Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Verba-Vov

VERBAL FIXED OR IDIOMATIC EXPRESSION
(Grammar) Abbreviated VID. A word sequence which constitutes a distinct semantic unit or a complex lexical unit; characterized as having a compound phonological, lexical, and morphological structure and a non-compositional meaning (Gross 1982). | Voula Giouli, 2023

VERBAL IDIOM

  1. (Grammar) A group of words containing a verb that has a different meaning from the meaning of any individual word within it.
    1. The doctor broke the news to the family that my grandmother had cancer.
     In (1) broke the news is an idiom that means telling someone about some important new information. So broke the news is not that someone divided news into parts violently. | Hakim Siahaan and Japen Sarage, 2019
  2. (Grammar) For the purpose of this paper, we define "verbal idioms" as verb phrases whose meaning is idiomatic and cannot be derived compositionally from the literal meaning of the idiom parts. Verbal idioms thus pose problems for natural language systems, and especially machine translation systems, where the entire phrase may have a noncompositional gloss. For example, in the system presented in this paper, the French idiom prendre en charge has been variously translated word for word (and therefore incorrectly) as 'take in load' or 'seize in load', when the correct translation in our technical context is 'support'.
     Other examples include faire partie de ('belong'), translated by 'make part' in some instances, arriver à expiration ('expire'), translated by 'get expiration', avoir besoin de ('need') translated by 'have need', etc. These verbal idioms are very common, and are typically translated very poorly. | Martine Smets, Joseph Pentheroudakis and Arul Menezes, 2002

VERBAL MULTI-WORD EXPRESSION
Typology for annotation:

 | Agata Savary, 2023

VERIDICALITY

  1. (Semantics) A semantic or grammatical assertion of the truth of an utterance.
     Merriam-Webster defines veridical as 'truthful', 'veracious' and 'non illusory'. It stems from the Latin veridicus, composed of Latin verus 'true' and dicere 'to say'. For example, the statement Paul saw a snake asserts the truthfulness of the claim, while Paul did see a snake is an even stronger assertion.
     The formal definition of veridicality views the context as a propositional operator (Giannakidou 1998).
    1. A propositional operator F is veridical iff Fp entails p, that is, Fp → p; otherwise F is nonveridical.
    2. Additionally, a nonveridical operator F is antiveridical iff Fp entails not p, that is, Fp → ¬p.
     For temporal and aspectual operators, the definition of veridicality is somewhat more complex:  Negation is veridical, though of opposite polarity, sometimes called antiveridical: Paul didn't see a snake asserts that the statement Paul saw a snake is false. | Wikipedia, 2023

VERLAN

  1. (Morphology) French pronunciation [vɛʁlɑ̃]. A type of argot in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words (Lefkowitz 1991). The word verlan itself is an example of verlan (making it an autological word). It is derived from inverting the sounds of the syllables in l'envers ([lɑ̃vɛʁ], 'the inverse', frequently used in the sense of 'back-to-front').
     Words in verlan are formed by switching the order in which syllables from the original word are pronounced. For example, français [fʁɑ̃sɛ] becomes céfran [sefʁɑ̃].
     Verlan generally retains the pronunciation of the original syllables. However, French words that end in an e muet (such as femme [fam]) and words that end in a pronounced consonant (such as flic [flik]) gain the sound [œ] once reversed. In addition, verlan often drops the final vowel sound after the word is inverted, so femme and flic become meuf ([mœf] - meufa in full form) and keuf ([kœf] - keufli in full form), respectively.
     The study of written verlan is difficult as it is primarily passed down orally, without standardized spelling. | Wikipedia, 2023
  2. (Sociolinguistics) I soon became aware that the sounds I was hearing were not French, but rather Verlan. What exactly is Verlan? According to Sherzer (1976), Verlan is a subcategory of speech play in the form of a play language involving syllable inversion, and varying in complexity according to the number of syllables in a word. The term Verlan is a metathesis of l'envers 'backwards', i.e. l'envers → versl'en → verlan.
     Verlan as a spoken phenomenon origininates in the working class immigrant-populated northern suburbs of Paris known as La Zone, and manages to cross social class boundaries. Many of these immigrants speak neither French nor their parents' language well, and have never even seen Paris. They are caught between societies and have been forced to create their own culture; one based on music, bandes dessinées 'comic strips', and Verlan, in an attempt to validate the culture of the banlieue 'suburb'. | Natalie Lefkowitz, 1991

VERNACULAR

  1. (Sociolinguistics) A form of language first-learned, most perfectly acquired, which we use automatically and unthinkingly in conversation with family and intimate friends. | William Labov, 2013
  2. (Sociolinguistics) In daily communication, people use different language varieties when contacting each other depending on different social contexts determined by factors such as participants, the setting and the topic. The use of different language varieties bears different functions or social significance. Generally, the more formal the language between participants is, the more distant their relationship; the more informal the language between participants is, the more intimate their relationship.  In nearly every speech community, there exists a certain vernacular language. Vernacular language is indigenous, native or local, spoken either by a rural or urban speech community, or by a lower social class; it is informal, or casual, or the least standardized; it is contrastively used with standard language; it is uncodified, but when there is a need, it is codified through the use of the dominant language, i.e., usually the standard language; its existence relies heavily on the dominant language; it is usually acquired as a first variety in the home; it is featured by colloquialisms, vulgarisms, substandard forms, and slang. There are hundreds of vernacular languages throughout the world, there. Vernacular languages, often used for a relatively narrow range of informal functions, include ethnic or tribal languages which are usually the first languages learned by people from those ethnic or tribal groups. The most typical example of vernacular language is Black English Vernacular in America. Vernacular language is even used by some writers in their literary works—Mark Twain in his The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Dante in his Divine Comedy. Vernacular language may become a standard language if standard language becomes outdated or is abandoned by the public. It is indispensable in daily communication as it is complementary to standard language. It can never be regarded as sub-standard or inadequate, however, as it is an important language variety. | Li Ming, 2020
  3. (Examples)

VERUM FOCUS

  1. (Information Structure) A phenomenon which results from accentuation of a specific component (finite verb, complementizer, relative or wh-element) in the left peripheral position of a clause. It invokes the effect of emphasizing the expression of truth of a proposition as Höhle (1988, 1992), who coined the term, characterized the phenomenon. In German, verum focus typically appears in the left periphery in main as well as in embedded clauses. | Horst Lohnstein, 2018
  2. (Information Structure) "Emphasiz[ing] or insist[ing] on the truth or falsity" of the proposition expressed by the speaker's utterance. (Romero and Han 2004)
     Focusing on intonational stress on polarity elements, Gutzmann and Castroviejo Miró (2011) propose that verum focus conveys the not-at-issue or use-conditional instruction that addresses the Question Under Discussion (QUD) (cf. Ginzburg 1996, Roberts 1996), which are the set of issues about the world that the participants in the discourse wish to resolve. Specifically, verum focus in an utterance indicates that the addressee should use the utterance to resolve the maximal, or most immediate, question in the QUD. Gutzmann and Castroviejo Miró suggest that this analysis accounts for the infelicity of utterances with verum focus in out-of-the-blue scenarios, as there is no maximal question in the QUD in such scenarios. | Junwen Lee, 2009
  3. (Information Structure) We think that the concept of "verum focus" should be abandoned, as it was partially motivated by the superficial similarity between verum and focus marking in languages like German and English.
     What is called "verum focus" is not focus, but just a way to mark verum. | Daniel Gutzmann, Katharina Hartmann, and Lisa Matthewson, 2020

VOCALISM

  1. (Phonology) The vowel sounds used in a language. | Wiktionary, 2023
  2. (Phonology; Morphology) 
    1. The vowel system of a language or dialect.
    2. The pattern of vowels in a word or paradigm.
     | Merriam-Webster, ?
  3. (Phonology; Phonetics) 
    1. The system of vowels peculiar to a given language, dialect, etc.
    2. A vocalic sound; vowel.
     | Collins Dictionary, ?
  4. (Examples)

VOICE ONSET TIME
(Phonetics) Abbreviated VOT. The duration of the period of time between the release of a plosive and the beginning of vocal fold vibration. This period is usually measured in milliseconds (ms). It is useful to distinguish at least three types of VOT:

  1.  Zero VOT: where the onset of vocal fold vibration coincides (approximately) with the plosive release.
  2.  Positive VOT: where there is a delay in the onset of vocal fold vibration after the plosive release.
  3.  Negative VOT: where the onset of vocal fold vibration precedes the plosive release.
 | SIPhTrA Tutorial on Plosives, ?

VOICE QUALITY

  1. (Phonetics) The essence of speech production. It is the source of voicing formed by vibrations in the larynx, or the noise of air coming through the glottis, and it defines the sound of a person's voice as the airstream is modified through the laryngeal articulator, through the oral vocal tract, and past the lips. | John H. Esling and Scott R. Moisik, 2021
  2. (Phonetics) In its broadest theoretical sense as a phonetic descriptor of accent, refers to the long-term characteristics of a person's voice—the more or less permanent, habitually recurring, proportionately frequent characteristics of a person's speech patterns (Abercrombie 1967, Laver 1980). A parallel term denoting how we recognize a person's voice is long-term quality (Nolan 1983). As a property of accent, voice quality refers to all of the habitual, long-term background, or holistic characteristics perceived as the most constant or persistent over time in a person's speech.
     Perceptually, it is the longest-term phonetic strand of the aural medium for language. The other two strands, the voice dynamics (prosodic) strand and the segmental strand, are progressively shorter term. Segments (vowels and consonants) last for tens or hundreds of milliseconds, voice dynamics (e.g. intonation) components can occur over a stretch of syllables or words, while voice quality, as Abercrombie (1967) put it, "refers to those characteristics which are present more or less all the time that a person is talking: it is a quasi-permanent quality running through all the sound" of a person's speech. | John H. Esling, Scott R. Moisik, Allison Benner, and Lise Crevier-Buchman, 2019
  3. (Phonetics) Refers to the long-term phonetic characteristics of a person's accent, although the term is also used in a narrower sense for the type of phonation produced in the larynx. | John H. Esling, 2012

VOLITIONAL UNDERGOER

  1. (Semantics) 
    1. Biblical Hebrew
      ʔîš
      man
      ʔim
      mother
      -mô
      -PRS.M.3SG
      wə
      CONJ
      ʔāv
      father
      -îw
      -PRS.M.3SG
      tîrā
      fear.IMPF
      -ʔû
      -M.2PL
      'Everyone shall fear his father and mother' (Leviticus 19:3)
     The sentence in (1) is minimally transitive because the syntactic object is not affected by the event. By contrast, the subject is volitional and affected, thereby labelled Volitional Undergoer. In Role and Reference Grammar the verb would be seen as a stative, non-causative verb. | Christian Canu Højgaard, 2019
  2. (Semantics) Åshild Næss (2007) defines agents as volitional instigators and patients as affected participants. This definition is far from new, but according to the Maximally Distinguished Arguments Hypothesis (MDAH), these categories are defined by the properties / features—volitionality, instigation, and affectedness—assigned the values "+" or "−". An Agent participant is thus defined as being +Volitional or [+VOL], and +Instigating or [+INST], while a Patient is defined as +Affected or [+AFF]. In addition, by the MDAH, each of the categories receives the value "−" for the defining property / properties of the opposing category, so that a complete definition of the category Agent is [+VOL, +INST, −AFF], and of Patient [−VOL, −INST, +AFF]. This definition is a feature-based definition of the Agent and Patient categories.
     Other participant types:  Volitional undergoers have the same semantic feature specification as experiencers and beneficiaries, and would be expected to receive similar formal encoding. Volitional Undergoer is used as a cover term for all participant types characterizable as above. | Jaehoon Yeon, 2008

 

Page Last Modified April 7, 2024

 
 B a c k   T o   I n d e x