Sank's Glossary of Linguistics
Io-Jz |
IP
See INFLECTIONAL PHRASE, INTONATIONAL PHRASE.
IRONY COMPREHENSION
- (Pragmatics) Comprehending an ironic remark requires:
- Detecting the speaker's meaning, which is typically the opposite of the sentence's meaning.
- Inferring the speaker's mocking attitude.
(Winner 1997) | Francesca Panzeri and Beatrice Giustolisi, 2017
- (Acquisition) Comprehending irony is a complex task: typically-developing children start recognizing what the speaker meant (typically the opposite of what was said) at approximately six years of age, with ironic criticisms (the more frequent form of irony) being understood earlier and better than ironic compliments. Irony comprehension has been linked to Theory of Mind abilities, which are in turn predicted by language competence, and with a possible role of social experiences to account for the asymmetry between criticisms and compliments. | Francesca Panzeri, Beatrice Giustolisi, and Laura Zampini, 2020
IRREALIS
- (Grammar) In many languages, particularly the Native American languages and those of Papua New Guinea, mood is described in terms of the grammatical markers of realis and irrealis. Although the distinction is basically the same as that between indicative and subjunctive, both being markers of the typological categories Realis and Irrealis, there are differences, and there is not always a clear distinction between them.
There are basically two ways in which realis and irrealis markers function:
- In some languages their main function is to co-occur with other grammatical categories. E.g., in Amele (Papuan, Roberts 1994) an irrealis marker is required whenever a future marker is present in the sentence.
- In other languages they mainly occur in isolation and are themselves the only markers of specific notional categories. E.g., in another Papuan language, Muyuw (Bugenhagen 1994, quoting a personal communication), the irrealis marker is itself the indication of future.
| F.R. Palmer, 2001
- (Grammar) Many languages have been described as systematically distinguishing between utterances relating to actual events and utterances referring to future, hypothetical, or counterfactual scenarios. This phenomenon is usually characterized as a distinction between realis and irrealis mood (where mood means 'verb mood' as opposed to 'sentence mood'). This is illustrated by the following examples:
- Nanti (Arawak) (Michael 2014)
a.
o=pok-ø-i
3.NONM.SBJ=come-IPFV-REAL.I
maika
now
'She is coming now.'
b.
o=n-pok-ø-e
3.NONM.SBJ=IRR-come-IPFV-IRR.I
kamani
tomorrow
'She will come tomorrow.'
| Kilu von Prince, Ana Krajinović, and Manfred Krifka, 2022
ISLAND
- (Syntax) J.R. Ross (1967) introduced the term island to refer to constructions that do not allow a wh- phrase to "escape" from them (that is, metaphorically speaking, the wh- phrase is marooned on the island). Besides complement clauses to nouns, Ross identified several other types of islands:
- Indirect questions.
- Relative clauses.
- Sentential subjects.
- Possessive noun phrases.
- Coordinate structures.
| Beatrice Santorini and Anthony Kroch, 2007
- (Syntax) A part of a sentence out of which words and phrases cannot be moved. Words and phrases are often moved around in a sentence. For example, when forming a question from a declarative sentence, the wh-word (who, what, where, when, etc.) moves to the front of the sentence:
- Mary will see an actor.
→ Which actor will Mary see?
- You claimed that Mary saw an actor.
→ Which actor did you claim that Mary saw?
However, words cannot move out of islands. For example, the question in (3) is unacceptable because it would require the wh-word to move out of an island, indicated by square brackets:
- You believed [the claim that Mary saw an actor].
→ * Which actor did you believe [the claim that Mary saw]?
| Yale Grammatical Diversity Project
- (Syntax) The three kinds of islands we have seen are adjunct islands, wh-islands, and DP islands (aka Complex Noun Phrase islands).
An island, somewhat pretheoretically, is a constituent that "traps" things from moving out of them. The idea is that something that is in (on) an island cannot escape, cannot be moved away.
So, adjuncts constitute one example of an island. If you have a complex clausal adjunct, such as if John buys a coffee, it will be adjoined to TP in a sentence like I will eat my hat if John buys a coffee. Suppose that you want to question what I'll eat. So, you substitute what in for my hat, and use an interrogative complementizer, which will force what to move into [Spec,CP]. The result is the perfectly well-formed question What will I eat if John buys a coffee? (Or, if you started from If John buys a coffee I will eat my hat, with the clausal complement adjoined on the left, then turning it into a question results in the reasonably acceptable What if John buys a coffee will I eat?).
If you try to ask a question about something inside the clausal adjunct, however, the result is not well formed. So, suppose we want to ask a question about the thing John might buy that would result in a hat-eating by me. Replace a coffee with what, use an interrogative complementizer, and you wind up with * What will I eat my hat if John buys? (or * What if John buys will I eat my hat?).
So, the adjunct "traps" a wh-word from moving out of it. You can't move a wh-word from a position inside an island to a position outside the island.
Other wh-phrase traps are questions (wh-islands) and definite DPs. | Paul Hagstrom, 2005
ISOCHRONY
- (Prosody) One of the basic hypotheses behind rhythmic models is that of isochrony, i.e. the organization of speech into portions perceived as being of equal or equivalent duration. There are two interpretations to this hypothesis:
- Strict isochrony expects the different elements to be of exactly equal duration.
- Weak isochrony claims that there is a tendency for the different elements to have the same duration; hence, a constituent containing five sub-constituents, for example, will be less than five times as long as a constituent containing only one sub-constituent.
Both involve a compression of the sub-constituents for the constituents to have similar duration, but less for weak isochrony.
The term isochrony has generally been reserved for the higher-level constituents such as the syllable and the stress-group. It is, however, worth noting that the same principle can equally well be expected to apply at all levels. Thus, if phones are grouped into syllables, we might well expect a syllable with only one phone to be shorter than a syllable with two phones, but not twice as short. | Caroline Bouzon and Daniel Hirst, 2004
- (Prosody) The postulated rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language. Rhythm is an aspect of prosody, others being intonation, stress, and tempo of speech (Wells 2006).
Three alternative ways in which a language can divide time are postulated (Nespor, Shukla, and Mehler 2011):
- The duration of every syllable is equal (syllable-timed).
- The duration of every mora is equal (mora-timed).
- The interval between two stressed syllables is equal (stress-timed).
The idea was first expressed thus by Kenneth L. Pike in 1945, though the concept of language naturally occurring in chronologically and rhythmically equal measures is found at least as early as 1775, in Prosodia Rationalis (Steele 1779). This has implications for linguistic typology: David Abercrombie (1967) claimed, "As far as is known, every language in the world is spoken with one kind of rhythm or with the other ... French, Telugu and Yoruba ... are syllable-timed languages, ... English, Russian and Arabic ... are stress-timed languages." While many linguists find the idea of different rhythm types appealing, empirical studies have not been able to find acoustic correlates of the postulated types, calling into question the validity of these types (Liberman 2008, 2008, Bertrán 1999, Roach 1982). However, when viewed as a matter of degree, relative differences in the variability of syllable duration across languages have been found (Ladefoged 2006). | Wikipedia, 2023
ISOMORPHIC PRINCIPLE
- (Diachronic) Maintains that languages maximally preserve one-to-one correspondences between meaning and form. In historical linguistics, explanations of language change in terms of homonymy avoidance, synonymy avoidance or ambiguity avoidance all more or less explicitly hark back to the isomorphic ideal. However, though soundly rooted in Structuralist and Functionalist theory, isomorphic thinking has received major criticism in recent decades. Variation is now generally considered pervasive and often stable in language, rather than a fleeting anomaly. This makes the workings of isomorphism seem inconsistent and its use as an explanation of change gratuitous. Moreover, some changes have been shown to be strikingly un-isomorphic (De Smet et al. 2018). It has even been argued that many-to-many correspondences between meaning and form actually offer functional advantages (Van de Velde 2014). | Hendrik De Smet, 2023
- (Grammar) One of the basic intuitions driving Functionalist thinking is that the structure of language is more or less optimally adapted to its function, which is first and foremost communication (Nuyts 2007). The isomorphic principle is one reflex of this underlying idea. Isomorphism states that for a communicative code to be clear and efficient, forms should be reliably associated with meanings, with a one-to-one mapping as the optimum. Many meanings mapped to one form would cause ambiguity, while many forms mapped to one meaning would needlessly burden memory.
The question, then, is how to account for violations of isomorphism. Ideally, from a Functionalist point of view, these are still explicable as somehow being functionally motivated. Indeed, in one respect, one-to-many mappings have already been recognized to have a functional advantage over one-to-one mappings. Without polysemy, the linguistic code would lack the flexibility to adapt to new situations. Croft therefore reformulates the isomorphic principle as follows:Polysemy is both economically and iconically motivated [...]. The set of related meanings can be thought of as a connected region in conceptual space [...]. The actual iconic correspondence between meaning and form is between a single form and a single region in conceptual space. [... T]he larger the region, the fewer total words necessary to cover the conceptual space, and the more economically motivated the form-meaning correspondence.
| Hendrik De Smet, 2019
ITIVE
See VENITIVE.
JAY-WALKING EXPERIMENT
- (Sociolinguistics) Labov (1975) reported this experiment whereby passers-by were asked their opinion about a (fictitious) incident and in replying revealed their interpretation of one of the following four forms which had been used by their interlocutor:
- He was arrested to test the law.
- He was arrested.
- He got arrested.
- He got arrested to test the law.
| Aidan Benedict Coveney, 1989
- (Sociolinguistics) By which Labov (1975) investigated the possibility of a semantic difference between the get-passive and the be-passive, with and without a purpose clause. A number of studies had shown that the use of the get-passive was increasing steadily among younger speakers, so that it became a important to know whether this was a case of semantic change or purely a formal shift of auxiliary. | William Labov, 1996
JESPERSEN'S CYCLE
(Historical) A series of processes which describe the historical development of the expression of negation in a variety of languages, from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, through a discontinuous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original pre-verbal marker. The pattern was formulated in Otto Jespersen's book Negation in English and Other Languages (1917) and named after him in Swedish linguist Östen Dahl's article "Typology of Sentence Negation" (1979).
There are three stages (Lucas 2007):
- In Stage I, negation is expressed by a single pre-verbal element.
Old French
jeo
I
ne
NEG
dis
say
'I do not say'
- In Stage II, both a preverbal and a postverbal element are obligatory.
Modern Standard French
je
I
ne
NEG
dis
say
pas
NEG
'I do not say'
- In Stage III, the original preverbal element becomes optional or is lost altogether.
Modern Colloquial French
je
I
dis
say
pas
NEG
'I do not say'
| Wikipedia, 2023
JITTER
- (Phonetics) The degree of variation in the spacing of glottal pulses over time. | ?
- (Phonetics) Irregular variation in the fundamental frequency of the vocal folds, such as occurs in harsh voice. | R.L. Trask, 1995
JUNCTURE PHONEME
(Phonology) In American Structuralist phonology, any of several putative phonological constructs, having the status of phonemes but lacking any intrinsic phonetic content, set up to account for the observed phonetic differences between apparently identical sequences of segmental phonemes, as in nitrate and nightrate, or as in why choose and white shoes. Trager and Bloch (1941) introduced the plus juncture to represent open internal juncture in such cases, and Trager and Smith (1951) added three varieties of external open juncture, distinguished by intonation: plus, single-bar, double-bar and double-cross junctures. Juncture phonemes were devised as a means of escaping the unpleasant consequences of the separation of levels, by which no grammatical information was available for phonological analysis. | R.L. Trask, 1995
JUSSIVE MOOD
- (Grammar) A directive mood that signals a speaker's command, permission, or agreement that the proposition expressed by his or her utterance be brought about.
Jussive mood is typically applicable in the first and third person. (Chung and Timberlake 1985, Mish 1991, Pei and Gaynor 1954, Palmer 1986) | SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, 2003
- (Grammar) A verb inflection used to indicate a command, permission, or agreement with a request; an instance of a verb so inflected.
The jussive mood is similar to the cohortative mood, except that it also applies to verbs in the second and third person. Although the jussive mood is absent from English, it is present in Arabic and Esperanto. | Wiktionary, 2023
- (Grammar) Some major types of imperative mood identified in this chapter, based on the Subject person, are the jussive mood (the second person), the cohortative mood (the first person plural), the optative mood (the third person), the oblative mood (the first person singular), and the hortative mood (all the three persons). | Dongqi Li, 2023
- (Grammar) The imperative mood has two contrasting types: jussive and optative. The jussive mood directly prompts the exchange through various kinds of command, while the optative mood does so indirectly by the speaker expressing his or her desire or intention. In terms of the addressee's response, however, both evoke a response by complying or refusing in the case of demanding a proposal, or accepting or rejecting in the case of offering. | Kazuhiro Teruya, 2017
- (Grammar) When it comes to the jussive in Finnish grammar, it is regarded as the third person and the passive form of the imperative. It should be noted that in the literature on other languages, the term is reported as being used for a number of purposes. For example, in Estonian, another Balto-Finnic language, the jussive is not included in the imperative paradigm but instead displays a full personal paradigm of its own (Metslang and Sepper 2010).
It is thus considered to be a mood that is autonomous from the imperative mood. In Sorbian (Scholze 2010),
Albanian (Breu 2010), Bulgarian and Macedonian (Lindstedt 2010), the term jussive refers to an analytic form that includes a specific auxiliary or particle. According to Lindstedt (2010), the analytic jussive is a Slavic and Pan-Balkan item. In some studies, the jussive is not considered a mood but rather a meaning, function or illocutionary act operated by certain imperative forms, in particular the third person imperatives (see Johanson 2009, Lindstedt 2010, Squartini 2010). In all cases, even though the grammatical status of the form varies, the third person reference seems to be typical of jussive semantics. | Rea Peltola, 2016
See Also COHORTATIVE MOOD.
Page Last Modified July 10, 2024