Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Sto-Stz

STOCHASTIC
(Statistics) From Greek Στόχος, 'aim' or 'guess'. Refers to the property of being well described by a random probability distribution (Lexico UK English Dictionary, 2020). Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselves, these two terms are often used synonymously. Furthermore, in probability theory, the formal concept of a stochastic process is also referred to as a random process (Adler and Taylor 2009, Stirzaker 2005, Chaumont and Yor 2012, Rosenblatt 1962, Kallenberg 2002).
 Non-deterministic approaches in language studies are largely inspired by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, for example, in functionalist linguistic theory, which argues that competence is based on performance (Newmeyer 2001, Bybee 1999). This distinction in functional theories of grammar should be carefully distinguished from the langue and parole distinction. To the extent that linguistic knowledge is constituted by experience with language, grammar is argued to be probabilistic and variable rather than fixed and absolute. This conception of grammar as probabilistic and variable follows from the idea that one's competence changes in accordance with one's experience with language. Though this conception has been contested (Chomsky 1959), it has also provided the foundation for modern statistical natural language processing (Manning and Schütze 1999) and for theories of language learning and change (Bybee 2007). | Wikipedia, 2023

STOCHASTIC O.T.
(Phonology) One influential approach to modeling linguistic variation in Optimality Theory is Stochastic OT (Boersma 1998; Boersma and Hayes 2001). In this framework, constraint rankings correspond to points on a number line. While the exact numerical values assigned to the constraints are arbitrary, a greater value corresponds to a higher ranking, and so domination relations between constraints can be represented numerically.
 Stochastic OT models variation by adding an element of unpredictability to the ranking relationships between constraints. In the grammar of a particular language, each constraint has an intrinsic and consistent ranking value. However, every time an input is mapped to an output by the grammar, the ranking value for each constraint is perturbed by a noise component (stated informally, for each constraint in the grammar, a small amount is added to or subtracted from the ranking value), resulting in a value known as the selection point for the constraint in question. The noise component is drawn from a normal distribution whose mean is the constraint's ranking value and whose standard deviation is some constant value, often set at 2.0 units by convention; each constraint's selection point will be within three standard deviations (±6.0 units) of the ranking value in more than 99% of all input-output mappings. Boersma and Hayes (2001) propose that all constraints have the same standard deviation for their noise distribution, because the noise function is part of the grammar as a whole and not the property of an individual constraint. The proposal that the noise distribution is the same for all constraints has crucial consequences for variation involving markedness scales. | Jennifer Smith and Elliott Moreton, 2011

STR-RETRACTION

  1. (Sociolinguistics; Phonology) Or, (str)-retraction. An ongoing sound change in English in which /s/ retracts towards [ʃ] in the context of a /str/ cluster. This change appears to be quite widespread, occurring across the US, UK, and New Zealand. (Durian 2007, Gylfadottir 2015, Lawrence 2000, Shapiro 1995) | E. Wilbanks, 2016
  2. (Sociolinguistics; Phonology) Some speakers of English have been reported to palatalize, or retract, /s/ before /t ɹ/, leading /s/ in this context to sound similar or identical to a palatal fricative [ʃ] (e.g., pronouncing street as [ʃt ɹit] or distract as [dɪʃt ɹækt]). Reports of retracted (str), as I will refer to this variable, have come from studies examining speakers in a range of English-speaking locations. This includes various places in the United States: from Georgia (Phillips 2001), southern Louisiana (Rutter 2011), and Columbus, Ohio (Durian 2007), to Philadelphia (Labov 1984), where it was first mentioned in the sociolinguistic literature. It has also been observed in the U.K. (Glain 2014), in location-specific studies of Estuary English (Bass 2009) and Cockney English (Altendorf 2003), as well as in New Zealand (Lawrence 2000). Most of these studies refer to retracted (str) as an innovative variant, and a few make direct claims about its status as a change in progress toward this pronunciation and away from standard /s/ in this context. | Duna Gylfadottir, 2015

STRESS ACCENT
See PITCH ACCENT.

STRICT INTERPRETATION
(Semantics) A wide range of expressions can be given more or less "strict interpretations", for example, flat and empty. Sometimes we use them in loose ways: when we say the fridge is empty, we don't mean it is an absolute vacuum. Sometimes we use these expressions intending to defer to the strict usage of relevant experts: when we say that an event is probable, we aim to invoke the concept as defined by experts on probability theory, even if we ourselves don't know exactly what that is.
 When we borrow an expression from a strict science, we may employ harmless-for-our-purposes simplifications that make our utterances, strictly speaking, false. We often use language this way: when describing my rheumatoid pain I may say that I have arthritis in my thigh, and it will be clear enough what I mean. But I aim to mean by arthritis what my doctor means, so if she informs me that it refers only to afflictions of the joints, I will adjust my usage. When we aim to use an expression as the experts do, but our everyday purposes aren't demanding, we often get by with uses that don't quite meet the strict standards. Call these cases of speaking strictly-enough. | Renée Jorgensen Bolinger and Alexander Sandgren, 2019

STRIDENT
(Phonology) This widely accepted feature, originally proposed by Jakobson (1939), was defined as follows by Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1952):

Strident phonemes are primarily characterized by a noise which is due to turbulence at the point of articulation. This strong turbulence, in its turn, is a consequence of a more complex impediment which distinguishes the strident from the corresponding mellow consonants: the labiodentals from the bilabials, the hissing and hushing sibilants from the nonsibilant dentals and palatals respectively, and the uvulars from the velars proper.
 This definition covers stops as well as fricatives. It thus distinguishes not only sibilant fricatives from corresponding nonsibilant fricatives, as in English sigh [s] vs. thigh [θ], but also sibilant affricates from corresponding nonsibilant stops, as in German reizen [ts] 'to tease' vs. reiten [t] 'to ride'. The feature [strident] has been maintained in one form or another in most subsequent work. | Hyunsoon Kim, George N. Clements, and Martine Toda, 2015

STRING-VACUOUS MOVEMENT
(Syntax) We tend to assume that most instances of wh-words will undergo this movement, even if it doesn't really look like it, as in this example:

  1. John kissed a frog.
  2. Who kissed a frog?
We tend to assume, for simplicity's sake, that it really looks like this, with a trace:
  1. Who t kissed a frog?
 When there's movement, but the sentence doesn't appear to have any movement going on, it is called "string-vacuous movement". The string of pronounced words hasn't seemed to change, but we still assume movement of some variety occurred, which may often be further teased out in different constructions. | r/linguistics, 2014

STRUCTURAL BORROWING

  1. (Morphology; Sociolinguistics) Or, morphostructural borrowing. The borrowing of abstract morphological schemata. In the strict sense of this term, the borrowing is limited to structures completely unattested in the recipient language.
     "Structural borrowing" in word-formation is defined here as the increase or decrease in frequency of use of an abstract word-formation schema caused by language contact and includes the new availability of a virtually unknown schema (i.e. a change from a null to a non-null frequency, or structural borrowing sensu stricto).
     A wide variety of changes is attested. From a qualitative standpoint, they do not affect the different recipient languages to the same extent. A qualitative cline of structural borrowing can be posited—from "minimal" to "slight", "moderate" and finally "heavy" change—depending on the relative degree to which the core of the word-formation system is affected. There is heavy restructuring when a process which used to be virtually unavailable emerges in the word-formation system, as in the case of lexical blending for a number of languages of Central and Eastern Europe. There is moderate restructuring in case of, for instance, positional innovation. This includes the appearance of prefixation (alongside suffixation) in Basque and of right-headed compounding (alongside left-headed compounding) in French and Italian. There is slight restructuring when the general form of a pattern is only marginally modified, as in Polish compounding, which now includes some new interfixless constructions. Finally, the change may be only minimal, when it does not have consequences on the forms of new outputs, as in the case of clipping in Polish. | Vincent Renner, 2018
  2. (Morphology) Structural factors that facilitate borrowing (cf. Moravcsik 1978, Field 2002) include:
    1. nouns > non-nouns, function words
    2. free morphemes > bound morphemes
    3. derivational morphology > inflectional morphology
    4. agglutinating affix > fusional affix
     | Yaron Matras, 2011

STRUCTURAL CASE

  1. (Grammar) Case which is assigned in a certain structural configuration, depending on government (and adjacency) only (as opposed to inherent case).
     It has been proposed that a verb assigns structural Accusative case to its NP complement, and that Nominative case is assigned by the finite inflection INFL to the canonical subject position [NP, IP]. More recently, structural case is identified with case assignment to the specifier in a specific kind of AGRP. (Chomsky 1986, 1991) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
  2. (Grammar) In the Principles-and-Parameters (P&P) model of grammar, nominative and accusative case are assigned to NPs that occupy specific positions in the syntactic structure at the level of S-structure: nominative is assigned by Infl to NPs in the specifier of IP, and accusative is assigned by V to its complement/sister NP (Chomsky 1981, 1986). This is why nominative and accusative are called "structural cases": they are assigned to whichever NP sits in the relevant structural position, regardless of the theta role it is assigned at D-structure, and regardless of what category assigns that theta role.
     P&P also differentiates the notions of structural and inherent case: structural case is dissociated from theta role assignment, but inherent case is indeed equivalent to it and can only be assigned by a theta role assigner to its assignee. Inherent case then correlates with thematic assignment, and therefore, there can be no dissociation between theta role and inherent case. This distinction between Case Theory and Theta Theory on the one hand, and between structural and inherent case on the other, is maintained in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995). What varies with respect to P&P are the structural positions where cases are checked: nominative and accusative case checking involve Spec-head relations with AgrS and AgrO respectively (Chomsky 1995). | Itziar Laka, 2006

STRUCTURAL IDENTITY
(Syntax) Under what circumstances can bits of a syntactic structure be said to be the same as or different from other bits of a syntactic structure? The answer that we give is that occurrences of expressions are syntactically the same just in case they are reconstructions of each other. The grounds on which expressions are identical in the sense of reconstructions are twofold.

  1. There must be lexical identity—they are composed of the same lexical expressions.
  2. There must be "structural identity"—the constituent elements that dominate the lexical expressions must be syntactically organized in the same way.
 That is, occurrences of expressions are reconstructions just because they have the same formal structure. Thus, in the sentence Max saw Harry, and Oscar saw Harry, too the verb phrases are reconstructions—there are two occurrences of the verb phrase saw Harry—but the subject noun phrases, for instance, are not reconstructions, since they are not lexically identical. | Robert Fiengo and Robert C. May, 1994

STRUCTURAL PRIMING

  1. (Psycholinguistics) Or, syntactic priming, or, structural repetition. The tendency for speakers to reuse recently experienced structures.
     Bock (1986) gave experimental participants pictures that can be described with either of the two kinds of dative structures (double objects, The woman handed the boy the paint brush, versus prepositional datives, The woman handed the paint brush to the boy). Participants described these pictures after saying an unrelated prime sentence that used either a double-object or prepositional dative structure.
     Priming was seen in the tendency for speakers to use the structure of the prime when describing the picture. Similar effects were seen for other structural alternations such as active transitive sentences (Lightning is striking the church) versus passives (The church is struck by lightning).
     The important aspect of this priming is that it appears to be the persistence of an abstract syntactically characterized structure (e.g., the frame: Noun_phrase Auxiliary_verb Main_verb Prepositional_phrase for a full passive), and not the lexical content of the utterance, its meaning, or its intonational properties (Bock and Loebell 1990). As such, structural priming provides evidence for a production process that uses structural abstractions during grammatical encoding. | Gary S. Dell and Cassandra L. Jacobs, 2016
  2. (Psycholinguistics) Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers make extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming", a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced (prime) sentence (Bock 1986). | Martin J. Pickering and Victor S. Ferreira, 2008
  3. (Psycholinguistics) The effect by which, in a dialogue, the current speaker tends to re-use the syntactic constructs of the previous speakers. SP has been used as a window into the nature of syntactic representations within and across languages. Because of its importance, it is crucial to understand the mechanisms behind it. Currently, two competing theories exist.
    1. According to the transient activation account, SP is driven by the re-activation of declarative memory structures that encode structures.
    2. According to the error-based implicit learning account, SP is driven by prediction errors while processing sentences.
     By integrating both transient activation and associative learning, Reitter et al.'s hybrid model (2011) assumes that SP is achieved by both mechanisms, and predicts a priming enhancement for rare or unusual constructions. Finally, a recently proposed account, the reinforcement learning account, claims that SP driven by the successful application of procedural knowledge will be reversed when the prime sentence includes grammatical errors. These theories make different assumptions about the representation of syntactic rules (declarative vs. procedural) and the nature of the mechanism that drives priming (frequency and repetition, attention, and feedback signals, respectively). | Yuxue C. Yang, Ann Marie Karmol, and Andrea Stocco, 2021
  4. (Psycholinguistics) Producers have a conspicuous tendency to reuse recently executed utterance plans, so that the likelihood that a speaker utters a passive sentence, for example, increases if that speaker has recently heard, read, or uttered another passive sentence (Weiner and Labov 1983, Ferreira and Bock 2006). This tendency toward Plan Reuse (also called structural persistence or syntactic priming) persists over time and over other intervening utterances. The effect is argued to be not (or not only) the temporary activation of recent plans but rather a manifestation of long-term implicit learning of syntactic structure (cf. Branigan et al. 1999, Chang et al. 2006). On this view, language users are continually learning from their and others' language use; with every utterance, a syntactic plan becomes more likely to be used in the future. Thus, while the phenomenon is often described as one of short-term repetition, its learning basis links it to retrieval from long-term memory. | Maryellen C. MacDonald, 2013

STRUCTURAL TRANSLATION
See METAPHRASE.

STYLE

  1. (Sociolinguistics) A set of linguistic variants with specific social meanings. In this context, social meanings can include group membership, personal attributes, or beliefs. Linguistic variation is at the heart of the concept of linguistic "style"—without variation there is no basis for distinguishing social meanings. Variation can occur syntactically, lexically, and phonologically.
     Many approaches to interpreting and defining style incorporate the concepts of indexicality, indexical order, stance-taking, and linguistic ideology. Note that a style is not a fixed attribute of a speaker. Rather, a speaker may use different styles depending on context. Additionally, speakers often incorporate elements of multiple styles into their speech, either consciously or subconsciously, thereby creating a new style. | Wikipedia, 2021
  2. (Sociolinguistics) Broadly speaking, "style" refers to the way that individual speakers vary their language in response to different aspects of the social situation.
     Early sociolinguistic accounts of style were taxonomic, detailing the many factors known to affect individual variation, such as topic, setting, or channel. With the advent of variationist research, style became quantifiable and measurable: crucially, William Labov's pioneering work showed that when stylistic variation was seen in conjunction with social variation, much of what had previously been considered free variation was in fact systematically structured. Social variation was analyzed as variation between groups—typically distinguished on the basis of gender, social class, age, and ethnicity—and a clear distinction was drawn between social and stylistic variation.
     Recent variationist work, however, gives more attention to speaker agency and the creative aspect of language use, focusing on how individuals exploit socially patterned variation to create a range of identities and to define and redefine the situation. As Eckert and Rickford state in their introduction, many researchers now see the borders between social and stylistic constraints on variation as highly permeable, and find the areas of overlap increasingly interesting. | Jenny Cheshire, 2007

STYLE-SHIFTING

  1. (Sociolinguistics) Refers to a single speaker changing style in response to context. As noted by Eckert and Rickford (2001), in sociolinguistic literature the terms style and register sometimes have been used interchangeably. Also, various connotations of style are a subject of study in stylistics.
     "Style-shifting" is a manifestation of intraspeaker (within-speaker) variation, in contrast with interspeaker (between-speakers) variation. It is a voluntary act which an individual effects in order to respond to or initiate changes in sociolinguistic situation (e.g., interlocutor-related, setting-related, topic-related). | Wikipedia, 2021
  2. (Sociolinguistics) One of the earliest characterizations of "style-shifting"—how people vary their way of speaking from moment to moment—was in terms of attention paid to speech in a given moment. This view asserted that reduced attention to speech often corresponded to the use of a less self-conscious, less prestige-oriented, vernacular style (Labov 1966). Later approaches included a wider range of interpersonal social dynamics and identity projection (e.g., Bell 1984, Coupland 1985, Schilling-Estes 2002, Eckert 2008), and these models are now seen by some as having "very largely supplanted the attention to speech explanation" (Coupland 2007). | Devyani Sharma and Kathleen McCarthy, 2018

STYLISTIC FRONTING

  1. (Syntax) A leftwards movement of adverbs (negation and sentence medial adverbs), participles, verb particles, PPs and DPs into a position that precedes the finite verb. | Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, 2004
  2. (Syntax) An optional movement process, found in Icelandic, of a word or a phrase into a phonological subject gap and it is associated with formal style (Maling 1980). The contrast between (1), without SF, and (2), with SF, illustrates the optionality. The relative clause has a subject gap and thus SF can apply and move the non-finite main verb in front of the finite auxiliary.
    1. Bækur
      books
      [CP
      [CP
      sem
      that
      eru
      are
      lesmar
      read
      til
      for
      skemmtunar]
      entertainment]
      eru
      are
      bestar.
      best
      'Books that are read for entertainment are the best ones.'
    2. Bækur
      books
      [CP
      [CP
      sem
      that
      lesnar
      read
      eru
      are
      til
      for
      skemmtunar]
      entertainment]
      eru
      are
      bestar.
      best
      'Books that are read for entertainment are the best ones.'
     | Lilja Björk Stefánsdóttir and Anton Karl Ingason, 2018

STYLISTIC REGISTER

  1. (Sociolinguistics) Among the many judgments that native speakers of English can make in word choice, they have intuitions about "stylistic registers"; they know, for instance, that the phrase henceforth the parties agree is very formal, but c'mon, guys is very colloquial. They also know that the former phrase can be used in official (e.g., legal) documents, but not with friends or family, while the latter is unlikely to appear in an academic paper. Understanding this stylistic distinction does not just help us decide what to say and when. It helps us decipher people, offering clues as to who might be a pompous bureaucrat, overusing formal vocabulary in inappropriate situations; who might be a cheerful, formality-eschewing hipster; etc. Knowing about stylistic registers helps us interpret people's linguistic behavior. | Nila Friedberg, 2021
  2. (Sociolinguistics) Or, style register. To find the appropriate words for the speaker's ideas. Rhetorical figures shape the speech and form the stylistic relevance of the discussed topics. There is no unique style that fits all the situations and no "stylistic register" that is appropriate for every audience.
     The last but not least constituent of persuasion is performance—intonation and body language bond the speaker with the audience. So stylistic register is formed under the influence of communicative situation, and it affects the organization of verbal and nonverbal argumentation, the semantics, syntax, and pragmatics of communication. | Iryna Voloshchuk and Galyna Usyk, 2018

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