CONJUGATION PREFIX

1. (Morphology) The verbal root in Sumerian is almost always a monosyllable and, together with various affixes, forms a so-called verbal chain which is described as a sequence of about 15 slots, though the precise models differ (see e.g. Rubio 2007, Attinger 1993, Zólyomi 2005). The finite verb has both prefixes and suffixes, while the non-finite verb may only have suffixes. Broadly, the prefixes have been divided in three groups that occur in the following order: modal prefixes, conjugation prefixes, and pronominal and dimensional prefixes (e.g. Attinger 1993, Rubio 2007). The suffixes are a future or imperfective marker /-ed-/, pronominal suffixes, and an /-a/ ending that nominalizes the whole verb chain.
    The meaning, structure, identity and even the number of conjugation prefixes have always been a subject of disagreements. The term conjugation prefix simply alludes to the fact that a finite verb in the indicative mood must always contain one of them. | Sumer Wiki, ?
2. (Morphology) Certain verb forms in Tlingit require the use of a conjugation prefix. The two verb forms included in this resource which require a conjugation prefix are the imperative (command) and perfective habitual (which translates as 's/he does it every time'). There are a total of four conjugation prefix options (na-, ga-, Ga-, and Ø- (no prefix)). Every Tlingit verb uses one of these four options. For example, in the imperative, na- conjugation verbs use the na- prefix (Nagú! 'Go!'); ga- conjugation verbs use the ga- prefix (Gagwáal! 'Beat it (drum)!'; Ga- conjugation verbs use the Ga- prefix (Ga.éexʼ! 'Invite him/her!'); and Ø conjugation verbs use no conjugation prefix (La.áx! 'Play it (musical instrument)!'). | Alaska Native Knowledge Network, 2016

CONJUNCT PHRASE

1. (Syntax) A sequence, notated [ a & b ], where a and b stand for the two terms of a conjoined sequence and & stands for the conjunction marker. The lexical category of a conjoined phrase is identical to that of its members, a and b. Moreover the grammatical function of [ a & b ] is the same as the grammatical function of a and of b (Haspelmath 2004, Godard 2005). The sequence [ a & b ] is hierarchically organized: [ a & b ] should be rewritten as [ a [ & b ] ]. | Marie-Claude Paris, 2015
2. (Syntax) It is well known that coordinating conjunctions form a subconstituent with the phrase that follows them ( [ conj X ] ). We show that such a conjunct phrase can have different grammatical functions: it can be coordinated in a coordinated phrase; it can be adjoined to several categories; it can also appear as an independent sentence. We focus on French incidental and emphatic conjunct phrases:
   1. a. Jean est parti, et rapidement.
       'Jean has left, and rapidly.'
      b. Jean est en avance, ou je me trompe.
       'Jean is early, or I'm wrong.'
    Contrary to their properties as an element of a coordination, these conjunct phrases are mobile, do not trigger plural agreement, and do not obey the constraint on parallel extraction. We analyze them as syntactic adjuncts, and extend the same analysis to phrases introduced by car in French, and to asymmetric verbal "coordinations" in Korean. | Anne Abeillé, 2005

CONJUNCTION REDUCTION

1. (Syntax) Or, coordination reduction. Occurs when some common feature of two coordinated sentences or clauses, which is overtly encoded in the first, is not repeated in the second. | Silvia Luraghi, 2014
2. (Syntax) An ellipsis mechanism that takes non-constituent conjuncts to be complete phrases or clauses at some deep level of syntax. These complete phrases or clauses are then reduced down to their surface appearance by the conjunction reduction mechanism. | Wikipedia, 2023

CONNECTEDNESS CONDITION
(Syntax) Kayne's (1983) Connectedness Condition is both an elegant and far-reaching attempt to reduce the ECP (Empty Category Principle) to a locality constraint based on graph-theoretic notions of locality: "constituting a subtree".
 The basic notion to be checked on these trees is g-projection: An antecedent is found by going bottom-up and checking every maximal projection that contains the e.c in need of an antecedent, whether it is in a standard government configuration. Formally, the CC reads:

Kayne's (1983) Connectedness Condition

1. Y is a g-projection of X (for X a structural governor like V and, in English, P) iff:
   • Y is an X̄ projection of X or of a g-projection of X, or
   • Y immediately dominates W and Z, Z a g-projection of X, and W and Z are in a canonical government configuration.
   W and Z are in a canonical government configuration iff:
   • W precedes Z in VO languages.
   • Z precedes W in OV languages.
2. The g-projection set of a category β governed by γ is constituted by β, every g-projection of γ, and every category dominating β and not dominating γ.
3. Let β_i ... β_n be a set of empty categories each locally bound by α in a tree T; then, the union of α and the union of the g-projection sets of every β must form a subtree of T.

CONNECTIVITY
(Syntax) We define the connectivity of each constituent α in a linguistic structure as the number of linguistic relations which relate α (or any part of α) to any constituent external to α. We conjecture that there is a universal finite bound on the connectivity of acceptable structures in every language. | Edward P. Stabler, 2001

CONSTRAINT

1. (General) Any restriction either on the application of a rule or process or on the well-formedness of a representation. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics
2. (General) The notion of constraints is generally used in modern linguistics (in particular in syntax and phonology) for representing properties that an object must satisfy (see Borsley 1996, Sag and Wasow 1999). Constraints can be general (or universal), valid for different languages, or at the opposite very specific, representing, for example, the variability of a given language. In all cases, the idea consists of stipulating properties ruling out structures which don't belong to the language. | Philippe Blache, 2000

CONSTRAINT ON CROSSING DEPENDENCIES

1. (Syntax) The CCD captures the observation that movement which results in nested dependencies is preferred to movement which results in crossed dependencies. Notice that, in the English examples below, the crossed dependency in (1b) is indeed ungrammatical, whereas a nested dependency (1a) is allowed.
   1. a. The violin_j that I wonder which sonatas_i to play____i on ____j.
      b. * The sonatas_i that I wonder which violin_j to play ____i on ____j.
    | Lauren Clemens and Rebecca Tollan, 2021
2. (Syntax) A proposal intended to account for the crosslinguistic dispreference for crossing dependencies is the Constraint on Crossing Dependencies (CCD; Kuno and Robinson 1972, Steedman 1985):

   Constraint on Crossing Dependencies
   No movement dependency may cross another movement dependency.

    While there is robust crosslinguistic evidence for the CCD, certain languages tolerate crossing dependencies in some contexts. Dutch, for example, is well-known for exhibiting crossing dependencies in clause-final verb clusters (Bach, Brown, and Marslen-Wilson 1986). | Rebecca Tollan and Lauren Clemens, 2022

CONSTRUCTICOGRAPHY
(Construction Grammar) Can be defined as a blend between Construction Grammar and Practical Lexicography, which aims at developing constructicons: repositories of form and function pairings in a language. | Hans C. Boas, Benjamin Lyngfelt, and Tiago Timponi Torrent, 2019

CONSTRUCTICON

1. (Construction Grammar) One of the central ideas in CxG is that our linguistic knowledge is structured as a mental inventory of constructions, i.e., a "constructicon". | Monique Robeé and Gerhard van Huysteen, 2023
2. (Diasystematic Construction Grammar) If grammar is community-specific rather than language-specific, then this must be reflected in the organization of speakers' constructional knowledge: their constructicon—i.e. the structured inventory of all structural elements—must cover all constructions used by the multilingual community. | Steffen Höder, 2018
3. (Construction Grammar) Construction grammar makes two central claims (Hoffmann and Trousdale 2013). The first claim is that linguistic structure consists of conventional pairings of form and meaning, that is, constructions. The second claim is that constructions are integrated into a system, known as the constructicon (sometimes written construct-i-con; Jurafsky 1991). There is a large body of research on the structure, meaning, acquisition, and change of particular constructions (for reviews, see Hilpert 2014, Hoffmann 2022); but there is relatively little research on the constructicon. As Lyngfelt (2018) noted in a recent paper, although researchers agree that constructions are integrated into a system, "the internal structure of the constructicon is still largely uncharted territory."
    In the classical model of construction grammar, the constructicon is an inheritance hierarchy or taxonomy (Fillmore and Kay 1999). Inheritance is a key concept of formal varieties of construction grammar (Fillmore and Kay 1999, Sag 2012) but has also been used by Goldberg (1995) and other cognitive linguists to describe the cognitive organization of grammar. Following the pioneering work of Goldberg, it has become a standard assumption of cognitive linguistics that the constructicon is mainly a taxonomy in which lower-level constructions inherit general properties from higher-level constructions. The inheritance model of the constructicon has dominated research in construction grammar for more than two decades, but recent research in usage-based linguistics argues that, while grammar includes an important taxonomic dimension, constructions are not only taxonomically related. Combining evidence from linguistics with insights from psychology, these studies argue that a person's knowledge of grammar involves multiple types of associations that characterize the constructicon as a multidimensional network (e.g. Kapatsinski 2018, Lyngfeld et al. 2018, Diessel 2019, Schmid 2020, Sommerer and Smirnova 2020). | Holger Diessel, 2023

CONSTRUCTION MORPHOLOGY

1. (Construction Grammar) In this framework, complex words are seen as constructions on the word level. The notion construction, a pairing of form and meaning, as developed in the theory of Construction Grammar, is essential for an insightful account of the properties of complex words. Morphological patterns can be represented as constructional schemas that express generalizations about sets of existing complex words and word forms, and provide the recipes for coining new (forms of) words. Such schemas form part of a hierarchical lexicon with generalizations on different levels of abstraction, they account for holistic properties of complex words that are not derivable from their constituents, and they can be unified into complex schemas that express the co-occurrence of certain types of word formation. The format of constructional schemas is also appropriate for phrasal lexical units with word-like functions such as phrasal names, particle verbs, and periphrastic expressions. | Geert Booij, 2010
2. (Construction Grammar) This framework, developed in Booij (2010), assumes a hierarchical lexicon with both abstract morphological schemas and stored complex words that instantiate these schemas. | Geert Booij, 2017
3. (Construction Grammar) The CxM literature generally uses a linearized and simplified shorthand notation (merging PHON/MORPH/SYN into one level of form), as illustrated in (1) (adapted from Booij 2010):
   1. < [[bake]_Vαj er]_Nβi ↔ [PERSON who BAKE_j]_i >
    Under a CxM understanding, the noun baker means 'someone who bakes' not because it is built from a morpheme bake and a morpheme meaning 'PERSON who Vs', but because there is a formal relation between verbs like bake, paint, or sell on the one hand and nouns like baker, painter, or seller on the other, correlating systematically with a semantic difference. These paradigmatic relations assign internal structure to baker, painter, and seller, which can be captured in a semi-specified construction or schema, as in (2) (adapted from Booij 2010):
   2. < [[X]_Vαj er]_Nβi ↔ [PERSON who PRED_j]_i >
    The schema is semi-specified because it consists of a specific suffix on the one hand and an unspecified variable X on the other. The variable is typed for the lexical category V and, potentially, for other formal features (symbolized as 'α') that delimit the set of verbs admitted in this construction; such typing serves to restrain the construction. Replacing the variable by appropriate lexical material yields a novel agentive noun. | Francesca Masini and Jenny Audring, 2018
4. (Morphology) The basic idea of constructional schemas is that they represent generalizations about sets of complex words with varying degrees of abstraction. The complex words themselves are specified individually in the lexicon to the extent that they are established, conventionalized lexemes. The relation between the abstract scheme and the individual instantiations of that scheme can be represented as a tree with the constructional schema as the dominating node. Individual words form the lowest nodes of the trees, and inherit the properties of the nodes by which they are dominated. For instance, the word baker might be represented as follows in the lexicon:

   1.         [ [x]X y ]Y
                 |
              [ [x]V er ]N     'one who V's'
                 |
              [ [bak]V er ]N   'one who bakes (professionally)'
      

    Each lower node inherits the properties of its dominating node. These inherited properties count as redundant information on the lower node. In the case of baker, this word also inherits properties from its base lexeme bake. Hence, it will also be linked to that lexeme:

   2.         [ [x]X y ]Y
                 |
              [ [x]V er ]N     'one who V's'
                 |
              [ [bak]V er ]N   'one who bakes (professionally)'
              /
          [ bake ]V
      

    Thus, complex words must be allowed to have multiple linkings in the lexicon. The second line in (2) represents the schema for deverbal nouns in -er. New words can be formed according to this schema through the formal operation of unification. This schema can be unified with, for instance, the verb to fax, thus leading to the deverbal noun faxer 'one who faxes'. The relation between the hierarchical ordered lines of representation is that of instantiation. For instance, the word baker is an instantiation of the scheme for deverbal nouns in -er. | Geert Booij, 2005

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