Sank's Glossary of Linguistics
Pas-Pg |
PAS-DE-QUOI RULE
- (Syntax) Obenauer's Que-Comp analysis analyzes the French interrogative que as the complementizer que. The transformational rule crucial to the Que-Comp analysis is one called Pas-de-Quoi ['Don't Mention It'], which, as its name suggests, deletes quoi (the neuter interrogative word) when it has been placed in Comp-initial position by wh-movement.
Pas-de-Quoi
[Comp
quoi X
1
·
que]
2
→
φ
2
Thus, the derivation of a simple question might proceed as in (1), under the Que-Comp analysis:
quoi
quoi
que
que
que
que
Jean
Jean
mange
mange
mange
mange
quoi
Jean
Jean
underlying
wh-movement
Subject Postposing
Pas-de-Quoi
Although this derivation has produced a grammatical sentence, a question arises immediately regarding the presence of the complementizer que. Obenauer assumes that all sentences, including root Ss, are preceded by a Comp node—effectively a que—in most cases. This is surely correct; see Kayne (1974), Dubuisson and Goldsmith (1975), and Obenauer (1976). But in virtually all other root sentences the complementizer que deletes when it is sentence-initial; why has it not deleted in (1)?
This, Obenauer suggests, is because when Pas-de-Quoi deletes quoi, it leaves behind a wh-feature in its place, so that when the Que Deletion rule attempts to apply, the que is not sentence-initial. | John Goldsmith, 1981
- (Syntax) Let me now suggest (1):
- French
Void Relative/Interrogative quoi whenever it is not a focus position.
(1) is very much in the spirit of Obenauer's (1976) Pas-De-Quoi rule, which he formulated as in (2):
- [CP quoi x que ] ⇒ [CP φ x que ]
In (2) the string to the left of que is that of "standard" interrogatives and relatives. Obenauer (1976) explicitly stated that quoi in Quoi qu'il te dise ['Whatever he tells you'] was not included in the CP in (2). This translates into my idea that quoi in such relatives is in a focus position, hence not erasable, despite the fact that it is in the CP layer. Although Obenauer's Pas-De-Quoi was formulated in a framework of generative grammar that made crucial use of contexts predicates [sic], extrinsic rule ordering, etc. it shares with my (2) the idea that the phenomenon it attempts to describe is specific to (Modern) French. Naturally a wider scope principle should replace (1) when / if one is discovered. | Jean-Yves Pollock, 2023
PASSIVE SLUICE
- (Syntax) The examples in (1) and (2) involve a pair of an active-antecedent and a passive-sluice:
- German
Hans
Hans
küßte
kissed
jemanden,
someone
ohne
without
zu
to
wissen,
know
wer
who.NOM
*(von
by
ihm
him
geküßt
kissed
wurde).
was
'(lit.) Hans kissed someone without knowing who (was kissed by him).'
- Russian
Ivan
Ivan
poceloval
kissed
kogo-to
someone
ne
NEG
znaja
knowing
kto
who.NOM
*(byl
was
pocelovan
kissed
im).
by.him
'(lit.) Ivan kissed someone without knowing who (was kissed by him).'
| Kensuke Takita, 2013
- (Syntax) Merchant (2013) observes that sluicing requires structural identity in voice, as in (1):
- * Someone saved Alex, but we don't know by whom
Alex was saved.
However, Nakamura (2016) observes (2):
- a. Not so much whether to teach the Bible in public schools, but how? And by whom? (Corpus of Contemporary American English)
b. GE Capital and Xerox in Stamford responded to inquiries about their use of extended-stay hotels by saying that they use them from time to time, but they were not sure how much or by whom. (The New York Times, Aug 9, 1998)
The naturally occurring sluices in (2) look to be counterexamples to structural identity in voice. The final sluices are passive despite the preceding spoken material being active (3):
- a. Active: ... teach the Bible in public schools ...
Passive: And by whom the Bible should be taught?
- b. Active: ... they use them from time to time ...
Passive: ... or by whom they are used.
Reversing the order from (2) to place the passive sluice first is unacceptable (5):
- a. * Not so much whether to teach the Bible in public schools, but by whom? And how?
b. * They use them from time to time, but they were not sure by whom or how much.
| Richard Stockwell, 2023
PASSIVE WITHOUT MORPHOLOGY
(Grammar) There is a passive-like construction in Bùlì in which the internal argument is made the surface subject and crucially, the external argument cannot surface as a by / for phrase in the structure.
Passive without morphology
Lāmmú
meat.DEF
bɔ̀nì.
chop
'The meat was chopped.'
Tálímǔ
farm.DEF
kpài.
weed
'The farm was weeded.'
Gbáŋká
book.DEF
chì:n.
read
'The book was read.'
I will argue that the constructions exemplified in (1) to (3) are indeed passive constructions. The fact that they lack morphology can be witnessed by the fact that the verb forms in the Passive without Morphology construction are the same as their active counterparts. | Abdul-Razak Sulemana, 2024
PATH
- (Semantics) The semantic role describing the locale(s) transversed in motion or propulsion predications.
- The baby crawled across the room.
| SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, 2003
- (Semantics) When I asked Fillmore what he thought the main problem with case grammar had been, he replied that it was the proliferation of semantic roles, or what were then called deep cases. He gave the example of the word through, which expresses the PATH role in sentences like (1). But in sentences like (2), through has to have a different semantic role, since my uncle does not define a spatial path.
- I drove through the tunnel.
- I got my job through my uncle.
| George Lakoff, 1993
PATH COMPONENTS
- (Semantics) Deixis is a component of Path, which is a broad category covering Vector (e.g. 'from', 'to') and Conformation ('inside', 'outside') along with Deixis ('hither', 'thither'). (Talmy 2000) (Talmy 2000) | Yo Matsumoto, Kimi Akita, and Kiyoko Takahashi, 2017
- (Semantics) Deixis is not a component of Path (Morita 2011, Matsumoto et al. 2017, Seifen et al. 2020). | Karl Seifen, 2022
PERCEPTION VERB
- (Grammar) A category of verbs used to represent perceptual events related to human and other conscious creatures. E.g., Persian didæn 'to see'. | Fatemeh Zakeri, Fatemeh Behjat, and Mohammad Rostampour, 2021
- (Semantics) The semantic field of perception has five components: vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste. The label perception refers to verbs such as see, look, hear, listen, sound, smell, touch, feel and taste among others. As an overall group, these verbs can be classified in three different groups according to the semantic role of their subjects.
The first group of verbs is traditionally described as "the receiving of an expression by the senses independently of the will of the person concerned" (Poutsma 1926). As for instance example (1) shows (Viberg 1984):
- a. Peter saw the birds.
b. Peter heard the birds.
c. Peter felt a stone under his foot.
d. Peter smelled cigars in the room.
e. Peter tasted garlic in the food.
This set of verbs is called passive perception (Palmer 1966), inner perception (Leech 1971), cognition (Rogers 1971, 1972), stative with experiencer subject (Lehrer 1990), and experience (Viberg 1984).
The second group of verbs is those exemplified in (2) (Viberg 1984):
- a. Peter looked at the birds.
b. Peter listened to the birds.
c. Peter felt the cloth (to see how soft it was).
d. Peter smelled the cigar (to see if he could smoke it).
e. Peter tasted the food (to see if he could eat it).
These verbs are called active perception verbs (Poutsma 1926, Leech 1971, Rogers 1971, 1972), active experiencer subject (Lehrer 1990), and active (Viberg 1984). They refer to an "unbounded process that is consciously controlled by a human agent" (Viberg 1984).
The last group is formed by those verbs whose subjects are the stimuli of the perception as illustrated in (3) (Viberg 1984):
- a. Peter looked happy.
b. Peter sounded happy.
c. The cloth felt soft.
d. Peter smelled good / of cigars.
e. The food tasted good / of garlic.
This group is called flip verbs (Rogers 1971, 1972), stimulus subject (Lehrer 1990), copulative (Viberg 1984), and percept (Gisborne 1996). | B. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 1999
- (Syntax) In Catalan:
- A sentence with a perception verb and a reflexive clitic:
La
the
nena
girl
es
self
veu
sees
ballar.
dance
'The girl sees herself dance.'
- A sentence with a perception verb and a pronoun:
La
the
nena
girl
la
her
veu
sees
saltar
skip
a
to
corda.
rope
'The girl sees her skipping the rope'
| Linda Escobar and Anna Gavarró, 1999
PERCEPTION VERB CONSTRUCTION
- (Syntax) Perception verbs occur with that-clause complements:
- a. I saw that John stole the car.
b. I heard that they came up the stairs.
They also occur with to-infinitival complements and bare VP complements. But they show the following contrasts in grammaticality:
- a. * I saw John to steal the car.
b. I saw John steal the car.
- a. * I heard them to come up the stairs.
b. I heard them come up the stairs.
- a. We saw John to be an obnoxious person.
b. * We saw John be an obnoxious person.
- a. * We've never seen John to be so happy before.
b. We've never seen John be so happy before.
| Tsutomu Matsunami, 1985
- (Syntax) In this presentation, Perception Verb Construction refers to a construction that expresses the meaning of 'appear to be', 'look', with a complementary element after terlihat or kelihatan, as in the following sentences.
- Indonesian
a.
Dia
3SG
ter-lihat
TER-see
marah.
angry
'He looks angry.'
b.
Dia
3SG
ke-lihat-an
KE-see-AN
sedih.
sad
'He looks sad.'
| Yuta Sakon, 2022
PERCEPTUAL ANIMACY
- (Cognition) Describes the tendency of human observers to interpret motion cues that suggest an interaction between two objects in anthropomorphic terms, such as social causation or intention. | Hauke S Meyerhoff, Markus Huff, and Stephan Schwan, 2013
- (Cognition) From the beginning, researchers have emphasized that the property of animacy also appears to be perceived in simple displays (Heider and Simmel 1944, Michotte 1950). Michotte even suggested that simple motion-cues provide the foundation for social perception in general:
In ordinary life, the specifying factors—gestures, facial expressions, speech—are innumerable and can be differentiated by an infinity of nuances. But they are all additional refinements compared with the key factors, which are the simple kinetic structures. (Michotte 1950)
Studies of perceptual animacy using animated geometric shapes involve at least the perception of a simple shape's being alive. In addition, many of them go even further and employ displays that give rise to the perception of goals (e.g. 'trying to get over here') and even mental states (e.g. 'wanting to get over there'). | Brian J. Scholl and Patrice D. Tremoulet, 2000
PERCEPTUAL CATEGORY LEARNING
(Speech Perception)
- Speech perception is an ongoing perceptual category learning problem.
- Need to adapt to each talker's accent.
- An accent corresponds to a particular set of perceptual categories.
- Perceptual category learning comes in two flavors: supervised and unsupervised.
- Supervised learning: have information that labels each observation with the correct category.
- Unsupervised learning: only have observations themselves, need to induce clusters based on observed statistics and prior expectations.
| Dave F. Kleinschmidt, Rajeev Raizada, and T. Florian Jaeger, 2015
PERFECTIVE ASPECT
(Grammar) Or, aoristic aspect (Comrie 1976). Abbreviated PFV. A grammatical aspect that describes an action viewed as a simple whole; i.e., a unit without interior composition. The "perfective aspect" is distinguished from the imperfective aspect, which presents an event as having internal structure (such as ongoing, continuous, or habitual actions). The term "perfective" should be distinguished from "perfect".
The distinction between perfective and imperfective is more important in some languages than others. In Slavic languages, it is central to the verb system. In other languages such as German, the same form such as ich ging ('I went', 'I was going') can be used perfectively or imperfectively without grammatical distinction (Comrie 1976). In other languages such as Latin, the distinction between perfective and imperfective is made only in the past tense (e.g., Latin veni 'I came' vs. veniebam 'I was coming', 'I used to come') (Comrie 1976). However, perfective should not be confused with tense—perfective aspect can apply to events in the past, present, or future.
The perfective is often thought of as for events of short duration (e.g., John killed the wasp). However, this is not necessarily true—a perfective verb is equally right for a long-lasting event, provided that it is a complete whole; e.g., Tarquinius Superbus regnavit annos quinque et viginti (Livy) 'Tarquin the Proud reigned for 25 years' (Comrie 1976). It simply "presents an occurrence in summary, viewed as a whole from the outside, without regard for the internal make-up of the occurrence." (Fanning 1990)
The essence of the perfective is an event seen as a whole. | Wikipedia, 2023
PERFORMATIVE HYPOTHESIS
(Pragmatics) The hypothesis that every sentence is associated with an explicit illocutionary act, i.e., is derived from a deep structure containing a performative verb.
Sentence (1) is derived from (2), or perhaps (3):
- I'll write you next week.
- I claim I'll write you next week.
- I promise I'll write you next week.
(Ross 1970) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
PERIPHERAL CONSONANTS
(Phonology) In Australian linguistics, the "peripheral consonants" are a natural class encompassing consonants articulated at the extremes of the mouth: labials (lip) and velars (soft palate). That is, they are the non-coronal consonants (palatal, dental, alveolar, and postalveolar). In Australian languages, these consonants pattern together both phonotactically and acoustically. In Arabic and Maltese philology, the moon letters transcribe non-coronal consonants, but they do not form a natural class. | Wikipedia, 2021
PERIPHERY
- (Role and Reference Grammar) In RRG's clause structure representation (the layered structure of the clause), the "periphery" is the part that does not belong to the core, i.e. the predicate and arguments. It corresponds roughly to what is otherwise known as clausal modifiers. | Glottopedia, 2007
- (Generative Grammar) The left periphery is the part of a syntactic tree above the inflectional phrase(s) (expressing tense, aspect and/or mood), where topic, focus, illocutionary force, etc. are expressed.
Luigi Rizzi proposed this structure for it:
[CP=ForceP For [TopP Top [FocP Foc [FinP Fin [TP X] ] ] ] ]
| Wiktionary, 2023
PERIPHRASE
(Rhetoric) The use of more words than are necessary to express the idea; a roundabout, or indirect, way of speaking; circumlocution. | Wiktionary, 2023
PERIPHRASIS
(Stylistics) In English dictionaries the terms "periphrasis" and paraphrase are interpreted as two separate terms. In the Macmillan Dictionary, for example, a periphrasis is defined as a means of expressing something more complex than necessary, and a paraphrase is used as a means of expression or writes using different words, especially to make it short or clear. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines a periphrasis as a way of referring to something in several words instead of naming it directly in a single word or phrase. A paraphrase interpreted as a means of repeating the meaning of a text with different words to determine its original meaning. There are several groups of definitions of the term in scientific sources:
- Periphrasis is defined as a descriptive phrase as follows:
a. periphrasis: a means of transmission describing the meaning of another phrase or word;
b. periphrasis: a means of expanding the meaning of another phrase or word;
c. periphrasis: a stylistic device consisting of a descriptive expression (allegory), an indirect, descriptive definition of objects and events of reality.
- Periphrasis as a stylistic device is defined as follows:
a. periphrasis: a stylistic device consisting of replacing the name of an object or other reality with a descriptive phrase that indirectly calls it;
b. periphrasis: a stylistic device of an indirect, descriptive definition of objects and events of reality.
| Kobilova Aziza Bakhriddinovna, 2022
PERSON-CASE CONSTRAINT
- (Syntax) Or, me lui, or, Ditransitive Person-Role Constraint. Prohibits first- and second-person phonologically weak accusative or absolutive direct objects (DOs) (clitics, agreement markers, and weak pronouns) when they cluster together in ditransitives with phonologically weak dative indirect objects (IOs) of the same type. The constraint was first documented by Meyer-Lübke (1899) for Romance, was later discussed by Perlmutter (1971) as a restriction applying to combinations of clitics, and was then studied in detail by Bonet (1991, 1994), who showed that it affects phonologically weak elements more generally. The PCC turned out to be extremely robust cross-linguistically, has been documented for a large number of typologically unrelated languages, and has been argued to relate to a number of agreement restrictions displayed in domains other than ditransitives. | Elena Anagnostopoulou, 2014
- (Syntax) A co-occurrence restriction on certain combinations of phonologically weak arguments of ditransitive verbs which is widely attested cross-linguistically (Perlmutter 1971, Bonet 1991, Anagnostopoulou 2003, Nevins 2007, a.o.). The following varieties of the PCC have been recognized in the literature:
The Person Case Constraint
In a combination of a direct object and an indirect object:
- Strong: The direct object has to be 3rd person.
- Weak: If there is a 3rd person, it has to be the direct object.
- Me-First: If there is a 1st person, it has to be the indirect object
- Strictly Descending: The argument with the higher person specification (where 1 is higher than 2 is higher than 3) has to be the indirect object.
The strong version of the PCC prohibits combinations of 1st and 2nd person (local) objects while the weak version allows such combinations, when the indirect object is also a local person. | Anne Sturgeon, Boris Harizanov, Maria Polinsky, Ekaterina Kravtchenko, et al., 2010
PERSON PORTMANTEAU
(Morphology) A marker which bundles the expression of person for subject and object of a verbal predicate into a single morphological unit. Although "person portmanteaus" implement a radically simple alternative to more familiar strategies of cross-referencing verbal arguments, they are cross-linguistically highly marked, and tend to be restricted to very specific combinations of subject and object. Person portmanteaus may therefore be regarded as a type of argument encoding sui generis as well as a litmus test for general properties of argument encoding in head-marking languages. An important though somewhat paradoxical property of person portmanteaus is that they are not necessarily unanalyzable. | J. Trommer, 2009
PF
(Syntax) Abbreviation for Phonetic Form. The least abstract representation of a sentence in Chomsky's theory of grammar. Both PF and LF are conceived as representations which interface with other systems, respectively phonetic and semantic. Occasionally glossed by the term surface structure. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2003
PF DELETION
- (Syntax) A "PF-deletion" hypothesis for VP ellipsis assumes the elided VP is fully syntactically represented but deleted in the phonological component between Spellout and PF. | Wikipedia, 2023
- (Syntax) We propose that particle-stranding ellipsis (PSE) results from a string-based deletion in the phonological component (see Mukai 2003 and An 2016). The two results derived here strongly suggest that the derivation of PSE involves "PF-deletion". | Yosuke Sato and Masako Maeda, 2018
- (Syntax) I argue that "PF deletion" operates on strings of elements, similarly to the way that syntactic operations target constituents. The crucial idea is that, although it is mostly syntax that determines what is to be deleted (and, thus, elements that undergo ellipsis are usually syntactic constituents), PF deletion also has its own guidelines when it applies—namely that elements that are elided should form an unbroken, continuous string. | Duk-Ho An, 2016
- (Syntax) In "PF-deletion" theories, ellipsis is commonly taken to involve non-pronunciation of a constituent which is 'given', i.e. made salient in the discourse. | Justin Colley and Itai Bassi, 2020
Page Last Modified May 23, 2024