OMNIVOROUS NUMBER
(Grammar) When a number probe skips over all singular DPs. Occurs in Kaqchikel Agent Focus (Preminger 2011):

1. Omnivorous number in Kaqchikel (Mayan; Guatemala)
   1. ja
      FOC

      rje'
      them

      x-e-tz'et-ö
      PRF-3PL-see-AF

      rja'
      him

      'It was them who saw him.'
   2. ja
      FOC

      rja'
      him

      x-e-tz'et-ö
      PRF-3PL-see-AF

      rje'
      them

      'It was him who saw them.'

OMNIVOROUS PERSON
(Grammar) When a person probe skips over DPs that are not 1st or 2nd person. Found in Nez Perce complementizer agreement, for example (Deal 2015):

1. Complementizer agreement in Nez Perce (Sahaptian; Idaho) favors [participant]
   1. ke-m
      C-2

      kaa
      then

      pro_2SG
       

      'e-cew'cew'-teetu
      3OBJ-call-TAM

      Angel-ne
      Angel-ACC

      'When you call Angel, ...'
   2. ke-m
      C-2

      kaa
      then

      Angel-nim
      Angel-NOM

      hi-cew'cew'-teetu
      3SUBJ-call-TAM

      pro_2SG
       

      'When Angel calls you, ...'

ONOMASTICS

1. The study of names. Such study is, in fact, carried out as part of several larger fields, including linguistics, ethnography, folklore, philology, history, geography, philosophy, and literary scholarship. In Europe, especially in Germany, it is a well recognized branch of philology, as witness the three-volume encyclopedic survey of the field recently published there (Eichler et al. 1996). By contrast, in the US, onomastics is scarcely recognized as a scholarly field at all. To be sure, there is an organization called the American Name Society, which publishes a small journal called Names, but only a few linguists belong to the society, and most linguists have probably never heard of the organization or the journal. | William Bright, 2003
2. The intellectual endeavor which studies names of all kinds, not simply as a subdiscipline of linguistics but involving several adjacent extralinguistic disciplines. In order to establish a sound basis for name studies, it is essential to clarify the distinction between names and words or, more generally, between lexicon and onomasticon. In the naming process, transfers occur not only from the former to the latter, but also from one name category to another. As name usage is the prerequisite for name survival, socio-onomastics has become a central concern of name studies. In a largely cross-disciplinary approach, literary onomastics, i.e., the study of names in literature, has recently become a strong focus and an active and productive activity. | Wilhelm FH. Nicolaisen, 2015

ONSET CONSTRAINT

1. (Optimality Theory) We conclude from the typological results and epenthesis data that the presence of an onset is an unmarked situation as compared to its absence. This is expressed in the structural well-formedness constraint ONSET (Itô 1989, Prince and Smolensky 1993):

   ONSET
   *[_σ V ('Syllables must have onsets.')

    This constraint requires that syllables must not begin with vowels; it is satisfied only by syllables that have an initial consonant, or onset. Therefore languages in which ONSET is undominated have obligatory onsets. Finally, ONSET is "grounded" in the articulatory and perceptual systems: the best starting point for a vowel is a preceding consonant (rather than another vowel). | René Kager, 1999
2. (Optimality Theory) Arabic unmistakably exhibits the ONS constraint, which we state as follows:

   ONS
   Every syllable has an Onset.

    For concreteness, let us assume that Onset is an actual node in the syllable tree; the ONS constraint looks at structure to see whether the node σ dominates the node Onset. | Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky, 1993

OO-IDENT(NASAL)
(Optimality Theory) A constraint:

OO-IDENT(NASAL)
Assign a violation to each segment in an output whose specification for nasality is not identical to its corresponding segment in the base.

OPEN-CHOICE PRINCIPLE

1. (Grammar) Represents the traditional assumption that practically each Position in a clause offers a choice (Sinclair 1991). | Britt Erman and Beatrice Warren, 2000
2. (Grammar) In 1991 the late John Sinclair, who is renowned for his pioneering work in the field of corpus-based lexicography, propounded an elegantly simple theory. In Sinclair's view, the prime determinants of our language behavior are the principles of idiom and open choice, and the principle of idiom takes precedence over the principle of open choice: "The principle of idiom is that a language learner has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear to be analyzable into segments". | Dirk Siepmann, 2011
3. (Grammar) Idiom forms found in canonized idiom dictionaries and other accepted resources can appear in literal (Open Choice Principle) contexts in authentic language (the boy kicked the bucket of apples) or in nonliteral contexts (the old dog finally kicked the bucket)—the Idiom Principle. | Kaitlyn Alayne VanWagoner, 2017

OPEN-ENDEDNESS
(General) The limitless ability to produce and understand totally new utterances is called open-endedness, and it should be perfectly clear to you that, without it, our languages and indeed our lives would be unrecognizably different from what they are. Perhaps no other feature of language so dramatically illustrates the vast, unbridgeable gulf separating human language from the signaling systems of all other creatures.
 The importance of open-endedness has been realized by linguists for decades. The term was coined by the American linguist Charles Hockett in 1960, though others have sometimes preferred the labels productivity or creativity. (Trask 2007) | Ruhee Bano and Sanjana Kumari, 2018

OPEN SYLLABLE LENGTHENING
(Diachronic) The process by which short vowels become long in an open syllable. It occurs in many languages at a phonetic or allophonic level, and no meaningful distinction in length is made. However, as it became phonemic in many Germanic languages, it is especially significant in them, both historically and in the modern languages.
 Open syllable lengthening affected the stressed syllables of all Germanic languages in their history to some degree. Curiously, it seems to have affected the languages around a similar time, between the 12th and the 16th centuries, during the late Middle Ages.
 The lengthening often also applied in reverse at some point by shortening long vowels in closed syllables. As a consequence of the combination of the two changes, vowel length and consonant length came to be in complementary distribution: one of the two features is no longer distinctive but is predictable from the other. | Wikipedia, 2025

OPERATIONAL PLAUSIBILITY

1. (Relational Network Theory) The fact that people are able to speak and write, and to comprehend texts (if often imperfectly), assures us that linguistic systems are able to operate for producing and comprehending texts. Therefore, a model of "linguistic structure" cannot be considered realistic if it cannot be put into operation in a realistic way. This principle, the requirement of operational plausibility, has also been mentioned by Ray Jackendoff (2002). | Glottopedia, 2018
2. (Example) Generative theory postulates that language is a productive computational system. In its various models it holds that in the mind/brain there are symbols and operations that manipulate those symbols, for example syntactic objects. But the neurological evidence allows to notice that in the brain there is no structure of symbol storage nor manipulation operations of these symbols. In addition, the hypothesis that there is a store of symbols and various operations requires that the linguistic system work in successive stages, taking certain syntactic objects in a given state to which certain operations are applied to finally produce syntactic objects "in conditions to be pronounced". In this sense, the hypothesis of storage and manipulation of objects lacks operational plausibility, because it does not offer a plausible characterization of how the proposed linguistic system can be operated in real time to produce and understand speech. | José María Gil, 2019

OPTATIVE UTTERANCE
(Grammar) An utterance that expresses a wish, regret, hope or desire without containing a lexical item that means 'wish', 'regret', 'hope' or 'desire' (cf. Rifkin 2000, Asarina and Shklovsky 2008). Optatives are typically perceived to be a type of exclamation, defined as utterances that are predominantly used to exclaim (cf. Quirk et al. 1972, 1985, Rifkin 2000).

1. Latin
   Utinam
   that

   ne
   not

   ...
    

   tetigissent
   touch.3PL.PLUP.SUBJ

   litora
   shores

   puppes
   ships

   '[Almighty Jupiter,] if only the [Attic] ships had never touched the [Knossian] shores!' (Catullus 64.171-172; adapted from Palmer 2001; translation is mine)

2. I wish [that the Attic ships had never touched the Knossian shores].
3. It would be good [if the Attic ships had never touched the Knossian shores].

4. Oh, that I had told them both a year ago!
   (Martin F. Tupper. 1851. The Twins: A Domestic Novel. Hartford: Silas Andrus.)
5. If only I had told them both a year ago!

6. If I'd only listened to my parents!
7. If I could just make them understand my point of view!
8. If I could but explain! (Quirk et al. 1985)
9. Oh that Apollo would but drive his horses slowly, that the day might be three hours longer; for it is too soon to depart, [...]
   (A. Marsh. 1682. The Ten Pleasures of Marriage. London: The Navarre Society.)

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