MOTION EVENT
(Semantics) A sentence denoting movement. A prototypical motion event "consists of one object (the Figure) moving or located with respect to another object (the reference-object or Ground) ... the Path ... is the course followed or site occupied by the Figure object with respect to the Ground object. Motion ... refers to the presence per se in the event of motion or location. ... In addition to these internal components a Motion event can have a Manner or a Cause" (Talmy, 1985).
 Imagine a simple motion event: a golf ball is rolling across a golf field. Human languages possess the means to parse this scene into a number of distinct encodable parts. For instance, language after language offers the means to refer to the ball separately from the background (the field), to follow its trajectory or path (across the field), to comment on its manner of moving (rolling or bouncing), to note whether the movement was caused by an agent (a golf player) or not, and so on. These and similar features are consistently singled out in the cross-linguistic packaging of motion events.
 In what we will call Manner languages (e.g. English, German, Russian, Swedish, Chinese), manner of motion is typically encoded in the verb, while path information appears in nonverbal elements such as prepositional phrases. In other Path languages (e.g. Modern Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi), the verb usually encodes the direction of motion, while the manner information is encoded in gerunds or prepositional phrases, or omitted altogether.

1. English:
   The ball rolled across the field.
   FIGURE MOTION+MANNER PATH GROUND
2. Modern Greek:
   I bala diesxise to gipedo.
   'the ball crossed the field'
   FIGURE MOTION+PATH GROUND

MOVE ALPHA
(Syntax) A most general formulation of possible movements. In effect, "Move alpha" says that some category alpha can be moved anytime anywhere. It generalizes rules such as Move NP and Move wh, which in their turn generalize construction specific transformations such as Passivization and Raising. Move alpha itself is considered an instance of Affect alpha. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

MOVEMENT CHAIN
(Syntax) In Government and Binding theory, a movement chain is formed by the linkages between a unit and successive traces left in positions from which it is moved. | ?

MÜLLER-TAKANO GENERALIZATION
(Syntax)

The Müller-Takano Generalization (Müller 1993, 1996; Takano 1994)
After phrase XP has moved from node α to node ω, a remnant phrase YP that dominates α but not ω cannot move to any node c-commanding ω if movement of XP and movement of YP are of the same type.

MULTI-PARTICIPANT NOUN
(Semantics) A noun that applies only to multi-participant events. A certain subset of mass nouns. Traffic and rubble are multi-participant nouns but furniture and luggage turn out not to be. Importantly, "typical" mass nouns like water are multiparticipant nouns. | Roger Schwarzchild, 2011

MULTI-WORD EXPRESSION

1. (Grammar) Abbreviated MWE. Understood here as a (continuous or discontinuous) sequence of words with the three compulsory properties:
   • Its component words include a head word and at least one other syntactically related word. Most likely the relation it maintains is a syntactic (direct or indirect) dependence but it can also be e.g. a coordination. Depending on the category of the head word, the whole MWE can be nominal, adjectival, prepositional, verbal, sentential, etc.
   • It shows some degree of orthographic, morphological, syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasy with respect to what is deemed general grammar rules of a language.
   • At least two components of such a word sequence have to be lexicalized.
    | Veronika Vincze, Agata Savary, Marie Candito, and Carlos Ramisch, 2016
2. (Grammar) A combination of at least two words which exhibits lexical, morphological, syntactic, and/or semantic idiosyncrasies.
   1. The [prime time] [speech made] by [first lady] [Michelle Obama] [set] the house [on fire]. She made [crystal clear] which issues she [took to heart] but she was [preaching to the choir].
    | Agatha Savary, 2023
3. (Grammar) Abbreviated MWE. Much of the language we are exposed to on a daily basis is "formulaic". Despite the potentially infinite creativity of language, many words co-occur with some words more frequently than with other, seemingly synonymous, ones. In the present paper, we will refer to such frequently co-occurring word combinations as "multi-word expressions". For the purpose of the present review, we adopt a very loose, rather inclusive definition of MWEs as highly familiar phrases that exhibit a certain degree of fixedness and are recognized as conventional by a native speaker. Arguably, MWEs can be of many different kinds, including but not limited to:
   • collocations (black coffee, morning sickness),
   • binomials (bride and groom, heaven and hell),
   • multi-word verbs (rely on, put up with),
   • idioms (tie the knot, can't judge a book by its cover),
   • complex prepositions (in support of, under the influence of),
   • speech formulae (how's it going? good afternoon),
   • and so on.
    MWEs differ vastly in:
   • length (they can be between two and eight, or even more, words in length),
   • literality (idioms are by definition figurative expressions, while many collocations and other types of MWEs are used literally),
   • degree of fixedness (some allow internal modification, others do not),
   • word class (closed-class vs. open-class).
   • and so on.
    Even within a particular type, MWEs differ considerably (e.g., idioms can be decomposable or non-decomposable, ambiguous or non-ambiguous, etc.). Despite such vast differences, all MWEs can be said to be relatively frequent and, as a result, highly familiar and predictable word clusters. | Anna Siyanova-Chanturia, 2013

MULTICULTURAL LONDON ENGLISH
(Sociolinguistics) A dialect of London English which has emerged since the early 1980s in parts of London where there has been a relatively high level of immigration. MLE is based on the traditional East End Cockney dialect, but it has a number of different sounds and grammatical constructions.
 For instance, unlike Cockney, MLE speakers pronounce their aitches at the beginning of words, as in house, instead of Cockney 'ouse. You might also notice the vowel sounds in the words like home, where the "o" is rather like a Scottish or a Newcastle vowel, or the vowel in a word like face, which also sounds as if it comes from Scotland or Newcastle. | University of York, 2019

MULTIETHNOLECT

1. (Sociolinguistics) A new language variety, or pool of variants, shared by more than one ethnic group living in an area. It is typically shared across minorities but also by members of majority groups. A multiethnolect is non-ethnic in its affiliation and its indexicality. This is true at least in the community in which it is spoken. Outside its own community it may sound distinctly "ethnic". It is arguably vernacularized. | Paul E. Kerswill, 2013
2. (Sociolinguistics) We use the term "multiethnolects" here to encompass a broad range of language forms and practices documented by researchers in European cities. First, it refers to the way that in mixed multicultural neighborhoods, young people may combine elements from different heritage languages with the dominant mainstream language. Dorleijn and Nortier (2013) give the following example, in which Turkish (underscored) and Moroccan Arabic (in italics) occur together with Dutch (in regular type):
   1. wreed
      great

      olmazmi
      wouldn't.be

      ah
      VOC

      sabbi?
      my.friend

      'Wouldn't that be great, my friend?'
    Dorleijn and Nortier point out that it is not necessary to be fluent in Turkish and Moroccan Arabic in order to speak in this way. Example (1), they say, could have been uttered by a young person of Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi or any other origin, including, of course, Turkish or Moroccan. Importantly, it could equally well have been uttered by a young Dutch-speaking monolingual person from a non-immigrant background. The term "multiethnolect", then, has been coined to capture the fact that this way of speaking is not ethnically marked.
    In addition, the term "multiethnolect" has been used to describe an ethnically neutral variable repertoire containing a core of innovative phonetic, grammatical, and discourse-pragmatic features. In London, for example, many of the diphthongs characteristic of the local variety of English have become near-monophthongs (in the FACE and PRICE lexical set for example). There is a new pronoun, man, a new quotative expression this is + speaker, and many other innovations (Cheshire et al 2011, Cheshire 2013).
    Wiese (2009, 2013), similarly, refers to Kiezdeutsch in Berlin as a multiethnolect: a way of speaking for young people in multicultural neighborhoods of Berlin that contains new forms of German. In both uses of the term, it is assumed that there is a base language, the dominant language of the local society, and that the multiethnolect is highly variable and dynamic. | Jenny Cheshire, Jacomine Nortier, and David Adger, 2015

MULTIPLE AGREE
(Syntax) In the literature on the syntactic operation AGREE, there are two main accounts about how a probe searches its domain to find a suitable goal: "Multiple Agree" and Cyclic Agree.
 Under Multiple Agree, a probe simultaneously searches and engages the features of all goals in its domain (e.g., Hiraiwa 2001, 2005; Nevins 2007, 2011; Zeijlstra 2004; etc.).
 In a Cyclic Agree model (e.g., Béjar and Rezac 2009), a probe searches its domain one argument at a time beginning with the most local goal and, under certain circumstances, the probe may look at the next most local goal if it is not fully satisfied by the features on the first argument probed. If the first instance of probing satisfies the probe, however, it bleeds probing of all additional goals in its domain. | Miloje Despić, Michael David Hamilton, and Sarah E. Murray, 2017
See Also CYCLIC AGREE.

MULTIPLE COORDINATE COMPLEX

1. (Grammar) A coordinate complex that is composed of three or more conjuncts and a single coordinator. | Nicholas George Winter, 2006
2. (Grammar) It has been commonly assumed in the literature on coordinate structures that (2) is derived from (1).
   1. Bill and Sue and John
   2. Bill, Sue, and John
    Adopting terminology from Zhang (2010), I refer to the structure in (1) as a Repeated Coordinate Complex and will refer to the structure in (2) as a "Multiple Coordinate Complex".
   3. Repeated Coordinate Complex – A coordinate structure consisting of n − 1 coordinators for n conjuncts while n > 2.
   4. Multiple Coordinate Complex – A coordinate structure consisting one coordinator for n conjuncts while n > 2.
    Both Repeated Coordinate Complexes and Multiple Coordinate Complexes stand in contrast to Coordinate Simplexes, illustrated in (5) and defined in (6).
   5. Bill and Sue
   6. Coordinate Simplex – A coordinate structure consisting of two conjuncts and one coordinator.
    | Nicholas George Winter, 2017

MULTIPLE EXPONENCE

1. (Morphology) Or, extended exponence. The occurrence of multiple realizations of a single morphosemantic feature, bundle of features, or derivational category within a word. | Alice C. Harris, 2017
2. (Morphology) The theoretical relevance of "Multiple Exponence" (ME), a one-to-many mapping between a morphological category and its formal expression (Matthews 1974; Stump 1991, 2001; Anderson 2001, 2005; Blevins 2003), has been attributed to the challenges it poses to incrementalist theories of morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, Noyer 1997, Stump 2001) and principles of economy and structural complexity (Andrews 1990, Anderson 1992, Noyer 1993, Kiparsky 2005). A parade example of ME is found in plural marking in German nouns, where plural is marked by either an affix (1a-b), Umlaut (1c-d), or both by an affix and Umlaut (1e-f).

   1. Multiple Exponence in German plural nouns

      	Singular	Plural	Gloss
      a.	Arm	Arm-e	'arm'	Suffixation
      b.	Bild	Bild-er	'picture'
      c.	Vater	Väter	'father'	umlaut
      d.	Boden	Böden	'earth'
      e.	Wurm	Würm-er	'worm'	Suffixation + Umlaut (ME)
      f.	Hals	Häls-e	'neck'

    | Gabriella Caballero, 2011
3. (Morphology) When the same morpheme occurs multiple times within a single word. ME has been previously described in a number of languages of the Nakh-Dagestanian language family (Bokarev 1949, Harris 2009, Magometov 1961), as well as in other languages such as Limbu, Dumi, Athpare, and Chintang (Kiranti languages, a subgroup of Tibeto-Burman; Bickel et al. 2007, Ebert 1997, van Driem 1987, 1993, 1997, a.o.), Hualapai (Yuman; Watahomigie et al. 1982), and Skou (Papua New Guinea; Donohue 1999, 2003).
   1. Multiple occurrence of the gender (class) agreement marker (CM) on certain verbs and adjectives in Nakh-Dagestanian languages:
      1. Chamalal
         b-ašak'u-b
         'short.SG.CLASS III'
         y-eč'at'v-i
         'black.SG.CLASS II' (Bokarev 1949)
      2. Batsbi
         d-ex-d-o-d-anŏ
         CM-destroy-CM-PRES-CM-EVID
         d-ek'-d-iy-eⁿ
         CM-fall-CM-TR-AOR (Harris 2009)
    | Andrei Antonenko and Alice C. Harris, 2010

MULTIPLE FRAGMENT ANSWER

1. (Syntax) Can be used to respond to multiple wh-questions, as in (1) and (2):
   1. A: Who speaks which language?
      B: Abby, Greek, and Ben, Albanian. (Merchant 2004)
   2. A: Who did you speak to about what?
      B: Mary (about) the weather, and Rab (about) the government. (Thoms 2014)
    Note that like Gapping, multiple fragmenting is subject to structural parallelism:
   3. A: Who has she said has eaten what?
      B: * Peter, his peas, and Sally, her green beans.
      (Intended: She's said Peter has eaten his peas, and Sally has eaten her green beans.)
    | Myung-Kwan Park and Sunjoo Choi, 2016
2. (Syntax) An example:
   1. Q: Who did they talk to about what?
      A: Mary the news, and John the weather.
    | Matthew Barros and Gary Thoms, 2023

MULTIPLE FRAGMENT ANSWER GENERALIZATION
(Syntax) 

Multiple Fragment Answer Generalization (Park 2013)
Multiple FAs that have the form of [NP-marker, NP-marker/-Ø] are acceptable, but not [NP-Ø, NP-marker/-Ø].

MULTIPLE SLUICING

1. (Syntax) A type of clausal ellipsis with more than one wh-remnant being pronounced:
   1. Everyone worked on something, but I don't know who on what.
    The following terminology for the different subparts of the sentences is the most standard in the literature (Merchant 2001, Vicente 2019):

   [ [Everyone]_{(correlate-1)} worked on [something]_{(correlate-2)} ]_(antecedent), 
   [but I don't know]_(intro) [ [who]_(remnant-1) on [what]_(remnant-2) ]_(sluice).

    | Álvaro Cortés Rodríguez, 2020
2. (Syntax) Describes elliptical questions with more than one wh-phrase as remnant. The phenomenon is found in languages which otherwise have wh-in-situ questions, (1), single wh-fronting, (2), and multiple wh-fronting, (3) (Merchant 2001).

   1. Japanese (Nishigauchi 1998)
      John-ga
      John-NOM

      [dareka-ga
      someone-NOM

      nanika-o
      something-ACC

      katta
      bought

      to]
      that

      it-ta.
      said
      Mary-wa
      Mary-TOP

      [dare-ga
      who-NOM

      nani-o
      what-ACC

      ka]
      Q

      siri-tagat-te
      know-want

      iru.
      is

      'John said someone bought something. Mary wants to know who what.'
   2. German
      Jeder
      every

      Student
      student

      hat
      has

      ein
      a

      Buch
      book

      gelesen,
      read

      aber
      but

      ich
      I

      weiß
      know

      nicht
      no

      mehr
      longer

      wer
      who

      welches
      which

      'Every student read a book, but I can't remember which student which book.'
   3. Slovenian (Marušič and Žaucer 2013)
      Vid
      Vid

      je
      AUX

      rekel,
      said

      da
      that

      je
      AUX

      Rok
      Rok

      predstavil
      introduce

      nekomu
      one.DAT

      nekoga,
      one.ACC,

      pa
      but

      ne
      not

      vem
      know

      komu
      who.DAT

      koga.
      who.ACC

      'Vid said that Rok introduced someone to someone, but I don't know who to who.'

    In these languages, multiple sluicing obeys the following two generalizations:
   • All remnants in multiple sluicing must originate in the same (finite) clause.
   • The clause where remnants originate may be inside of an island.
    | Klaus Abels and Veneeta Dayal, 2017

MULTIPLE WH-FRONTING
(Syntax) Rudin (1988) shows that there are two types of multiple Wh-fronting languages. One type is the Bulgarian type, which includes languages such as Bulgarian and Romanian. Rudin argues that in this type of languages all fronted Wh-phrases are in SpecCP, forming a constituent, as in (1). The other type of languages is the Serbo-Croatian type, which includes languages such as SC, Czech, and Polish. According to Rudin, in SC type of languages, the fronted Wh-phrases do not form a constituent; only the first Wh-phrase is located in SpecCP, while other fronted Wh-phrases are adjoined to IP, as shown in (2).

1. Bulgarian:
   [_CP
    

   Koj
   who

   kogo
   whom

   [_IP
    

   vižda ] ]
   sees

     'Who sees whom?'
2. Serbo-Croatian:
   [_CP
    

   Ko
   who

   [_IP
    

   koga
   whom

   [vidi] ] ]
   sees

     'Who sees whom?'

MULTIVERB CONSTRUCTION

1. (Grammar) For example, the following Lao sentence shows six verbs in a row, in a single prosodically integrated unit, with no inflection or explicit marking of the grammatical relationship between them.
   1. Lao
      caw⁴
      2SG

      lòòng²
      try.out

      mèè⁴
      PCL

      qaw³
      take

      paj³
      go

      hét¹
      make

      kin³
      eat

      beng¹
      look

      'You go ahead and take (them) and try cooking (them)!'
    This sentence—the words of a merchant giving a sales pitch for her sausages—is no mere "string of verbs". Such sequences in Lao can be analyzed in terms of nested (usually binary) relationships. In example (I), a left-headed complement-taking adverbial lòòng² 'try out' combines with a right-marking adverbial beng¹ 'look' in bracketing a complex verb phrase consisting of a "disposal" construction expressing focus on manipulation of an object (with the combination qaw³–hét¹ 'take (and) do/make') incorporating paj³ 'go' as an inner directional particle, in a purposive clause chain with kin³ 'eat'. The surface string of six contiguous verbs in (1) is highly structured, yet there is little if any surface indication of such structure in the language. | N.J. Enfield, 2008
2. (Grammar) Sentences with multiple verbs and no overt coordinators exist in Asante Twi, a member of the Kwa subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family spoken in the southern half of Ghana.
   1. Ama
      A

      wɔɔ
      pound-PST

      bayerɛ
      yam

      no
      DET

      dii
      eat-PST

      aburo
      corn

      no
      DET

      'Ama pounded the yam and ate the corn.'
   2. Kofi
      K

      kyii
      catch-PST

      akɔla
      child

      no
      DET

      bɔɔ
      beat-PST

      no
      3SG

      'Kofi caught the child and beat it.'
   3. Ama
      A

      wɔɔ
      pound-PST

      bayerɛ
      yam

      no
      DET

      dii
      eat-PST

      yɛ
      do

      'Ama pounded the yam and ate it.'
    | Cansada Martin, 2010

MURMUR
See BREATHY.

Page Last Modified January 8, 2024

 

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