MOTION EVENT
(Semantics) A sentence denoting movement. A prototypical motion event "consists of one object (the Figure) moving or located with respect to another object (the reference-object or Ground) ... the Path ... is the course followed or site occupied by the Figure object with respect to the Ground object. Motion ... refers to the presence per se in the event of motion or location. ... In addition to these internal components a Motion event can have a Manner or a Cause" (Talmy 1985).
 Imagine a simple motion event: a golf ball is rolling across a golf field. Human languages possess the means to parse this scene into a number of distinct encodable parts. For instance, language after language offers the means to refer to the ball separately from the background (the field), to follow its trajectory or path (across the field), to comment on its manner of moving (rolling or bouncing), to note whether the movement was caused by an agent (a golf player) or not, and so on. These and similar features are consistently singled out in the cross-linguistic packaging of motion events.
 In what we will call Manner languages (e.g. English, German, Russian, Swedish, Chinese), manner of motion is typically encoded in the verb, while path information appears in nonverbal elements such as prepositional phrases, as in (1). In other Path languages (e.g. Modern Greek, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi), the verb usually encodes the direction of motion, while the manner information is encoded in gerunds or prepositional phrases, or omitted altogether, as in (2).

1. English
   The ball rolled across the field.
   FIGURE MOTION+MANNER PATH GROUND
2. Modern Greek
   I bala diesxise to gipedo.
   'the ball crossed the field'
   FIGURE MOTION+PATH GROUND

MOVE ALPHA
(Syntax) A most general formulation of possible movements. In effect, Move alpha says that some category alpha can be moved anytime anywhere. It generalizes rules such as Move NP and Move wh, which in their turn generalize construction-specific transformations such as Passivization and Raising. Move alpha itself is considered an instance of Affect alpha. (Chomsky 1977, 1980, 1981, 1986, Lasnik and Saito 1984, 1992) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

MOVE X
(Prosody) Cases of stress shift include the Rhythm Rule of English, which accounts for the appearance of leftward-shifted stress in certain words and phrases when a stronger stress follows, as in thirtéen, but thìrteen mén. Prince (1983) suggests that such rules of stress shift take the form Move X. This rule schema can be defined thusly:

Move X
Move one grid mark at a time along its layer. Where Move X resolves a stress clash, movement must take place along the row where the clash occurs.

MOVEMENT CHAIN

1. (Syntax) In Government and Binding theory, a movement chain is formed by the linkages between a unit and successive traces left in positions from which it is moved. | ?
2. (Examples)
   ○ This conclusion is independently motivated, as movement chains that start from distinctly merged objects are not treated as identical by the Linear Correspondence Axiom:
   1.  [_CP What_k did [_TP John_j [_vP  John _j buy  what _k ? ] ] ]
   
    There are two chains in (1):
   • An A-chain consisting of two copies of John in Spec-vP to Spec-TP.
   • An Ā-chain consisting of two copies of what from the object position in VP to Spec-CP.
   
    Clearly, the heads of these chains are treated as distinct by the LCA. | Nico Baier, 2018
   See Also A-CHAIN, LINEAR CORRESPONDENCE AXIOM.
   ○ Our claim is that the apparently random well formedness of chains created by two (or several) successive instances of movement can be accounted for if we assume that the two links of a movement chain must satisfy the following condition at the interfaces:

   If (α, β) is a chain created by MOVE, then the sets of features of α and β must be in a proper inclusion relation at LF and at PF.

    | Anna Maria DiSciullo and Daniela Isac, 2008
   ○ We may say that which books does engage in two types of chains, namely a movement chain and a binding chain:
   1.  [ Which books ]₁ did you [ [ file t₁ ] [ without reading e₁ ] ] ?
   
    | Marcus Kracht, 2001
   ○ The only difference between an overt and a covert movement, on these theories, is the decision as to which copy in the movement chain to pronounce. | Norvin Richards, 2001

MÜLLER-TAKANO GENERALIZATION
(Syntax) A constraint.

The Müller-Takano Generalization (Müller 1993, 1996, Takano 1994)
After phrase XP has moved from node α to node ω, a remnant phrase YP that dominates α but not ω cannot move to any node c-commanding ω if movement of XP and movement of YP are of the same type.

MULTI-PARTICIPANT EVENT
(Semantics) A situation where multiple participants are involved. In a multi-participant event, there are different roles that participants play, including:

• Patientive: The most patient-like participant.
• Absolutive: The most involved or affected participant in the situation.
• Agentive: The most agent-like participant in the situation.

MULTI-PARTICIPANT NOUN
(Semantics) A noun that applies only to multi-participant events. A certain subset of mass nouns. Traffic and rubble are multi-participant nouns but furniture and luggage turn out not to be. Importantly, "typical" mass nouns like water are multi-participant nouns. | Roger Schwarzchild, 2011

MULTI-WORD EXPRESSION

1. (Grammar) An expression with at least two lexicalized components (i.e. always realized by the same lexemes), including a head word and at least one other syntactically related word. | Carlos Ramisch, Silvio Cordeiro, Agata Savary, Veronika Vincze, et al., 2018
2. (Grammar) Abbreviated MWE. Understood here as a (continuous or discontinuous) sequence of words with three compulsory properties:
   • Its component words include a head word and at least one other syntactically related word. Most likely the relation it maintains is a syntactic (direct or indirect) dependence but it can also be, e.g., a coordination. Depending on the category of the head word, the whole MWE can be nominal, adjectival, prepositional, verbal, sentential, etc.
   • It shows some degree of orthographic, morphological, syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasy with respect to what is deemed general grammar rules of a language.
   • At least two components of such a word sequence have to be lexicalized.
   
    | Veronika Vincze, Agata Savary, Marie Candito, and Carlos Ramisch, 2016
3. (Grammar) A combination of at least two words which exhibits lexical, morphological, syntactic, and/or semantic idiosyncrasies.
   1. The prime time speech made by first lady Michelle Obama set the house on fire. She made crystal clear which issues she took to heart but she was preaching to the choir.
   
    | Agatha Savary, 2023
4. (Grammar) Abbreviated MWE. Much of the language we are exposed to on a daily basis is "formulaic". Despite the potentially infinite creativity of language, many words co-occur with some words more frequently than with other, seemingly synonymous, ones. We will refer to such frequently co-occurring word combinations as multi-word expressions. We adopt a very loose, rather inclusive definition of MWEs as highly familiar phrases that exhibit a certain degree of fixedness and are recognized as conventional by a native speaker. Arguably, MWEs can be of many different kinds, including but not limited to:
   • Collocations (black coffee, morning sickness).
   • Binomials (bride and groom, heaven and hell).
   • Multi-word verbs (rely on, put up with).
   • Idioms (tie the knot, can't judge a book by its cover).
   • Complex prepositions (in support of, under the influence of).
   • Speech formulae (how's it going? good afternoon).
   • And so on.
   
    MWEs differ vastly in:
   • Length (they can be between two and eight, or even more, words in length).
   • Literality (idioms are by definition figurative expressions, while many collocations and other types of MWEs are used literally).
   • Degree of fixedness (some allow internal modification; others do not).
   • Word class (closed-class vs. open-class).
   • And so on.
   
    Even within a particular type, MWEs differ considerably (e.g., idioms can be decomposable or non-decomposable, ambiguous or non-ambiguous, etc.). Despite such vast differences, all MWEs can be said to be relatively frequent and, as a result, highly familiar and predictable word clusters. | Anna Siyanova-Chanturia, 2013

MULTICULTURAL LONDON ENGLISH

1. (Sociolinguistics) A dialect of London English which has emerged since the early 1980s in parts of London where there has been a relatively high level of immigration. Multicultural London English (MLE) is based on the traditional East End Cockney dialect, but it has a number of different sounds and grammatical constructions.
    For instance, unlike Cockney, MLE speakers pronounce their aitches at the beginning of words, as in house, instead of Cockney 'ouse. You might also notice the vowel sounds in the words like home, where the "o" is rather like a Scottish or a Newcastle vowel, or the vowel in a word like face, which also sounds as if it comes from Scotland or Newcastle. | Paul Kerswill, 2019
2. (Sociolinguistics) The emergence of MLE was explored in two research projects in multilingual areas of London (Kerswill, Cheshire, Fox, and Torgersen 2004–2007, 2007–2010). We found that young people from diverse language backgrounds did not mix features from different "languages" (in the first sense of the term multiethnolect) but instead used a variable repertoire of innovative English features, including near monophthongs in place of the diphthongs traditionally characteristic of the local London area (e.g. in the FACE, PRICE, and GOAT lexical sets), a staccato rhythm, a new pronoun (man), and a new quotative expression (this is +speaker) (Cheshire et al. 2013). These features were part of the speakers' vernacular in Labov's sense of the term: their basic, unmarked, unreflecting, unmonitored way of speaking. | Jenny Cheshire, 2019

MULTIDIALECTAL

1. (Sociolinguistics) Consisting of, or conversant in, more than one dialect. | Wiktionary, 2024
2. (Examples)
   ○ In Sinitic Historical Phonology, notable tasks that could benefit from machine learning include the comparison of dialects and reconstruction of proto-languages systems. Motivated by this, this paper provides an approach for obtaining multi-dialectal representations of Sinitic syllables, by constructing a knowledge graph from structured phonological data, then applying the BoxE technique from knowledge base learning. | Zhibai Jia, 2023
   ○ Multilingual NLP studies how to learn common structures that transfer across languages. These strategies may also yield benefits in multi-dialectal settings. | Caleb Ziems, William Held, Jingfeng Yang, Jwala Dhamala, Rahul Gupta, and Diyi Yang, 2022
   ○ Then, we will explain how it is possible to convert Wikidata into a multilingual multidialectal dictionary for Arabic dialects. Finally, we will describe how Wikidata (as a multilingual multidialectal dictionary for Arabic dialects) can be used by Computational linguists and Computer scientists in the Natural Language Processing of the varieties of Arabic. |  Houcemeddine Turki, Denny Vrandečić, Helmi Hamdi, and Imed Adel, 2017
   ○ This chapter aims at contributing to an understanding of processes of language standardization by looking at a multidialectal public live performance, broadcast by local media in the Dutch province of Limburg. | Leonie Cornips, Vincent de Rooij, Irene Stengsi, and Lotte Thissen, 2016
   ○ For our experiments we use the Multidialectal Parallel Corpus of Arabic (MPCA) which was recently released by Bouamor, Habash, and Oflazer (2014). They present the first parallel multidialectal Arabic dataset, comprised of 2,000 sentences in Modern Standard Standard Arabic, five regional dialects, as well as English. | Shervin Malmasi, Eshrag Refaee, and Mark Dras, 2015
   ○ This chapter reviews different approaches to spelling dialects and related languages. It advocates and illustrates an approach that is informed by both phonology and sociolinguistics: a systematic multidialectal approach that advocates spelling in ways that allow all dialects to read and pronounce literature by systematically applying the rules of their own dialect's phonology. | Peter Unseth, 2015
   ○ Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the detection of mispronunciations in familiar words was compared in infants aged 1;8 exposed to consistent (monodialectal) or variable (multidialectal) pronunciations of words in their daily input. Only monodialectal infants detected the mispronunciations whereas multidialectal infants looked longer at the target following naming whether the label was correctly produced or not. | Samantha Durrant, Claire delle Luche, Allegra Cattani, and Caroline Floccia, 2014
   ○ This paper describes the collection and classification of a multi-dialectal corpus of Arabic based on the geographical information of tweets. We mapped information of user locations to one of the Arab countries, and extracted tweets that have dialectal word(s). | Hamdy Mubarak and Kareem Darwish, 2014
   ○ This thesis proposes to combine methods and data from two rather distant fields of language science—dialectology and human language technology—into a system that automatically transforms Standard German words and sentences into multiple Swiss German dialects. The resulting system is designed to benefit from the etymological proximity of these language varieties and from data made available by dialectological research. We qualify this scenario as cross-lingual, multi-dialectal sentence generation: cross-lingual in the sense that it describes the relation between two vertically opposed language varieties, Standard German and Swiss German, and multi-dialectal in the sense that the Swiss German side of the model is intended to cover the whole range of internal dialectal variation. | Yves Scherrer, 2012
   ○ This paper deals with the suitability of using a single multi-dialectal acoustic modeling for all the Spanish variants spoken in Europe and Latin America. ... The paper describes the rule-based phonetic transcription used for each dialectal variant, the selection of the shared and the specific phonemes to be modeled in a multi-dialectal recognition system, and the results of a multi-dialectal system dealing with dialects in and out of the training set. | Albino Nogueiras, Mónica Caballero, and Asunción Moreno, 2002

MULTIETHNOLECT

1. (Sociolinguistics) A new language variety, or pool of variants, shared by more than one ethnic group living in an area. It is typically shared across minorities but also by members of majority groups. A multiethnolect is non-ethnic in its affiliation and its indexicality. This is true at least in the community in which it is spoken. Outside its own community it may sound distinctly "ethnic". It is arguably vernacularized. | Paul E. Kerswill, 2013
2. (Sociolinguistics) We use the term multiethnolects here to encompass a broad range of language forms and practices documented by researchers in European cities. First, it refers to the way that in mixed multicultural neighborhoods, young people may combine elements from different heritage languages with the dominant mainstream language. Dorleijn and Nortier (2013) give the following example, in which Turkish (underscored) and Moroccan Arabic (underscored) occur together with Dutch (italicized):
   1. wreed
      great

      olmazmi
      wouldn't.be

      ah
      VOC

      sabbi?
      my.friend

      'Wouldn't that be great, my friend?'
    Dorleijn and Nortier point out that it is not necessary to be fluent in Turkish and Moroccan Arabic in order to speak in this way. Example (1), they say, could have been uttered by a young person of Afghan, Iranian, Iraqi or any other origin, including, of course, Turkish or Moroccan. Importantly, it could equally well have been uttered by a young Dutch-speaking monolingual person from a non-immigrant background. The term multiethnolect, then, has been coined to capture the fact that this way of speaking is not ethnically marked.
    In addition, the term multiethnolect has been used to describe an ethnically neutral variable repertoire containing a core of innovative phonetic, grammatical, and discourse-pragmatic features. In London, for example, many of the diphthongs characteristic of the local variety of English have become near-monophthongs (in the FACE and PRICE lexical set for example). There is a new pronoun, man, a new quotative expression this is + speaker, and many other innovations (Cheshire et al. 2011, Cheshire 2013).
    Wiese (2009, 2013), similarly, refers to Kiezdeutsch in Berlin as a multiethnolect: a way of speaking for young people in multicultural neighborhoods of Berlin that contains new forms of German. In both uses of the term, it is assumed that there is a base language, the dominant language of the local society, and that the multiethnolect is highly variable and dynamic. | Jenny Cheshire, Jacomine Nortier, and David Adger, 2015
3. (Sociolinguistics) A repertoire of innovative linguistic forms used by young people of all ethnicities, including monolingual non‐immigrant speakers.
    The innovative forms and practices are dynamic and highly variable.
    The term multiethnolect seems more appropriate for linguistic features and language practices that are not restricted to one ethnic group nor to the effect of a heritage language, but it has been rightly criticized for implying a focus on one dimension of social variation, ethnicity, at the expense of other relevant dimensions. Some researchers prefer terms such as contemporary urban vernaculars or urban youth speech styles, but these too are open to criticism (Cheshire et al. 2015). | Jenny Cheshire, 2013

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