RENDAKU
See SEQUENTIAL VOICING.

REPETITIVE COORDINATOR
(Syntax) In Japanese, for example, coordination can be constructed with particles such as to 'and,' mo 'and,' and ka 'or'. Examples below consist of the coordinators and their repetitive coordinators, which are generally assumed to be similar to correlative coordinators such as both and either in English.

1.	2.	3.
A mo B mo	A to B to	A ka B ka
A CONJ B RC-mo	A CONJ B RC-to	A DISJ B RC-ka
'A and B'	'A and B'	'A or B'

RESPONSE-STANCE VERB
Not all attitude verbs have a semantics on which their clausal complement is just predicated of the attitudinal object associated with the event argument of the verb. With one class of attitude verbs, the clausal complement in addition serves as a predicate of a contextually given attitudinal object, which gives further support for the semantics of attitude reports based on attitudinal objects. The class of verbs consists in what Cattell (1978) called "response-stance verbs" and includes repeat, confirm, agree, and remind, as in the sentences below:

1. John repeated that it will rain.
2. John confirmed that it was raining.
3. John agreed to surrender.
4. John reminded Mary to return the keys.

RESPONSIVE PREDICATE
(Syntax) A clause-embedding predicate like English know and guess that can take both declarative and interrogative clausal complements. The meanings of RPs when they take a declarative complement and when they take an interrogative complement are hypothesized to be constrained in systematic ways.
  Since Karttunen (1977), a major question for the semantics of question-embedding is the relationship between the interpretation of a given RP when it embeds a declarative complement (e.g., Jo knows that it is raining) and when it embeds an interrogative complement (e.g., Jo knows whether it is raining). | Mora Maldonado, Jennifer Culbertson, and Wataru Uegaki, 2022

RESTRICTED QUANTIFIER
(Semantics) A quantifier is restricted if it ranges over things of a specified sort. It is unrestricted if it ranges over the entire domain.
  In the formal language of logic, we write the restriction or sort indicator after the variable(s) inside parentheses. That is, to restrict to things satisfying a description A, we write ∀(x: A) B or ∃(x: A) B. For unrestricted quantifiers, the restriction is omitted, and of course the parentheses are not needed, so we write ∀x B or ∃x B.
  For the universal and existential quantifiers (and for numerical quantifiers generally) it is possible to translate between the two notations. ∀(x: Fx) Gx is equivalent to ∀x(Fx → Gx), and ∃(x: Fx) Gx is equivalent to ∃x(Fx ∧ Gx). Conversely, ∀x Fx is equivalent to ∀(x: Fx → Fx) Fx or more briefly to ∀(x: ¬Fx) Fx, while ∃x Fx is equivalent to ∃(x: Fx → Fx) Fx or more briefly to ∃(x: Fx) Fx.
  Examples:

1. To say Every goat is hairy with a restricted quantifier, write ∀(x: Gx) Hx. To say the same thing with an unrestricted quantifier, write ∀x(Gx → Hx).
2. To say Some footballer is hairy with a restricted quantifier, write ∃(x: Fx) Hx. To say the same thing with an unrestricted quantifier, write ∃x(Fx ∧ Hx).

RESULTATIVE
(Syntax) A resultative is a phrase that indicates the state of a noun resulting from the completion of the verb. In English:

1. John licked his plate clean.
2. Mary painted the fence blue.
3. The cold weather froze the lake solid.

4. Passive: The well was drained dry.
5. Unaccusative: The door swung open.

6. Gordon laughed himself helpless.
7. The child screamed itself hoarse.

RESUMPTIVE PRONOUN
(Syntax) A personal pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent after a pause or interruption (such as an embedded clause, series of adjectives, or a wh-island).

1. This is the girl_i that whenever it rains she_i cries.

REVERSATIVE VERB
(Morphology) Prefixed verbs like unload, disconnect, desegregate, and German entfallen, entladen, desinfizieren are called "reversative" verbs because of the apparent semantic effect of the prefix: it somehow "reverses" the meaning of the base verb. The notion of reversative verbs (or prefixes) has been elaborated mainly in word-formation analysis. | Wolf-Peter Funk, 1988

REVERSE PSEUDO-CLEFT
(Grammar) In reverse-pseudo cleft sentences, the focus is placed at the beginning, unlike the other cleft sentences.

Structure: X (focus point) + to be verb + WH clause

1. Cleft: What I gifted him was a racing car.
   Reverse cleft: A racing car is what I gifted him.
2. Cleft: We need your support.
   Reverse cleft: Your support is what we need.
3. Cleft: What I have been looking for is a tech guy.
   Reverse cleft: A tech guy is what I have been looking for.
4. Cleft: What he is asking for the project is 2 crores.
   Reverse cleft: 2 crores is what he is asking for.

REVERSIBLE PASSIVE

1. (Syntax) A passive with two animate arguments. | ?
2. (Syntax) In reversible passive constructions, the subject can be exchanged with the agent in the by-phrase and still leave a correct logical sentence. In nonreversible passive constructions, the subject can not be exchanged with the agent in the by-phrase and still leave a correct logical sentence. | Rochester Institute of Technology, undated

REVERTIVE MOTION
(Semantics) An event of motion where the entity retraces the path of some previous motion event to arrive at the former starting location of the previous motion. It roughly translates as 'going back'.
  Perambulative revertive motion describes an event of motion where the entity returns to the starting location of some previous motion event. It differs from linear revertive motion in that the path of the revertive motion event ε₁ is not the same as the path of the (presupposed) previous motion event ε₀, and roughly translates as 'going back around' or as the verb 'circle'. | James A. Crippen, 2019

REVISED HIERARCHY MODEL

1. (Acquisition) The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart 1994), the RHM, was initially proposed to account for observed asymmetries in translation performance by late bilinguals who acquired the second language (L2) after early childhood and for whom the first language (L1) remains the dominant language. The RHM effectively merged the alternative models of word association and concept mediation described by Potter, So, Von Eckardt, and Feldman (1984) into a single developmental model.
    The RHM explained longer translation latencies from L1 to L2 (forward translation) than from L2 to L1 (backward translation) as an underlying asymmetry in the strength of the links between words and concepts in each of the bilingual's languages. The L1 was hypothesized to have privileged access to meaning, whereas the L2 was thought to be more likely to require mediation via the L1 translation equivalent until the bilingual acquired sufficient skill in the L2 to access meaning directly. On this account, translation from L2 to L1 could be accomplished lexically, without semantic access, if the L2 word enabled lexically mediated retrieval of the translation. In contrast, L1 to L2 translation would necessarily be semantically mediated because of the strong L1 link to meaning. Evidence for the proposed asymmetry was reported in a series of experiments that showed that forward translation, from L1 to L2, was more likely to engage semantics than backwards translation, from L2 to L1 (e.g., Kroll and Stewart 1994, Sholl, Sankaranarayanan, and Kroll 1995). | Judith F. Kroll, Janet G. van Hell, Natasha Tokowicz, and David W. Green, 2010
2. (Acquisition) The Common Store Model implied that a bilingual's two lexicons have access to one common conceptual store (McCormack 1977). Successive versions of this model, called "Revised Hierarchy Models" (Kroll and Stewart 1994, Kroll and De Groot 1997), suggest that links between the lexicons and the common store, as well as the links between the lexicons themselves, have differential strength depending on the stages of bilingual fluency (Heredia 1997).
    For both beginning and fluent bilinguals, of course, the first language lexicon would have strong direct links to the conceptual store. A beginning bilingual speaking his or her second language would have very weak links to the conceptual store and would access it primarily via translation through the first language lexicon. Very fluent bilinguals would have direct access to the conceptual store from either of their languages and would rely infrequently on translation strategies between the lexicons. Recent evidence, however, may indicate that conceptual access is implicated for all bilinguals beyond very initial stages of second language development (De Groot and Poot 1997). | Robert W. Schrauf and David C. Rubin, 1998

RHOTACIZATION
(Phonology) Rhotacism (American English Dictionary 2013) or "rhotacization" is a sound change that converts one consonant (usually a voiced alveolar consonant: /z/, /d/, /l/, or /n/) to a rhotic consonant in a certain environment. The most common may be of /z/ to /r/ (Catford 2001). When a dialect or member of a language family resists the change and keeps a /z/ sound, this is sometimes known as zetacism. | Wikipedia, 2022

RICHNESS OF THE BASE

1. (Optimality Theory) Unlike its ancestor theories, OT models phonological generalizations completely at the surface. The assumption that no grammatical restrictions are stated at the level of lexical representation is called "Richness of the Base" (Prince and Smolensky 1993, Smolensky 1996, Smolensky, Davidson, and Jusczyk 2004). | Lisa Davidson, Peter Jusczyk, and Paul Smolensky, 2004
2. (Optimality Theory) OT supposes that there are no language-specific restrictions on the input. This is called "richness of the base". Every grammar can handle every possible input. | Wikipedia, 2018

RIGHT NODE RAISING

1. (Syntax) There is a construction involving coordination, "Right-Node Raising" (RNR; Ross 1967), that has long been known to be insensitive to conjunctinternal islands:
   1. [John met the man who wrote __] and [Mary met the woman who published __] the recent bestseller about bats.
    In addition to island insensitivity, RNR has the property that rightmost within each conjunct is a gap associated with the shared material. | Asaf Bachrach and Roni Katzir, 2007
2. (Syntax) An operation of reduction on coordinated clauses whose rightmost constituents are identical.
    RNR derives the structure in (2) from the underlying structure in (1) by adjoining one copy of the identical constituents (the book) to the right of the sentence, and deleting the identical originals (indicated by e).
   1. [[John saw the book] and [Bill bought the book]]
   2. [[John saw e_i ] and [Bill bought e_i ]] the book_i
    (Postal 1974) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

RIGHT UPWARD/DOWNWARD MONOTONICITY
See MONOTONICITY.

RNRI PRINCIPLE
(Semantics) An empirical generalization (Krifka 2007, 2011) which simply states that round numbers tend to get round interpretations. In contrast, non-round numbers always obligatorily get a precise interpretation.
 As for their semantics, it seems that and-a-half phrases indicate an interval/set of values around the Numeral computed in the phrase. Now, let φ be a sentence containing an and-a-half numeral expression α and let β be the actual value that α approximates; then the desired truth/felicity condition is as follows: φ is true/felicitous just in case when β is sufficiently close to [|α|]. By sufficiently close we want the difference between the denotation of and-a-half expression [|α|] and β to be contextually ignorable, which is to say that β falls in this set of values associated with α. | Shaunak Phadnis, 2022

ROOT
(Semantics) Idiosyncratic component of meaning, characterized by an ontological type, chosen from a fixed set of options (e.g., state, result state, thing, stuff, location, manner); the set of roots is in principle open-ended. Not to be confused with the notion of "root" used in morphology. | Beth Levin, 2009

ROOT COMPOUND

1. (Morphology) Are formed when two existing words are simply joined together, without any extra morpheme, to create a novel word. For example, a barn that is used only for horses may be called a horse barn. These invented words are known as novel "root compounds". | Bernard Grela, William Snyder, Kazuko Hiramatsu, 2004
2. (Morphology) Mandarin has many compound-like expressions which seem to be derived directly from (non-word) roots. For example, yi, the root of the word ma yi 'ant', occurs in many derived words, including gong yi 'worker ant'. It seems reasonable to analyze these constructions as compounds, yet traditional theories of compounding as well as recent work on Mandarin morphology (Dai 1992) have assumed that true compounding is word-based. Dai further implies that only true compounding is productive and that what we shall term "root compounding" is unproductive, thus apparently strengthening the distinction between the two types.
    We show, using a corpus-based measure of morphological productivity due to Baayen (1989), that many nominal roots in fact productively form root compounds; thus, at least on the basis of productivity, there is no compelling reason to consider word and root compounding as distinct morphological processes. | Richard Sproat and Chilin Shih, 1996

RULE INVERSION
(Grammar) A grammar state with a configuration of underlying forms and rules representing the inverse of the former state. | Jennifer Hay and Andrea Sudbury, 2005

RULE/LIST FALLACY
(Grammar) Most linguistics models adopt what Taylor (2012) has called a dictionary and grammar perspective on language: everything that is idiosyncratic and non-computable is stored in the dictionary and everything that is computable is regulated by the grammar that typically is regarded as devoid of meaning.
 The cognitive definition of grammar as an inventory of form-meaning pairs actually goes against such a view, saying not only that grammatical patterns are inherently meaningful, but also that the existence of a more general pattern (a "rule") does not exclude storage of instances of these patterns with their (possibly particular) meaning. Langacker has called this the "rule/list fallacy": it is not necessarily so that because something is regular or computable, it is not, or cannot, be stored. Quite the contrary, it turns out that full compositionality is rare and that speakers store much more than is often assumed. | Maarten Lemmens, 2015

Page Last Modified October 8, 2023

 

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