circonstant dependency grammar circumflex [Lat. circumflexus ‘in rounded form’]

A whole set of (linguistic) elements that are characterized by at least one common property. For example, the words book, back, and bathe belong to the class of expressions in English that begin with the letter b, while aunt, sister, and daughter belong to the class of female kinship terms. In this use, ‘class’ is synonymous with set. Classes determined in this way can be in various relations to one another, a distinction being drawn primarily between hierarchical (organized according to the schema of genus proximum-differentia specifica) classifications and cross-classifications ( definition). Examples of a hierarchical classification are speech act classes ( speech act theory) as well as morphological classes ( morphology); the systematization in phonology by means of distinctive features is based on a cross-classification. In taxonomic structuralism the form classes, characterized by their different realizations, are the basis of language description ( distribution).