Sank's Glossary of Linguistics
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BECAUSE X CONSTRUCTION
(Grammar) The English because X construction (1) has a number of functional and formal equivalents in other languages such as weil X in German (2), want X in Dutch (3), but also protože X in Czech (4), among others (Konvička 2019).
BENEFACTIVE CASE
(Case Grammar) The noun or noun phrase that refers to the person or animal who benefits, or is meant to benefit, from the action of the verb is in the benefactive case. For example, in the sentences
BIDIRECTIONAL OPTIMALITY THEORY
Abbr. BiOT. Emerged at the turn of the millennium as a fusion of Radical Pragmatics and Optimality Theoretic Semantics. It stirred a wealth of new research in the pragmatics-semantics interface and heavily influenced e.g. the development of evolutionary and game theoretic approaches. Optimality Theory holds that linguistic output can be understood as the optimized products of ranked constraints. At the center of BiOT is the insight that this optimization has to take place both in production and interpretation, and that the production-interpretation cycle has to lead back to the original input. BiOT is now generally interpreted as a description of diachronically stable and cognitively optimal form-meaning pairs. It found applications beyond the semantics-pragmatics interface in language acquisition, historical linguistics, phonology, syntax, and typology. | Anton Benz and Jason Mattausch, 2020
BIGRAM MORPHOTACTIC CONSTRAINTS
(Morphology) In a paper on variable prefix ordering in Tagalog, K. Ryan (2010) labels the two-morpheme (step-by-step) ordering bigram morphotactics. "A bigram constraint X-Y, in which X and Y are (classes of) morphemes, can be taken to penalize each instance of X not immediately followed by Y (cf. local selectional restrictions, e.g. Fabb 1988). The ranking of these constraints motivates ordering restrictions [...] in which X-Y-Z is the only grammatical output for an input comprising X, Y and Z." Ryan's model assigns a weight to each bigram, which allows him to treat every possible two-morpheme combination as a constraint in the sense of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004), all bigrams being ranked according to their weight. The weight of a bigram depends on the frequency of occurrence of that bigram in a corpus. Ryan promotes the bigram-morphotactics analysis as a novel approach "intended to supplement, not replace, semantic factors in affix ordering such as scope". | Stela Manova, 2011
BINARY-BRANCHING CONSTRAINT
1. * X' /|\ / | \ X Y Z 2. X' / \ / \ X' Z / \ / \ X Y 3 /\ / \ /____\ X X'' / \ / \ Y X' / \ / \ tx Z| Ad Neeleman, Joy Philip, Misako Tanaka, and Hans van de Koot, 2022
BINDING
BINDING DOMAIN
(Syntax) Mainstream generative accounts (Chomsky 1981, Pollard and Sag 1994, Manning and Sag 1999, Bresnan 2002, Reinhart and Reuland 1993) sketch a very clear, uniform picture of anaphoric dependencies. "Binding" in the syntactic sense of the word is primarily limited to the predicational domain, formulated as in binding conditions A (1) and B (2):
BINDING PRINCIPLES
BINOMINAL NOUN PHRASE
While the table shows that the corpus data can be distributed to the 12 types of BNP, there are three points to be developed:
╲ N2
N1 ╲[+] Animate [−]Animate
([+]entity)[−]Animate
([−]entity)Lexical
[+]ind.The theatrics of a loser
(fiction)A warren of passages
(spoken)A hurricane of wind
(fiction)Lexical
[−]ind.The death of a pioneer
(spoken)A wardrobe of dresses
(fiction)A night of friction
(fiction)Figurative A heck of a guy
(fiction)A whale of a table!
(fiction)A ghost of a smile
(fiction)Modificational An excellent breed of dog
(spoken)??? A merry tinkle of laughter
(fiction)
BLEEDING
(Syntax) Antonym, feeding. A term used in generative linguistic analysis of rule ordering, and originally introduced in the context of diachronic phonology, to refer to a type of functional relationship between rules. A bleeding relationship is one where an earlier rule (A) removes a structural representation to which a later rule (B) would otherwise have applied, and thus reduces the number of forms which can be generated. If rule B is of the form X ⇒ Y, then rule A must be of the form W ⇒ Z, where W includes Z, and Z is distinct from both X and Y. In these circumstances, rule A is called a bleeding rule in relation to B, and the linear order of these rules is called a bleeding order. If the rules are applied in the reverse order, A is said to counter-bleed B. Counter-bleeding results in a non-affecting interaction in which a rule fails to realize its potential to reduce the number of forms to which another rule applies. It is also possible in a pair of rules for each rule to bleed the other (mutual bleeding). | David Crystal, 2008
BLEEDING ORDER
(Phonology) An order of rules such that one rule destroys the input of another rule. Consider the following two rules proposed by Schane (1968) for French:
BLOCKING
(Morphology) Blocking can be defined as the non-occurrence of some linguistic form, whose existence could be expected on general grounds, due to the existence of a rival form. *Oxes, for example, is blocked by oxen, *stealer by thief. Although blocking is closely associated with morphology, in reality the competing "forms" can not only be morphemes or words, but can also be syntactic units. In German, for example, the compound Rotwein 'red wine' blocks the phrasal unit *roter Wein (in the relevant sense), just as the phrasal unit rote Rübe 'beetroot'; lit. 'red beet' blocks the compound *Rotrübe.
Besides such cases of lexical blocking, one can observe blocking among productive patterns. Dutch has three suffixes for deriving agent nouns from verbal bases, -er, -der, and -aar. Of these three suffixes, the first one is the default choice, while -der and -aar are chosen in very specific phonological environments. Contrary to lexical blocking, the effect of this kind of pattern blocking does not depend on words stored in the mental lexicon and their token frequency but on abstract features (in the case at hand, phonological features). | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2019
BOUNDARY TONE
BOUNDING NODE
(Syntax) A node that plays a role in determining whether a movement is local enough. Traditionally, NP and S (in English) or S' (in Italian) are considered bounding nodes. More recently, bounding nodes have been defined in terms of barriers. | Leticia Pablos, 2006
BOUNDING THEORY
(Syntax) Theory about the locality of movement. The main principle of Bounding theory is the Subjacency condition, which forbids movement across more than one bounding node.
In (1) which books has been moved over two bounding nodes, NP and CP. In (ii), NP and IP are the relevant bounding nodes. In (i) the so-called Complex NP Constraint is violated, in (ii) the so-called Subject Condition. Thus, the Subjacency condition subsumes both the Complex NP Constraint and the Subject Condition.
BREATHY
(Phonetics; Phonology) A term used in the phonetic classification of voice quality, on the basis of articulatory and auditory criteria. Breathiness refers to a vocal effect produced by allowing a great deal of air to pass through a slightly open glottis: this effect is also sometimes called murmur. Some speakers do have an abnormally breathy voice quality as a permanent feature of their speech. What is of particular significance for linguistic analysis is that breathy effects may be used with contrastive force, communicating a paralinguistic meaning: the whole of an utterance may be thus affected, as in an extremely shocked pronunciation of Oh really!
Breathy voice, or breathy phonation, is also sometimes encountered as a phonological characteristic, as in Gujarati, where there is an opposition between breathy and non-breathy vowels. | David Crystal, 2008
BRIDGE VERB
(Syntax) In English and many other languages, the acceptability of long-distance wh-extraction out of a finite declarative complement clause appears to vary based on the matrix verb: "bridge verbs" like think and say lead to relatively high acceptability, verbs like shout less so.
Page Last Modified November 29, 2023
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