phrases, interpreted through context and intonation.