P-OMISSION
(Syntax) Apparent violations to the P(reposition)-Stranding Generalization (Merchant 2001) appear in Spanish, a language that does not allow P-stranding in regular wh-questions. I will refer to these apparent violations to the P-stranding Generalization as cases of "P(reposition)-omission", which I define as the omission of a preposition in an ellipsis fragment.

A language L will allow P-omission in sluicing iff L allows preposition stranding under regular wh-movement. (adapted from Merchant 2001)

P-SET
(Pragmatics) Hawkins (1978) wrote that the requirement of uniqueness in a definition of definiteness is not absolute but rather holds within the limits of a pragmatically delimited set of entities (P-sets). For each usage of the definite article in English, one type of P-set is delimited. Speakers make use of different P-sets that are apparent to all conversational participants, and they refer to a unique definite NP within the limits of the delimited P-set. These P-sets are of several types:

• The previous discourse set.
• The immediate situation of utterance set.
• A larger or specific situation set.
• Associative relationships set.
• Establishing relatives or genitives set.
• The universe of discourse set.

P-STRANDING GENERALIZATION
See PREPOSITION STRANDING GENERALIZATION.

PAIR-LIST ANSWER

1. (Syntax) Questions with universal quantifiers in argument position may allow for at least two types of answers: a single answer (SA; 1a), and a pair-list answer, (PLA; 1b). Object questions with a subject quantifier, like (1), typically allow both. By contrast, the availability of a PLA for subject questions with an object quantifier, as in (2), is more controversial.
   1. Who did everyone kiss?
      a. Everyone kissed John. (SA)
      b. Mary kissed John, Jane kissed Nick and Sarah kissed Michael. (PLA)
   2. Who kissed everyone?
    Beyond the syntactic position of the question and quantifier terms, a number of additional factors have been claimed to affect the availability of PLA: the lexical nature of the question-words, their presuppositional status and number (Agüero-Bautista 2001, Chierchia 2003), as well as the nature of the interacting quantifiers (Williams 1988, Beghelli 1997). To further complicate the picture, individual acceptability judgments reported in the literature are sometimes at odds with each other (Dayal 1996, Szabolcsi 1997, Agüero-Bautista 2001). | Asya Achimova, Viviane Deprez, and Julien Musolino, 2010
2. (Syntax; Semantics) Or, pair-list response. Questions with plural definites (henceforth QPDs) have long been known to allow for pair-list responses (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984, Pritchett 1990). For example, (1a) may elicit (1b).
   1. a. Who do the students like?
      b. Ann likes Professor Jones and Ben likes Professor Smith.
    My use of the term "response" here is intentional. It has been debated whether (1b) truly is an answer to (1a), in the sense that an answer is generated in the semantics, with a direct and predictable correspondence between its content and the semantics of the question that elicits it. The term response, on the other hand, I use atheoretically to describe anything said in reply to a question, whether or not there is a direct link to the question's content. This distinction in terminology foreshadows the central question of this paper: do pair-list responses to QPDs have the status of answers? | William Johnston, 2023

PAIR-LIST READING
(Semantics) The term "pair-list reading" will be applied to both types (1) and (2):

1. Who did every dog bite?
   'For every dog, who did it bite?'
2. Who did six dogs bite?
   'For six dogs of your choice, who did each bite?'

λP ∃X | X a set determined by the quantifier & P (which x ∈ X bit whom)

PALEOGRAPHY
(Diachronic) Or, palaeography (UK). Ultimately from Greek: παλαιός, palaiós, 'old', and γράφειν, gráphein, 'to write'. The study of historic writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, including the analysis of historic handwriting. It is concerned with the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.
 The discipline is one of the auxiliary sciences of history. It is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating historic texts. However, it generally cannot be used to pinpoint dates with high precision.
 Palaeography can be an essential skill for historians and philologists, as it tackles two main difficulties. First, since the style of a single alphabet in each given language has evolved constantly, it is necessary to know how to decipher its individual characters as they existed in various eras. Second, scribes often used many abbreviations, usually so as to write more quickly and sometimes to save space, so the specialist-palaeographer must know how to interpret them.
 Knowledge of individual letter-forms, ligatures, punctuation, and abbreviations enables the palaeographer to read and understand the text. The palaeographer must know, first, the language of the text (that is, one must become expert in the relevant earlier forms of these languages); and second, the historical usages of various styles of handwriting, common writing customs, and scribal or notarial abbreviations. Philological knowledge of the language, vocabulary, and grammar generally used at a given time or place can help palaeographers identify ancient or more recent forgeries versus authentic documents.
 Knowledge of writing materials is also essential to the study of handwriting and to the identification of the periods in which a document or manuscript may have been produced (Gwinn 1986). | Wikipedia, 2023

PARADIGM TRIMMING
(Morphology) A device by which a series of paradigms disallows certain combinations of elements, thereby greatly reducing the total possible combinations.
 Cross-linguistically, the ways in which paradigms may be trimmed and the mechanisms used to express marking-overload combinations are extremely limited. | Kristin Addis, 1993

PARADIGMATIC GAP
(Grammar) At the most broad level, the term "paradigmatic gap" has been used to refer to any phenomenon in which a grammatical structure or lexical item is expected but not attested. For example, when one language has a word that has no direct parallel in another language, this is sometimes called a paradigmatic gap in the second language. Also, the term "paradigmatic gap" is often applied to situations in which some grammatical structure is expected based on language-internal grounds but a different, yet fully grammatical, structure appears instead.
 Narrowly, for a lexeme belonging to lexical class C, a paradigmatic gap exists if no synthetic or morphological periphrastic form is used to express a set of inflectional properties I, when the language normally has a form expressing I for lexemes in class C. Any otherwise well-formed syntactic structure into which a hypothetical form is placed crashes. | Andrea D. Sims, 2006

PARAGOGE

1. (Morphology) The addition of a sound to the end of a word. Often, this is due to nativization, and a logical counterpart of epenthesis, particularly vocalic epenthesis. | Freebase
2. (Morphology) Also called epithesis and ecstasis, as opposed to prosthesis and apocope. The addition of a letter or a syllable to the end of a word, as amidst for amid, generical for generic. | Chambers 20th Century Dictionary

PARALANGUAGE
(Phonology) A term used in suprasegmental phonology to refer to variations in tone of voice which seem to be less systematic than prosodic features (especially intonation and stress). Examples of paralinguistic features would include the controlled use of breathy or creaky voice, spasmodic features (such as giggling while speaking), and the use of secondary articulation (such as lip-rounding or nasalization) to produce a tone of voice signalling attitude, social role, or some other language-specific meaning. Some analysts broaden the definition of paralanguage to include kinesic features; some exclude paralinguistic features from linguistic analysis. | David Crystal, 2008

PARASITIC GAP

1. (Syntax) Tentatively, we can define a "parasitic gap" as a gap that is dependent on the existence of another gap, which I will henceforth refer to as the real gap, in the same sentence. By a gap, I understand an empty node that is necessarily controlled by a lexical phrase somewhere in the sentence.
    It follows from this definition that a parasitic gap will only occur if there is a filler-gap dependency elsewhere in the sentence and the parasitic gap is interpreted as controlled by that filler. The characterization of parasitic gaps rules out gaps that arise as the result of a pronoun deletion rule.
    In languages like Japanese and Turkish, which have rules of optional pro drop, a gap may act just like a deictic pronoun and be interpreted as referring to something salient in the context. In languages like English and Swedish, optional pro drop does not occur and gaps are controlled sentence internally.
    Here are some examples of sentences with parasitic gaps. For perspicuousness, I will, when possible, indicate the parasitic gap by ___p.
   1. Which articles did John file __ without reading ___p ?
   2. This is the kind of food you must cook __ before you eat ___p .
   3. Which girl did you send a picture of __ to __?
   4. Which boy did Mary's talking to ___p bother __ most?
    | Elisabet Engdahl, 1983
2. (Syntax) A construction in which one gap appears to be dependent on another gap. Thus, the one gap can appear only by virtue of the appearance of the other gap, hence the former is said to be parasitic on the latter. For example, in the example sentence in (1) the first gap is represented by an underscore (___), and appears as a result of movement of the constituent which explanation to the beginning of the sentence. The second gap is represented by an underscore with a subscript p (____p); this is the "parasitic gap".
   1. Which explanation did you reject ___ without first really considering ____p ?
    While parasitic gaps are present in English and some related Germanic languages, e.g. Swedish (Engdahl 1983), their appearance is much more restricted in other, closely related languages, e.g. German and the Romance languages (Engdahl 1983). Japanese linguistic scholar Fumikazu Niinuma (2010) has attempted to differentiate between parasitic gaps and coordination in his research, as he believes the two are often confused.
    An aspect of parasitic gaps that makes them particularly mysterious is the fact they usually appear inside islands to extraction. | Wikipedia, 2022

PARSABILITY HYPOTHESIS
See COMPLEXITY-BASED ORDERING.

PARSE TREE
(Computational) Or, parsing tree (Chiswell and Hodges 2007) or derivation tree or concrete syntax tree. An ordered, rooted tree that represents the syntactic structure of a string according to some context-free grammar. The term "parse tree" itself is used primarily in computational linguistics; in theoretical syntax, the term syntax tree is more common.
 Concrete syntax trees reflect the syntax of the input language, making them distinct from the abstract syntax trees used in computer programming. Unlike Reed-Kellogg sentence diagrams used for teaching grammar, parse trees do not use distinct symbol shapes for different types of constituents.
 Parse trees are usually constructed based on either the constituency relation of constituency grammars (phrase structure grammars) or the dependency relation of dependency grammars. Parse trees may be generated for sentences in natural languages, as well as during processing of computer languages, such as programming languages. | Wikipedia, 2022

PARSER
(Computational) An abstract machine designed to test the structural integrity of a linguistic unit. In contrast to a recognizer, a "parser" produces a structural description for all well-formed units.
 The behavior of a parser is determined by the (parsing) algorithm and is based on certain linguistic information (grammar and lexicon in most cases). Most parsers have been developed for the syntactic analysis of sentences. But in general, a parser can be used to analyze the structure of any kind of linguistic unit: a single word, an arbitrary phrase or a complete text. (Naumann 2005, Sikkel 1998) | Glottopedia, 2007

PARTIAL NULL SUBJECT LANGUAGE
(Syntax) A set of languages falls under the general rubric of "partial null-subject languages", that is languages which allow null subjects but under more restricted conditions than consistent null-subject languages. For the languages considered here, the conditions include (a) when the subject is a generic pronoun corresponding to English one (exemplified by (1a), from Marathi), and (b) when the subject is controlled by an argument in a higher clause (exemplified by (1b), also from Marathi).

1. a.
    

   unahlyat
   summer-in

   lavkar
   early

   utthavla
   wake

   jato
   go-PRS-3SM

     'In summer one wakes up early'
   b.
    

   Ram
   Ram

   mhanala
   say-PST-3SM

   ki
   that

   ghar
   house

   ghetla
   buy-PST-3SN

     'Ram said that he bought a house'

PARTICLE-STRANDING ELLIPSIS
(Syntax) PSE is illustrated by Speaker B's utterance in (1) (Hattori 1960), which involves the ellipsis of the topic element—Tanaka-kun 'Tanaka'—but leaves the overt topic particle behind.

1. A:
    

   Tanaka-kun-wa?
   Tanaka-TITLE-TOP

     'How about Tanaka?'
   B:
    

   wa-ne,
   TOP-PRT

   kaisya-o
   company-ACC

   yameta-yo.
   quit-PRT

     'He quit his company.'

PARTITIVE

1. (Grammar) Partitive case is an instance of inherent case. Partitive case is optionally assigned by unaccusative verbs, such as Italian arrivare, to a post-verbal subject, which is in fact the internal argument:
   1. E'
      is

      arrivato
      arrived

      Gianni
      Gianni

      'Gianni arrived'
    According to Belletti (1988), partitive case can be assigned if no case (Nominative or Accusative) is assigned otherwise. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Grammar) The Finnish partitive is a particularly clear instance of an apparently hybrid category of semantically conditioned structural case.
    In its aspectual function, partitive case is assigned to the objects of verbs which denote an unbounded event. In its NP-related function, partitive case is assigned to quantitatively indeterminate NPs (including indefinite bare plurals and mass nouns), even if the verb denotes a bounded event. Moreover, in Slavic, the distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect has the very same two functions (among others).
    Partitive case originated as a purely adverbial local case with the meaning 'from'. It developed first its NP-related functions, in several stages. The aspectual function was the last to emerge. | Paul Kiparsky, 2004

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