Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Phr-Pn

PHRASAL VERB CONSTRUCTION
(Grammar) Among multi-word expressions, phrasal verbs (PVs) are one of the most prolific, productive and elusive structures. Broadly, PVs form multi-word structures by combining a lexical verb and an adverbial particle, as illustrated in (1-3). (1) illustrates an intransitive (henceforth [V Prt]) use of the PV break down, and (2) and (3) illustrate transitive uses of bring up and turn on. In the case of bring up, the verb is used in a verb-particle-object ([V Prt Obj]) structure and in the case of turn on the verb is used in a verb-object-particle ([V Obj Prt]) structure.

  1. I just broke down in tears when I saw the letter.
  2. I ventured to bring up the subject of the future.
  3. The warden said that she would turn the heating on.
 Semantically, it is generally accepted that PVs represent single semantic units. For instance, Biber et al. (1999) observes that PVs "can be classified by semantic domain, based on their core meanings, using the same categories as simple lexical verbs" such as activity, mental, communication or aspectual. Further, PVs can convey idiomatic meanings that cannot be recovered bottom-up (Alejo Gonzáles 2010; e.g. bring up in the sense of 'raise'). However, despite having an overall meaning, PVs can also retain, to a certain extent, the meaning of their components (cf. Jackendoff 1997, Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman 1999, Armstrong 2004). For instance, in the case of semi-idiomatic PVs, the verb word keeps its meaning while the meaning of the particle is less easy to isolate (Quirk et al. 1985; e.g. slacken off, cut up) and in the case of nonidiomatic PVs, the individual meanings of the components remain apparent (e.g. bring in, walk up, take out). Further, PVs can be interpreted differently depending on their context of use: For instance, bring up can be fully compositional in the sense of 'carry something up the stairs' and metaphorical in the sense of 'raise (a topic)'.
 In the usage-based tradition, PVs are constructions like all other constructions, i.e. "conventionalized pairings of form and function" (Goldberg 2006) which, cognitively, can be seen as mental patterns as they represent regularities that speakers can extract from a number of analogical usage events (Cappelle 2009). | Sandra C. Deshors, 2016
See Also VERB-PARTICLE CONSTRUCTION.

PHRASEOLOGICAL TEDDY BEAR
(Acquisition) Ringbom (1998) shows that the frequencies of individual word forms tend to differ between learners and native speakers of English, with learners having a tendency to overuse vocabulary items that have high frequencies in general corpora of English. The overuse can be related to a core vocabulary that the learners have acquired early and know well. Hasselgren (1994) compares such familiar lexical favorites to children's toys: "Stripped of the confidence and ease we take for granted in our first language flow, we regularly clutch for the words we feel safe with: our 'lexical teddy bears'."
 A hypothesis of the present study is that the same tendency will be visible in the use of lexical bundles: some bundles will seem familiar and unobjectionable to learners, who will resort to them frequently as their "phraseological teddy bears". This idea is not novel; Nesselhauf (2005) suggests that learners' occasional overuse of "certain native-speaker-like chunks" may partly result "from learners using some of them as lexical teddy bears". | Hilde Hasselgård, 2019

PHYLOGENY
(Diachronic) The application of this general term in linguistics refers to the historical (or diachronic) development and decay of language in speech communities, or as represented in historical texts; also referred to as phylogenesis. Phylogenetic study contrasts with ontogeny, for the study of development in the individual, as carried on in language acquisition. | David Crystal, 2008

Π-GESTURE
(Prosody) The π-gesture model provides an account of the properties of prosodic boundaries. While various other conceptualizations of prosodic boundaries have been proposed, the π-gesture model is discussed here because it clearly defines prosodic boundaries. Furthermore, it has explicit temporal properties and allows the examination of the coordination of prosodic events. Finally, the model allows for a structurally more gradient prosodic hierarchy, which is in line with experimental evidence.
 The π-gesture model has been developed within the Articulatory Phonology framework, where the basic phonological unit is a gesture, which specifies a constriction target as its goal (e.g. for alveolar consonants, a tongue tip constriction constitutes the constriction target). Gestures in Articulatory Phonology are both units of information, specifying lexical contrast, and units of action, with specified temporal and spatial information. That is, gestures are lexical units parametrized both phonetically and phonologically, such that there is no need for a translational component that traditionally might be posited as mediating between phonology and phonetics. | Jelena Krivokapić, 2014

PIED-PIPING

  1. (Syntax) The phenomenon that when a wh-phrase is moved, it can optionally "drag along" a larger NP or PP in which it is contained.
     E.g., next to this first example, the other two are also possible:
    1. This is the book [ NP which ] I have designed [ NP the covers [ PP of t ] ]
    2. This is the book [ PP of which ] I have designed [ NP the covers t ]
    3. This is the book [ NP the covers of which ] I have designed t
     In some cases, pied-piping is obligatory, due to the Left Branch Condition. (Ross 1967) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
  2. (Syntax) The notion of "pied-piping" has been an integral part of all versions of the theory of generative grammar that assume transformational movements since it was first introduced by Ross (1986, from his 1967 dissertation). The term itself—attributed by Ross to Robin Lakoff—refers to the phenomenon whereby some particular movement operation T, designated to displace an element A, in fact displaces additional elements together with A. More specifically, pied-piping is involved when an application of T ends up moving some constituent B that properly contains A. Ross' Pied-Piping Convention was originally meant, for instance, to extend the application of the Relative Clause Formation transformation, so that it is able to move more than just the NP immediately dominating the relative pronoun in cases such as shown in (1)–(5), where (2), (3), and (4) represent, according to Ross (1986), instances of pied-piping by the relative wh-pronoun.
    1. reports [ which ] the government prescribes the height of the lettering on ...
    2. reports [ the covers of which ] the government prescribes the height of the lettering on ...
    3. reports the [ lettering on the covers of which ] the government prescribes the height of ...
    4. the boy [ whose guardian's employer ] we elected president
    5. * the boy [ whose ] we elected guardian's employer president
     From their inception until now the existence of pied-piping effects has uniformly been assumed in the literature, and the assumed pied-piping mechanism has provided a useful descriptive tool. | Julia Horvath, 2016

PILLAI SCORE
(Phonetics) Hay et al. (2006) introduced a method for estimating the extent of overlap between vowel categories which they referred to as the "Pillai score" (Pillai). They used this method in their analysis of near and square in New Zealand English. Kennedy (2006) subsequently used it to examine caught and foot before /l/ in New Zealand English. Hall-Lew (2009) and Wong and Hall-Lew (2014) used it for analyzing cot and caught in San Francisco and New York City. The Pillai score, formally known as the Pillai-Bartlett trace, is simply a statistic that is part of the output of a MANOVA model. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) is a type of ANOVA that models variation with respect to more than one dependent variable simultaneously, such as both F1 and F2. The higher the value of the Pillai statistic, the greater the difference between the two distributions with respect to these dependent variables. Each model also provides a measure of statistical significance, with a p value generated for each Pillai statistic that indicates whether the difference between clusters is significant.
 The Pillai does not represent distance so much as a more abstracted difference: Pillai score values range from 0 to 1 in all cases, with 0 indicating no difference between two clusters and 1 indicating no similarity. The Pillai score is directly drawn from a procedure that models F1 and F2 variation simultaneously—a feature which may be desirable or not. Although the set range of Pillai scores from 0 to 1 is useful for comparison across speakers (within a corpus), the Pillai values are not expressed in units that are easy to interpret. Linguists are more likely to prefer measures that represent the difference between two acoustic categories in perceptually meaningful terms, such as Hertz. | Jennifer Nycz and Lauren Hall-Lew, 2013

PITCH ACCENT

  1. (Prosody) A term used in the description of languages in which the distribution of the tones within a word is totally predictable once one has specified a particular tonal feature of the word (as in Japanese). The notion has also been applied to English, where some phonological models analyze intonation contours as a sequence of one or more pitch accents, each associated with a stress-prominent syllable in a word. | David Crystal, 2008
  2. (Prosody) Or, tonal accent. A distinction is made between stress accent and pitch accent. Stress accent refers to variation in loudness, while pitch accent refers to variation in musical pitch (frequency). English or German has stress accent. Japanese has only pitch accent, with an accent of rising pitch and another of falling pitch. | Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn, 2008

PITCH EXCURSION

  1. (Phonetics) A deviation in pitch, for example in the syllables of enthusiastic speech. | Wiktionary, 2023
  2. (Phonetics) While the experiments by 't Hart (1981) placed the issue of discriminability of F0 differences in a linguistic context, the listeners' task remained non-linguistic in the sense that they had to decide which item of a stimulus pair contained the larger pitch movement. Linguistically, the size of accent-lending F0 excursions would in general appear to correlate with the prominence of the accent. Accordingly, in our experiment, we decided to put 't Hart's claim that differences of less than 3.0 semitones (ST) do not play a role in speech to the test in a linguistically oriented task: one which required judges to decide which of two accents that varied in F0 excursion size was more prominent, choosing 1.5 ST as our smallest interval. As is well known, the relation between prominence and F0 excursion is confounded by overall intonation features. As Breckenridge and Liberman (1977) and Pierrehumbert (1979) have shown, the prominence impression of F0 excursions is a function of the serial position of the accent, later accents requiring smaller excursions than earlier ones, an effect which is generally attributed to declination (cf. Cohen, Collier and 't Hart, 1982).
     A separate, and arguably more important issue in the relation between differences in perceived prominence and F0 excursion size differences is that of the measure in which F0 differences should be expressed for the purposes of linguistic description. Some authors, e.g. Pierrehumbert (1979), Ladd (1983), and Liberman and Pierrehumbert (1984) present their data in Hertz, others, e.g. 't Hart & Collier (1975), Thorsen (1980), and 't Hart (1981) in ST. Expression of F0 data in ST would seem to do justice to the perception of pitch intervals: a jump from 150 to 300Hz is, musically, equal to one from 100 to 200Hz. On the other hand, there are also indications that a given semitone interval in a low frequency range does not have the same perceptual effect as the same interval (expressed in ST) in a higher frequency range. In a pilot study on the perceptual effect of F0 movements superimposed on a steeply descending baseline carried out by the first author, it was found that early movements created a stronger prominence impression than later movements with the same excursion in ST. Perhaps Stevens' remarks (1975) are relevant here:
    ... all musical intervals grow subjectively larger as frequency increases up to about four octaves above middle C. In other words, throughout the whole of what is usually called the musical range, intervals made up of equal frequency ratios (i.e. musical intervals) increase in perceived pitch extent with increasing frequency ... it is often thought that the musical scale based on frequency ratios is somehow a subjective scale. It is not.
     | A.C.M. Rietveld and C. Gussenhoven, 1985

PITCH RANGE

  1. (Phonetics) The range of values between the highest and lowest F0 values in a given stretch of speech. In a higher pitch range, both the peaks and the troughs are higher than in a lower pitch range. | Scott Myers, 1996
  2. (Phonetics) Refers to the upper and lower limits of a speaker's vocal pitch. | Pamela Rogerson-Revell, 2011

PIVOT
(Syntax) The syntactic pivot is the verb argument around which sentences "revolve" in a given language. This usually means the following:

 The first two characteristics have to do with simple morphosyntax, and from them, it is quite obvious the syntactic pivot in English (and most other European languages) is called the subject. An English verb cannot lack a subject (even in the imperative mood, the subject is implied to be you and is not ambiguous or unspecified) and cannot have just a direct object and no subject; and (at least in the present tense, and for the verb to be) it agrees partially with the subject.
 The third point deserves an explanation. Consider the following sentence:
  1. I shot the deer and killed it.
 There are two coordinated propositions, and the second proposition lacks an explicit subject, but since the subject is the syntactic pivot, the second proposition is assumed to have the same subject as the first one. One cannot do so with a direct object (in English). The result would be ungrammatical or have a different meaning:
  1. *I shot the deer and I killed.
  The syntactic pivot is a feature of the morphosyntactic alignment of the language. | Wikipedia, 2021

PLURACTIONALITY
(Grammar) Or, verbal number. If not used in its aspectual sense, a grammatical aspect that indicates that the action or participants of a verb is, or are, plural. This differs from frequentative or iterative aspects in that the latter have no implication for the number of participants of the verb.
 Often a pluractional transitive verb indicates that the object is plural, whereas in a pluractional intransitive verb the subject is plural. This is sometimes taken as an element of ergativity in the language. However, the essence of pluractionality is that the action of the verb is plural, whether because several people perform the action, it is performed on several objects, or it is performed several times. The exact interpretation may depend on the semantics of the verb as well as the context in which it is used. The lack of verbal number does not generally mean that the action and participants are singular, but rather that there is no particularly notable plurality; thus it may be better described as paucal vs. multiple rather than singular vs. plural.
 Although English does not have verbal number as a grammatical device, many English verbs such as stampede and massacre are used when one of the participants involves a large number. English also has a number of verbs (often ending in -le, such as nibble) which indicate repetitive actions, and this is similar to some types of grammatically-marked pluractionality in other languages. | Wikipedia, 2023

 

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