Violating a maxim is when you break one of Grice’s Maxims on purpose, but you don’t want anyone else to notice. You’re hoping that the other people in the conversation will think you haven’t broken any maxims at all, so they won’t interpret any hidden meanings in your words. We call a hidden meaning like this an ‘implicature’.
Text World Theory is a theory in cognitive linguistics that explains and analyses how we create images in our minds when we read, listen to or watch texts.
A Mary-Sue is an idealised character without nuance. They don’t have flaws or limitations that impact them in meaningful ways, and the story’s plot and characters revolve around them. They don’t need to struggle, so their existence cheapens the tension.
Jargon is specialist language that is specific to an activity, hobby, profession, academic subject, or trade. In order for specialist language to be considered ‘jargon’ it needs to exclude people who don’t understand it.
Litotes is a language device where you combine a negative word (like “no”, “not”, “don’t”, “isn’t”, etc) with a word or phrase to express the opposite thing for effect. For example, “I’m not happy” means you’re unhappy.
In linguistics, hedging is when you use certain words and phrases to make what you’re saying sound less harsh, more cautious or more unsure.
Syntax is one of the six micro-linguistic levels you study in English language. It is about how we order words to make phrases, clauses and sentences.
The implied reader is the person (or group of people) that we infer a text was made for. We base this inference on the text producer’s decisions about language, narration, characters, plot, structure, form, layout, mode, context, genre, etc.
External deviation is a kind of foregrounding where the text producer breaks conventions or “rules” that people accept for the type of text they’re writing. They do this to draw attention to specific parts of their writing.
Free direct speech is a type of speech presentation that indicates you are repeating the actual words of another person. You do this by surrounding the speech in punctuation (usually speech marks or inverted commas), but you do not use a reporting clause.