DISTRIBUTED MORPHOLOGY

1. (Grammar) A theory of the architecture of grammar first proposed in the early 1990s at MIT by Morris Halle, Alec Marantz and their students and colleagues.
     Although there are numerous hypotheses and directions in current DM research, three core properties define the theory: Late Insertion, Underspecification, and Syntactic Hierarchical Structure All the Way Down.
   • Late Insertion refers to the hypothesis that the phonological expression of syntactic terminals is in all cases provided in the mapping to Phonological Form (PF). In other words, syntactic categories are purely abstract, having no phonological content. Only after syntax are phonological expressions, called Vocabulary Items, inserted in a process called Spell-Out.
   • Underspecification of Vocabulary items means that phonological expressions need not be fully specified for the syntactic positions where they can be inserted. Hence there is no need for the phonological pieces of a word to supply the morphosyntactic features of that word; rather Vocabulary items are in many instances default signals inserted where no more specific form is available.
   • Syntactic Hierarchical Structure All the Way Down entails that elements within syntax and within morphology enter into the same types of constituent structures (such as can be diagrammed through binary branching trees). DM is piece-based in the sense that the elements of both syntax and of morphology are understood as discrete instead of as (the results of) morphophonological processes.
    | Rolf Noyer, 1999
2. (Grammar) The basic principle of Distributed Morphology is that there is a single generative engine for the formation of both complex words and complex phrases: There is no division between syntax and morphology, and there is no Lexicon in the sense it has in traditional generative grammar. Distributed Morphology rejects the notion of a lexicon in the way it had been used. Any operation that would occur in the "lexicon" according to lexicalist approaches is considered too vague in Distributed Morphology, which instead distributes these operations over various steps and lists (Noyer 1999).
     The term "Distributed Morphology" is used because the morphology of an utterance is the product of operations distributed over more than one step, with content from more than one list (Nevins 2015). In contrast to lexicalist models of morphosyntax, Distributed Morphology posits three components in building an utterance:
   • The Formative List provides the input for syntax.
   • The Exponent List (the list of Vocabulary Items) is consulted to provide the utterance with post-syntactic phonological content.
   • Syntactic operations (such as Merge, Move or Agree in the Minimalist framework) apply to formatives.
    | Wikipedia, 2022

DISTRIBUTIONAL HYPOTHESIS
See DISTRIBUTIONAL SEMANTICS.

DISTRIBUTIONAL LINGUISTICS
(General) A theory that was mainly based on the concept of distribution. Hence, the distribution of a linguistic unit is the set of syntactic environments where the unit can potentially occur. Within that framework, the work of the linguist consists in building paradigms or distributional classes which encompass a set of elements likely to occur in a given place or context.
 The method of investigation in Distributional Linguistics was a taxonomic one. Based on a discovery procedure also referred to as Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA), it consisted in breaking up larger linguistic units into smaller ones known as their immediate constituents until one gets to the smallest units, that is non-lexical categories which could not be broken up any further. | LE BI LE Patrice, 2020

DISTRIBUTIONAL SEMANTICS

1. (Semantics) DS aims to learn the meanings of linguistic expressions from a corpus of text. The core idea, known as the distributional hypothesis, is that the contexts in which an expression appears give us information about its meaning.
    The idea has roots in American structuralism (Harris 1954) and British lexicology (Firth 1951, 1957), and with the advent of modern computing, it began to be used in practice. In a notable early work, Spärck-Jones (1964) represented word meanings as Boolean vectors, based on a thesaurus.
    DS has become widespread in Natural Language Processing, first with the rise of count vectors (Erk 2012, Clark 2015), then of word embeddings (Mikolov et al. 2013), and most recently, of contextualized embeddings (Peters et al. 2018, Devlin et al. 2019). What all of these approaches share is that they learn representations in an unsupervised manner on a corpus. | Guy Emerson, 2020
2. (Semantics) The hallmark of any model of distributional semantics (DS) is the assumption that the notion of semantic similarity, together with the other generalizations that are built upon it, can be defined in terms of linguistic distributions. This has come to be known as the Distributional Hypothesis (DH), which can be stated in the following way:

   Distributional Hypothesis
   The degree of semantic similarity between two linguistic expressions A and B is a function of the similarity of the linguistic contexts in which A and B can appear.

    Therefore, according to the DH, at least certain aspects of the meaning of lexical expressions depend on the distributional properties of such expressions, i.e. on the linguistic contexts in which they are observed. If this is true, by inspecting a significant number of linguistic contexts representative of the distributional and combinatorial behavior of a given word, we may find evidence about (some of) its semantic properties. A key issue is how this functional dependence between word distributions and semantic constitution is made explicit and explained, i.e. whether we conceive it to be merely correlational or instead a truly causal relation. The possible answers to this issue determine large differences within the field of DS. | Alessandro Lenci, 2008

DITRANSITIVE DIATHESIS

1. (Syntax) Or, dative shift. The prototypical ditransitive verb is give. Its semantic participants are theme and goal/beneficiary. The theme is preceded by the goal/beneficiary in the construction. In diathesis alternation, the theme precedes the goal/beneficiary. What is different here is the syntactic structure; the verb is followed by the object (NP) which is then followed by the oblique theta (PP). The verb in a dative construction then subcategorizes for an NP followed by a PP. the subcategorization frame for the verb will be: V[ ____ NP PP]. An example in English is (1).
   1. Ama
      Agent

      gave
       

      Kofi
      Beneficiary

      the
       

      book.
      Theme
    When the sentence in (1) undergoes diathesis alternation it becomes (2).
   2. Ama
      Agent

      gave
       

      the
       

      book
      Theme

      to
       

      Kofi.
      Beneficiary
    The Ga (Kwa; Ghana) example in (3) is from the verb of change and possession.
   3. Amá
      Ama

      há
      give.PST

      yòò
      woman

      lɛ̀
      DEF

      wòlò
      book

      'Ama gave the woman a book'.
    The verb ha 'give' also behaves the same way as the English verb give which subcategorizes for two noun phrases as objects. The theme wolo 'book' is preceded by the beneficiary yòò lɛ̀ 'the woman' in (3). The verb ha can be used to constructionally express "ditransitivity" as illustrated in (4).
   4. Amá
      Ama

      kɛ̀
      move

      wòlò
      book

      há
      give.PST

      yòò
      woman

      lɛ̀
      DEF

      'Ama gave a book to the woman'.
    | Yvonne Akwele Amankwaa Ollennu, 2017
2. (Syntax) Example:
   1. a. They served Alex the Chasselas.
      b. They served the Chasselas to Alex.
    | Richard Stockwell, 2022

DOMAIN
(General) The range or extent of forms to which some rule, etc. applies. E.g. in many languages the word is the domain of vowel harmony: i.e. the application of the rule does not extend beyond words. A class of verbs like sing, sink, or drink might also be described as the domain of a rule by which i in the present tense is changed to a in the past. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2003

DOUBLE DEFINITE
(Syntax) Swedish is well known for the fact that it appears to show two reflexes of definiteness in its definite nominals. The language makes use of a definite article at the beginning of the nominal and a definite suffix on the head noun. | Nicholas LaCara, 2011

DOUBLE DISLOCATION FOCUS CONSTRUCTION
(Syntax) Though the DDFC resembles the Dislocation Focus Construction, the former involves two remnant-parts occurring after the SP (Lau 2021). Note that the order of these two remnants (α and β) becomes reversed in DDFC, which makes it not only distinctive from DFC, but also interesting theoretically. I argue that the pre-SP part (γ) is the only component to receive focus interpretation. Thus the derivation of DDFC involves the processes of focalization and defocalization.

1. [Jat
   One

   bou
   CL

   dinsigei]
   TV

   lo,
   SP

   keoi
   s/he

   soeng
   want

   maai
   buy

   ___.
   

    DFC (Cheung 2005)

   'S/he wants to buy a TV.'
2. Hou2
   Very

   faai3
   fast

   sau1lei5jyun4
   repair.finish

   gwaa,
   SP

   bou6
   CL

   din6lou5____,
   computer

   ngo5
   I

   gu2___.
   think

    DDFC

   'I think the computer will be repaired soon.'

Underlying Structure: SP α β γ → Surface Structure: γ SP β α

DOUBLE ELLIPSIS

1. (Syntax) Examples:
   1. Not so much whether to teach the Bible in public schools, but how [e]? And by whom [e]?
       (Corpus of Contemporary American English)
   2. GE Capital and Xerox in Stamford responded to inquiries about their use of extended-stay hotels by saying that they use them from time to time, but they were not sure how much [e] or by whom [e] .
       (The New York Times, Aug 9, 1998)
    | Richard Stockwell, 2023
2. (Syntax) Ellipsis parallelism and extended L-triviality really come apart in relation to the sentence in (1) with ellipsis in both clauses of the conditional at once:
   1. If he₁ is < >, he₁ is < >.
    Though it need not, (1) can have a trivial interpretation where both ellipses are resolved via the same antecedent, as in the exchange in (2):
   2. A: Is John₁ wrong? B: If he₁ is wrong, he₁ is wrong.
    There is more to say about the status of double ellipsis in (1) as opposed to single ellipsis in (3b).
   3. a. If John is wrong, then he is wrong.
      b. * If John is wrong, then he is wrong.
    While (1) needs to be provided with an antecedent before it can be interpreted, as in (2), it can also be judged acceptable in isolation. The acceptability of (1) out of the blue suggests a willingness to assume that a discourse could readily be provided to resolve the ellipses. But we do not seem to be willing to make the same allowances for (3b). (3b) is judged unacceptable in isolation, despite the fact that there are discourses where it is good. It seems that the presence of a potential but unlicensed antecedent in the if-clause in (3b) precludes the deference to discourse tolerated in (1) when no potential antecedent is available. | Richard Stockwell, 2018
3. (Syntax) The English Unitarian Thomas Belsham (1750–1829), in A Calm Inquiry Into the Scripture Doctrine Concerning the Person of Christ, considered, among other arguments, that of "double ellipsis".
    The argument runs, more or less, like this. If, instead of interpreting genesthai as absolute ('to be [born]'), we suppose that genesthai means 'to become' (in an elliptical sense to be determined), the key phrase at John 8:58 becomes:
   1. [Lit. Eng.] before Abraham become [ellipsis], I am [ellipsis]
    Neither become nor I am are, reasonably, used in an absolute sense. So, there may be an ellipsis associated with each verb. Unpacking the double ellipsis, we may have:
   2. Before Abraham become [father of a multitude] I am [the Messiah]
    | Miguel de Servet, 2016

DOWNDRIFT
(Prosody) The pattern in which each successive pitch peak in a phrase is lower than the previous one. Statements in Chichewa display a strong downdrift effect, but this tendency is much less strong in questions. There is significantly less of a downward trend in questions than in statements in a wide variety of languages: English, Swedish, Rausa, Danish, Mandarin, and Zulu. | Scott Myers, 1996

DOWNSTEP
(Phonetics) A phonemic or phonetic downward shift of tone between the syllables or words of a tonal language. It is best known in the tonal languages of West Africa, but the pitch accent of Japanese (a non-tonal language) is quite similar to downstep in Africa. Downstep contrasts with the much rarer upstep. The symbol for downstep in the International Phonetic Alphabet is a superscript down arrow ( ꜜ ). It is common to see a superscript exclamation mark used instead due to typographic constraints. | David Crystal, 2003

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