COALESCENCE
(Phonology; Historical Linguistics) Or, fusion. A sound change where two or more segments with distinctive features merge into a single segment. This can occur both on consonants and in vowels.
 A common form of fusion is found in the development of nasal vowels, which frequently become phonemic when final nasal consonants are lost from a language. This occurred in French and Portuguese. Compare the French words un vin blanc [œ̃ vɛ̃ blɑ̃] 'a white wine' with their English cognates, one, wine, blank, which retain the n's.
 Another example is the development of Greek bous 'cow' from Indo-European *gwous. Although *gw was already a single consonant, [ɡ^w], it had two places of articulation, a velar stop ([ɡ]) and labial secondary articulation ([^w]). In Greek bous these elements have fused into a purely labial stop [b].
 Often the resulting sound has the place of articulation of one of the source sounds and the manner of articulation of the other. | Wikipedia, 2023

CODE-SWITCHING
(Sociolinguistics) Or, language alternation. Occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualism in that plurilingualism refers to the ability of an individual to use multiple languages (Common European Framework for Reference on Languages, retrieved 2022), while code-switching is the act of using multiple languages together. Multilinguals (speakers of more than one language) sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other. Thus, code-switching is the use of more than one linguistic variety in a manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety. Code-switching may happen between sentences, sentence fragments, words, or individual morphemes (in synthetic languages). | Wikipedia, 2023

COGNATE OBJECT CONSTRUCTION
(Syntax) A noun phrase containing a noun which is morphologically related to the verb. In English, this noun can sometimes be the exact copy of the verb (as in the case of smile a smile, laugh a laugh, and dance a dance).

1. French (Pereltsvaig 2002)
   a. Il a dansé une grande danse.
    He danced a grand dance.
   b. Elle a chanté une (belle) chanson.
    She sang a (beautiful) song.

COGNITIVE CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR (CCxG)
(Grammar) Since the publication of Adele Goldberg's (1995) seminal book Constructions, Construction Grammar (CxG) has become increasingly popular and inspired analyses of a wide range of grammatical constructions in different languages. Goldberg's (1995) constructional approach has come to be known as Cognitive Construction Grammar (CCxG) since the publication of her (2006) book Constructions at Work.
 The most basic idea that CCxG shares with other constructional approaches is that a linguistic model should in principle be able to account for all facets of a speaker's knowledge about their language. Another basic idea is that grammatical constructions are the fundamental building blocks of language. | Hans C. Boas, 2011

COHORTATIVE MOOD

1. (Grammar) Or, hortatory mood. Is used to express insistence, imploring, self-encouragement, wish, desire, intent, command, purpose or consequence. In Latin it is interchangeable with the jussive. | Keteven Gadilia, 2007
2. (Grammar) Indicates exhortation addressed to the speaker herself, either exclusively or including her addressees (Gesenius 1910). | Danny Kalev and Larisa Leisiö, 2020
3. (Grammar) Or, intentional, or, cohortative subjunctive, or, hortatory subjunctive. A grammatical mood, used to express plea, insistence, imploring, self-encouragement, wish, desire, intent, command, purpose, or consequence. It is similar to the jussive mood, with the notable exception that the cohortative appears only in first person, whereas the jussive appears in second or third. Cohortatives are found in several languages, including Ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew. In English they are expressed by such verbal auxiliaries as let and should, yet this is misleading, as it implies a request for confirmation not always intended in the original text. | Gates of the City, 2010

COLEXIFICATION
(Semantics) A linguistic phenomenon that occurs when a word can be used to express multiple concepts. Since its recent formalization (François 2008), it has been the focus of extensive work that culminated in the creation of a dataset of cross-linguistic colexifications (List et al. 2018; Rzymski et al., 2020). The study of colexification allows the comparison of language structures across cultures and countries, contributing to a universal overview of the studied phenomena. | Anna Di Natale, Max Pellert and David Garcia, 2021

COLEXIFICATION NETWORK
(Semantics) The CLICS project reflects the rigorous and transparent approaches to standardization and aggregation of linguistic data, allowing to investigate colexifications through global and areal semantic networks, like the one below, mostly by reusing data first collected for historical linguistics. We designed its framework, along with the corresponding interfaces, to facilitate the exploration and testing of alleged cross-linguistic polysemies (Urban 2011) and areal patterns (Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Liljegren 2017, Gast and Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2018, Schapper, Roque, and Hendery 2016). The project is becoming a popular tool not only for examining cross-linguistic patterns, particularly those involving unrelated languages, but also for conducting new research in fields not strictly related to semantically oriented lexical typology (Brochhagen 2015, Divjak, Levshina, and Klavan 2016, Gil 2017, Georgakopoulos and Polis 2018, San Roque, Kendrick, Norcliffe, and Majid 2018) in its relation to semantic typology (Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2008, 2015, Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Rakhilin, and Vanhove 2016).

Example of a Colexification Network


           FATHOM ●         ● KNEEL
                   \         \
                    \         \
                     \         \
PALM OF HAND ●        ● ARM     ● KNEE
              \     //|\       /				  
               \   // | \     /	
                \ //  |  \   /
            HAND ●    |    ● ELBOW
                / \   |   /
               /   \  |  /
              /     \ | /
        FIVE ●        ● WRIST		

A strong link between ARM and HAND is 
shown, showing that in many languages 
both concepts are expressed with the 
same word. Among others, weaker links 
between concepts HAND and FIVE, 
explainable by the number of fingers 
on a hand, and ELBOW and KNEE, 
explainable as both being joints, can 
also be observed.

COLLECTIVE PREDICATE

1. (Semantics) A predicate that applies to a plurality of things as a whole and not to each of the individual members.
    Example: The contrast below shows that gather is a collective predicate because it can only be used as a predicate with a subject that refers to a plurality.
   1. * John / A boy / Every boy gathered.
   2. The boys / John and Mary / The club gathered.
    Other predicates, such as buy a house or carry the piano upstairs can be used as collective predicates but also as distributive predicates. John and Mary bought a house is therefore ambiguous between a collective reading (they bought the house together) and a distributive reading (they each bought a house). (Link 1983) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Semantics) A few tentative definitions:
   • Distributive predicates are true of a plural subject only if they are true of each individual in the group. Probably they should also be able to be predicated of a singular subject.
     • E.g., be asleep, run a mile, scream.
   • Collective predicates are normally true of a group and not of the individual members of the group.
     • E.g., gather, disperse, elect.
   • Ambiguous predicates are ambiguous. They seem to be able to be interpreted as distributed actions or collective actions. Hence, they can occur with either singular or plural subjects. Also called group endeavors or collective accomplishments.
     • E.g., build the house, carry the piano upstairs.
    | Alison Taub, 1989

COLLOCATE
(Corpus) The collocates of a word are those words that tend to occur in proximity to that word more than they occur in proximity to all other words in the corpus. The idea of collocation is implemented using a variety of different statistics to determine the co-occurrence of words. | Computational Analysis of Catalogue Data, 2023

COLLOCATION

1. (Grammar) Partly or fully fixed expressions that become established through repeated context-dependent use. Such terms as crystal clear, middle management, nuclear family, and cosmetic surgery are examples of collocated pairs of words.
    Collocations can be in a syntactic relation (such as verb-object: make and decision), lexical relation (such as antonymy), or they can be in no linguistically defined relation. Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a grammatically correct sentence will stand out as awkward if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching. | Wikipedia, 2022
2. (Grammar) The co-occurrence of two words in some defined relationship. We look at several such relationships, including direct adjacency and first word to the left or right having a certain part-of-speech. We also consider certain direct syntactic relationships, such as verb/object, subject/verb, and adjective/noun pairs. It appears that content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) behave quite differently from function words (other parts of speech); we make use of this distinction in several definitions of collocation. | David Yarowsky, 1993

COLLOCATION ANALYSIS

1. (Corpus) Allows us to identify contiguous collocations of words. One of the most common types of multi-word expressions are proper names, which can be identified simply based on capitalization in English texts. | Quanteda Tutorials, ?
2. (Corpus) Corpus linguists specify a key word in context (KWIC) and identify the words immediately surrounding them. This gives an idea of the way words are used.
    The processing of collocations involves a number of parameters, the most important of which is the measure of association, which evaluates whether the co-occurrence is purely by chance or statistically significant. Due to the non-random nature of language, most collocations are classed as significant, and the association scores are simply used to rank the results. Commonly used measures of association include mutual information, t scores, and log-likelihood (Dunning 1993, 2008). | Wikipedia, 2022

COLLOSTRUCTIONAL ANALYSIS
(Grammar) A family of methods developed by (in alphabetical order) Stefan Th. Gries (UCSB) and Anatol Stefanowitsch (Free U of Berlin). Collostructional analysis aims at measuring the degree of attraction or repulsion that words exhibit to constructions, where the notion of construction has so far been that of Goldberg's construction grammar.
 Collostructional analysis so far comprises three different methods:

1. Collexeme analysis, to measure the degree of attraction/repulsion of a lemma to a slot in one particular construction.
2. Distinctive collexeme analysis, to measure the preference of a lemma to one particular construction over another, functionally similar construction. Multiple distinctive collexeme analysis extends this approach to more than two alternative constructions.
3. Covarying collexeme analysis, to measure the degree of attraction of lemmas in one slot of a construction to lemmas in another slot of the same construction.

COMBINATORY CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR

1. (Grammar) Some early extensions to Categorial Grammar were "combinatory" in nature, extending the core CG with functional operations on adjacent categories, such as "wrap" (Bach 1979, Dowty 1979), functional composition (Ades and Steedman 1982), type-raising (Steedman 1985), and substitution (Szabolcsi 1989). CCG has retained an active concern with keeping expressive power and automata-theoretic complexity to a minimum, and has been actively involved with issues of linguistic explanation and practical computational linguistics, including wide-coverage parsing using statistical models. | Mark Steedman and Jason Baldridge, 2009
2. A given CCG grammar is defined almost entirely in terms of the entries of the lexicon, which are (possibly complex) categories bearing standard feature information (such as verb form, agreement, etc.) and subcategorization information. Some simplified lexical entries are given below:
   1. a ⊢ np / n
   2. musician ⊢ n
   3. that ⊢ (n \ n) / (s_vform=fin | np)
   4. Bob ⊢ np
   5. saw ⊢ s_vform=fin \ np / np
   The slashes indicate the direction in which an argument category is sought in the string: the forward slash (/) specifies an argument appearing to the right; the backward slash (\) specifies an argument appearing to the left; and the vertical slash (|) specifies an argument appearing in either direction. Note that the argument category always appears on the right hand side of the slash, with the result category on the left hand side of the slash. A convention of left associativity is assumed, so that a category such as s \ np / np is equivalent to (s \ np) / np.
    CCG has a small set of rules which can be used to combine categories in derivations. The two most basic rules are forward (>) and backward (<) function application:
   6. (>) X / Y Y ⇒ X
   7. (<) Y X \ Y ⇒ X
    CCG also employs further rules based on the composition (B), type raising (T), and substitution (S) combinators of combinatory logic. Each combinator gives rise to several directionally-distinct rules; for example, there are forward and backward rules for both composition and type raising:
   8. (>B) X / Y Y / Z ⇒ X / Z
   9. (<B) Y \ Z X \ Y ⇒ X \ Z
   10. (>T) X ⇒ Y / (Y \ X)
   11. (<T) X ⇒ Y \ (Y / X)
    | Michael White, 2004
   See also CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR.

COMMON GENDER
(Grammar) In the common-neuter gender contrast, a masculine–feminine–neuter system previously existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns (they have merged into what is called common gender), though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be of either gender. Examples include Danish and Swedish, and to some extent Dutch. The dialect of the old Norwegian capital Bergen also uses common gender and neuter exclusively. The common gender in Bergen and in Danish is inflected with the same articles and suffixes as the masculine gender in Norwegian Bokmål. This makes some obviously feminine noun phrases like a cute girl, the well milking cow or the pregnant mares sound strange to most Norwegian ears when spoken by Danes and people from Bergen since they are inflected in a way that sounds like the masculine declensions in South-Eastern Norwegian dialects. The same does not apply to Swedish common gender, as the declensions follow a different pattern from both the Norwegian written languages. Norwegian Nynorsk, Norwegian Bokmål and most spoken dialects retain masculine, feminine and neuter even if their Scandinavian neighbors have lost one of the genders. The merger of masculine and feminine in these languages and dialects can be considered a reversal of the original split in Proto-Indo-European. | Wikipedia, 2022

COMMON GROUND
(Pragmatics) One thing, according to Grice, that is distinctive about speaker meaning, as contrasted with other ways of getting people to believe something, is a kind of openness or transparency of the action: when speakers mean things, they act with the expectation that their intentions to communicate are mutually recognized. This idea leads naturally to a notion of "common ground"—the mutually recognized shared information in a situation in which an act of trying to communicate takes place. A representation of the common ground helps to clarify both the end of the communicative action by representing the possibilities among which the speaker intends to distinguish, and the means available to the speaker to distinguish between them—the information that must be available in order that the act of uttering certain noises reasonably be taken as an act of trying to get someone to acquire certain information.
 In the simple picture, the common ground is just common or mutual belief, and what a speaker presupposes is what she believes to be common or mutual belief. The common beliefs of the parties to a conversation are the beliefs they share, and that they recognize that they share: a proposition φ is common belief of a group of believers if and only if all in the group believe that φ, all believe that all believe it, all believe that all believe that all believe it, etc. | Robert Stalnaker, 2002

COMMUNICATION COMPLEXITY
Yao (1979) introduces a formal definition of communication complexity, which models the difficulty of solving a problem when necessary information is split between different parties and communication between parties is costly. In the simplest model of communication complexity, two parties (typically named Alice and Bob) are provided with personal data-sets, and are asked to compute some function over both data-sets. We measure the communication complexity of that function in terms of the amount of information that must be sent between the two parties in order for one of them to compute the result. Communication complexity has been generalized in many ways, from allowing different types of probabilistic behavior, to including additional parties, to adding structure to the back-and-forth nature of Alice and Bob's messages. | Ryan Daniel Budnick, 2023

COMMUTATIVITY
(Semantics) In modeling the semantics of operators like conjunction and disjunction through the boolean ∧ and ∨ of classical logic, we commit ourselves to the claim that conjunction and disjunction are commutative. Commutativity refers to a kind of symmetry: that is, the order in which the conjuncts/disjuncts appear does not matter. Natural language should mirror the commutativity of classical logic (p ∧ q) = (q ∧ p), and (p ∨ q) = (q ∨ p). And most of the time, this seems to be the case:

1. John likes likes listening to Bach and he likes listening to Mozart.
   John likes listening to Mozart and he likes listening to Bach.
2. John likes listening to Bach or he likes listening to Mozart.
   John likes listening to Mozart or he likes listening to Bach.

1. Mary got married and got pregnant.
   Mary got pregnant and got married.
2. A man_i walked in and he_i was wearing a hat.
3. ✗He_i was wearing a hat and [a man]_i walked in.

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