Sank's Glossary of Linguistics
Pot-Prec |
POTENTIALIS
- (Grammar) I am going to propose a tentative system of semantic variables (or categorial distinctions) which, I suggest, will facilitate the classification and synopsis of otherwise isolated types (or "cases") of conditional sentences—such as realis, irrealis, potentialis, and the like. | Wolf-Peter Funk, 1985
- (Grammar) Daakie (Oceanic; Vanuatu) has a five-way distinction that expresses both temporal and modal notions. In addition to a realis marker there is a potentialis marker for events that are expected to happen, a distal marker for temporally or modally remote events, a realis negation, and a potentialis negation. These markers are used in main and dependent clauses, where they express factive and negative interpretations.
The example in (1) illustrates a potentialis clause with a non-realis complementizer, ka.
pune=n
tell=NOMIN
ke
CP.RE
na-m
1SG-RE
longbini
want
ka
CP.NR
na-p
1SG-POT
pune
tell
'the story that I want to tell', trad. story (Bong1.092)
Potentialis modality is used in main clauses to express (2) directive, (3) hortative, or (4) commissive speech acts.
ko-p
2SG-POT
sengane
give.TR
de-re
NRE-PART
na-p
1SG-POT
ane.
eat.TR
'Give me some of it so I can eat it.' (Boa2.076)
ngale
then
do-p
1+2.DU-POT
bá
plant
meleh
food
byen
because
soló.
wedding.feast
'After that, let's plant food for the wedding.' (Aiben7.009)
na-p
1SG-POT
sengane
give.TR
suburu
mat
mane
to
s-ok
CL1-1SG
tuutuu
grandparent
man
male
'I promise to give the mat to my grandfather' (Aiben7.023)
These cases have in common that they refer to events that can be realized in the future. They share this property with predictions about what will happen in the future. | Manfred Krifka, 2016
- The main complementation strategies in Adyghe (West Circassian), first described in Gerassimov 2006, are the following: verbal stem without tense suffixes or subordination markers, potentialis without case markers (1), factive form in zere-, verbal stem with case markers, and potentialis with case markers (2).
laʁe-xe-r
plate-PL-ABS
s-thač̣ʼə-n
1SG.A-wash-POT
faje.
must
'I must wash the dishes.'
sə-tje-fe-n-č̣ʼe
1SG.ABS-LOC-fall-POT-INS
s-e-šʼəne.
1SG.ABS-DYN-fear
'I'm afraid of falling down.'
I consider this a distinct construction from the potentialis without case markers, because the two differ in their morphosyntactic properties and syntactic distribution. | Natalia Serdobolskaya, 2016
PRAGMATIC ENRICHMENT
- (Pragmatics) Sometimes used in a broad sense to refer to the process in virtue of which the content conveyed by an utterance comes to include all sorts of elements which are contextually implied without being part of what the utterance literally means. In his class notes "Pragmatic Enrichment: Introduction by Examples," Chris Potts gives examples like the following:
John and Mary have recently started going together. Valentino is Mary's ex-boyfriend. One evening, John asks Mary, Have you seen Valentino this week?
Mary answers, Valentino's been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks.
Valentino has in fact been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks, but it is also the case that Mary had a date with Valentino the night before.
Mary's utterance clearly suggests a negative (and false) answer to the question: Have you seen Valentino this week? Literally, however, she only says that Valentino has been sick with mononucleosis for the past two weeks, and that is true.
Now, pace Potts, the phrase pragmatic enrichment on its standard use is meant to contrast with conversational implicature, instead of being a non-technical synonym for it (as it is for Potts). On the standard use, while conversational implicatures belong to the post-semantic layer of interpretation, pragmatic enrichment belongs to the semantic layer: it affects the proposition expressed by an utterance. This puts pragmatic enrichment in the same ballpark as the assignment of contextual values to indexicals and free pronouns. | François Recanati, 2013
- (Pragmatics) The term enrichment has come to be well established in the pragmatics literature and largely accepted across different theoretical standpoints, even though it is often employed as an alternative to more technical vocabulary that does differ between the positions. The phenomenon the term is used for describing is pretty much the same. A typical example is the following (Carston 2002):
- He handed her the key and she opened the door
- He handed her the key and she opened the door [with the key that he had handed her].
A normal and typical interpretation of (1) associates with it a content that is more completely articulated in (2), which includes additional linguistic material in brackets. The semantic contribution of this material to (2) is the pragmatic enrichment of (1). That is, when processing (1) the hearer/reader tends to interpret it as representing a type of situation which is more completely represented by (2). That the referent of she used the key handed to her by the referent of he is not semantically represented in (1), but is "read into" it, i.e. pragmatically added during interpretation. It is semantically represented in (2).
The idea is not that the hearer tacitly adds the bracketed expression during interpretation. It is also not the case, as in normal examples of ellipsis recovery, that there is a particular expression that would be recovered in any effort of making the enrichment explicit. Rather, it is the semantic content (in context) of the added phrase that matters, and often there are alternative possible linguistic additions that are semantically equivalent as far as the linguistic and extra-linguistic context goes. | Peter Pagin, 2017
PRAGMATIC FREE ENRICHMENT
See FREE ENRICHMENT.
PRAGMATIC SKILL
(Pragmatics) Using prosodic cues that can disambiguate broad vs. narrow focus seems to require something special: a high level of pragmatic skill.
There's a connection between pragmatic skill and heightened sensitivity to paralinguistic cues of prominence.
Better pragmatic skill is associated with less overlap between the perceived prominence of prenuclear accented words and nuclear accented words. It's a trend only, but there was marginally significant three-way interaction: accent status × pragmatic skill × listener sex.
Listeners with worse pragmatic skill are sensitive to one thing: a word's being accented or not accented.
Results from a Rapid Prosody Transcription task suggest that pragmatic skill is associated with more gradient behavior in judging prominence in connected speech.
Better pragmatic skill is associated with more reliable perceived differences between discrete contrasts. | Jason Bishop, 2022
PRAGMATICALLY NEUTRAL WORD ORDER
- (Grammar) Discussions of word order in languages with flexible word order in which different word orders are grammatical often describe one of the orders as the (pragmatically) unmarked or neutral word order, while other grammatical orders are all described as being marked in some way. In most languages in which one order has been so characterized, the order described as unmarked is also the order which occurs most frequently in spoken or written texts. It is widely assumed, in fact, that this is a necessary characteristic of unmarked word order, that it is part of what it means to be unmarked that the unmarked word order be most frequent. For example, Greenberg (1966) claims explicitly that the unmarked order in a language is "necessarily the most frequent". There are instances, however, in which this assumption has been questioned, in which descriptions of word order in particular languages have claimed that a particular order is unmarked or neutral, even though that order is not significantly more frequent than other orders, and may in fact be less frequent than at least some other orders. | Matthew S. Dryer, 1995
- (Grammar) Greenberg (1963) proposed using three criteria to identify the basic word order of any given language:
- The use of prepositions versus postpositions.
- The relative order of subject, verb, and object in declarative sentences with nominal subject and object.
- The position of qualifying adjectives, either preceding or following the modified noun.
Although these three criteria have been modified as the typological
program has matured, they still reflect the fundamental question involved in determining how a language patterns: does a head (i.e., the constituent being modified) precede or follow its modifier? To answer this question, four criteria are typically used, in varying degrees: 1) frequency, 2) distribution, 3) clause type, and 4) pragmatics (Siewierska 1988, Payne 1997, Bickford 1998, Dryer 1985).
The "frequency" criterion focuses on that word order that is numerically dominant. This is perhaps the most common criterion and was adopted early in the typological approach by Greenberg himself: "The so-called normal order, it would seem, is necessarily the most frequent" (1966).
The first criterion that recognizes the salience of context in the
basic word order discussion is the test of "distribution". Given two or
more alternatives for a syntactic construction, the one that occurs
in the greater number of environments is unmarked and, hence, the
basic order.
The second criterion used to filter raw frequency results concerns
"clause type". This criterion is predicated on the observation that
languages often exhibit different word order patterns in different
clause types; in such cases, not all clause types present the language's basic word order.
The third, and final, criterion by which the raw frequency data are
filtered concerns "pragmatic markedness". Attention to the pragmatic features of a clause is particularly significant for so-called free-order languages like Hebrew, that is, languages exhibiting a great deal of word order variation. At the core of this approach is the recognition that the majority of language data contains pragmatically marked, or non-neutral, clauses. Even for languages that have a more rigid word order, such as English, pragmatics can produce extreme but grammatically acceptable examples, as with Into the room walked the Prime Minister, a VS clause with a fronted locative PP—certainly not basic order in English. | Robert D. Holmstedt, 2011
PRE-DP ONLY
(Semantics) Only is traditionally defined as a propositional operator, such as (1). Yet, syntactically, only can occur at various positions, including at a pre-DP position, as in (2).
- ⟦only⟧C = λp<s,t> λw : p(w). ∀p′ ∈ C [ p′(w)→p ⊆ p′ ]
- Jill brought only wine.
Pre-DP only is known (Taglicht 1984) to scopally interact with modals:
- Jill may bring only wine. (may > only, only > may)
- may > only: Jill is allowed to not bring anything other than wine
- only > may: Jill is not allowed to bring anything other than wine
| Itai Bassi, Aron Hirsch and Tue Trinh, 2022
PRE-FORTIS CLIPPING
- (Phonology) A process whereby vowels are pronounced with shorter durations before voiceless segments. | John McGahay, 2019
- (Phonology) Refers to the phenomenon in English of vowels being shorter before voiceless obstruents than before voiced ones. | Hyesun Cho, 2015
PRE-VERBAL SLOTS
(Pragmatics) VO languages have two pre-verbal slots:
- Position 1: Established or accessible information.
- Traditionally distinguished as contrastive topic.
- Establishes an explicit frame of reference.
- Represents choice to place info in marked position
- —a.k.a. point of departure.
- Position 2: Newly asserted information (focal).
- Traditionally referred to as emphasis.
- Most salient information made more prominent, emphasized.
- Represents choice to place most salient info in a marked position
- —a.k.a. preposed focal constituent.
| Steven E. Runge, 2008
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