Sank's Glossary of Linguistics
Why-Wz |
WHY-STRIPPING
- (Syntax) A type of sluice-stripping where the wh-element is restricted to why, and the non-wh remnant is typically identical to its antecedent in the preceding clause. Why-Stripping involves a base-generated why and leftward movement of a focused non-wh-element followed by clausal ellipsis.
- Spanish
[A points at pictures of Juan.]
A:
Juanx
Juanx
va
will
a
to
vender
sell
estas
these
fotos.
pictures.
'Juan will sell these pictures.'
B:
Por qué
why
fotos
pictures
de
of
sí mismox
himselfx
(y
(and
no
not
de
of
otros)?
others)
'Why will he sell pictures of himself, and not pictures of others?'
| Iván Ortega-Santos, Masaya Yoshida, and Chizuru Nakao, 2014
- (Syntax) Example:
- Japanese
A:
John-wa
John-TOP
natto-o
natto-ACC
tabeta.
ate
'John ate natto.'
B:
naze
why
NATTO-(O)
natto-ACC
(desu)
COP
(ka)?
Q
'Why natto?'
| Hiroko Kimura and Hiroki Narita, 2023
WORD EMBEDDING
(Computational) A point in a two-dimensional space is a primitive notion for a unique position set by two values, usually x and
y. Similarly, word embeddings are unique vectors of features influenced by all other words in a distributional space.
While dictionaries describe meanings of words through linking concepts to other concepts, word embedding links words
to numbers rather than words to encode word-level semantics and similarities (Lai, Liu, et al. 2016).
Additionally, word embedding can capture many linguistic regularities and patterns (Mikolov et al. 2013). However, they treat words holistically with no attention to their internal structure, ignoring the fact that, morphologically, meaning is a multi-faceted concept with multiple axes along which two words can be similar (Cotterell and Schütze 2015). For languages known to be morphologically impoverished, like English, this fact could be ignored, but for processing inflectional languages with rich morphology, like Arabic, exploiting word internal structure is mandatory (Cotterell et al. 2016). For example, applying word embedding to Arabic causes different surface realizations of a word, like conjugations and inflections of a verb, to be the most semantically similar words and this strongly demotes other semantically similar words that have different forms. In addition, these kinds of similarities lead to sparsity problems and deficiency in exploiting shared semantics (Cotterell et al. 2016). | Rana Afer Salama, Abdou Youssed, and Aly Fahmy, 2018
WORDHOOD
- (Grammar) What are words and how should we individuate them? There are two main answers on the philosophical market.
- For some, words are bundles of structural-functional features defining a unique performance profile.
- For others, words are non-eternal continuants individuated by their causal-historical ancestry.
These conceptions offer competing views of the nature of words, and it seems natural to assume that at most one of them can capture the essence of wordhood. This paper makes a case for pluralism about wordhood: The view that there is a plurality of acceptable conceptions of the nature of words, none of which is uniquely entitled to inform us as to what wordhood consists in.
A quick terminological caveat: The term word is ambiguous between a token reading and type reading. On the token reading, the term picks out observable, spatio-temporally located entities like utterances and inscriptions. On the type reading, the term picks out the abstract lexical units that speakers take to be externalized, conveyed, or articulated by appropriately produced utterances and inscriptions. | Luca Gasparri, 2020
- (Grammar) Most linguistic theories and descriptions rely, in one way or another, on a concept of the word. The word is argued to be the domain of certain formal properties, which makes it both a useful and a necessary structure for linguistic analysis (Graff 1929, Bloomfield 1933 [1984], Robins 1959, a.o.). In addition, words have proven to be psychologically real for language users, including L1 learners (Sapir 1921 [2004], Bolinger 1963, Tomasello 2003, a.o.). However, defining the word, either within or across languages, is one of the best-known issues in descriptive linguistics (Hiorth 1958, Lehmann 1962, Krámský 1969, a.o.)
The major complication in defining words is that the relevant formal properties do not always single out the same strings. Such mismatches have motivated arguments for different word units, the most widely accepted of which is the division into phonological (or prosodic, or p-) words and morphological (or grammatical, or g-) words (Dixon 1977, 2010, Hall 1999, Dixon and Aikhenvald 2003, Hall et al. 2008, Hildebrandt 2015). | Tim Zingler, 2020
- (Grammar) Many languages of North America exhibit a high degree of polysynthesis, having words with a clause-like level of complexity, a high number of morphemes per word, noun incorporation, and rich agreement, among other phenomena. For instance, the following polysynthetic words from Inuktitut appear in language lessons intended for beginners (Pirurvik Centre 2015):
- Aatuvaa-mu-u-laaq-tunga
Ottawa-ALL-go-DIST.FUT-DEC.1SG
'I will be going to Ottawa.'
- Katima-qati-gi-junna-qinnga?
meet-partner-have.as-can-INTER.2SG.1SG
'Can you meet with me?'
We can note that both of these examples exhibit noun incorporation and rich agreement and the latter also contains a modal.
Recent analyses of these words—and particularly in frameworks such as Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994)—posit that they are syntactically complex. But such complexity raises the following question: Are orthographic polysynthetic words really words, in the usual sense?
Sadock (1980) argues that words in West Greenlandic (part of the Inuit dialect continuum) are words in the usual sense. His arguments include the fact that affixes cannot occur in isolation, that "obligatory sandhi processes operate within words, but are optional or inapplicable between them", that it is "impossible to interrupt words with pauses or parenthetical material", and that "error correction can take place only at the boundaries of words", among other more syntactically oriented arguments, such as the inability to conjoin constituents within words. | Anja Arnhold, Richard Compton, and Emily Elfner, 2018
- (Grammar) While zi 'character' has figured prominently throughout the long history of Chinese linguistics, ci 'word' was hardly a topic prior to the twentieth century. According to Lü (1990), the first Chinese scholar to talk about ci 'word', as in contrast to zi 'character', was Shizhao Zhang (1907). Real discussion did not occur until the 1950s, when, prompted by the desire to introduce an alphabetic writing system, wordhood became an issue of urgency and many studies ensued. It was soon realized, however, that the task at hand was harder than one had thought, since testing criteria often conflicted with each other (see, for example, Lu 1964, Ling 1956, Fan 1958, Chao 1968, Lü 1979, Huang 1984, H. Zhang 1992, Dai 1992). This has made some leading scholars doubt whether defining word in Chinese is a meaningful thing to do. For example, in his classic work on Chinese grammar, Y. R. Chao (1968) states that "Not every language has a kind of unit which behaves in most (not to speak all) respects as does the unit called 'word'".
I conclude that wordhood in Chinese is clearly definable. In particular, a modifier-noun [ M N ] nominal without the particle de is a compound; so are its derivatives, such as [ M [ M N ] ], [ [ M N ] N ], [ [ M N ] [ M N ] ], etc., as proposed by Fan (1958) and Dai (1992). | San Duanmu, 1998
- (Grammar) Recent research has clearly shown that the term word conflates a number of notions that must be kept distinct. If we use the term phonological word (p-word) to refer to units of a phonological domain, then there are two types of phonological words, metrical word and prosodic word. Let us use the term syntactic word (s-word) to refer to wordlike units for the purposes of syntax. The expressions John's and isn't in (1a) and (1b) are single p-words, but not single s-words:
- a. John's coming here tomorrow.
b. Isn't he being promoted?
| Tara Mohanan, 1995
- (Grammar) The notion word, which is the atomic unit in grammar, can be defined in different ways in different levels of grammar.
- The notion word can be defined in terms of morphological integrity: the word is a unit whose parts cannot be separated from the rest.
- It can also be defined in terms of grammatical-functional properties: in the case of a verb, it is the unit that governs its subject and object, and also a unit for certain operations that are related to grammatical functions such as passivization.
- The word can also be defined as a unit of meaning; it is a unit that conveniently packages meanings in an integrated way.
These kinds of different senses of atomicity of the word represent the definition of the word at different levels of representation (i.e. constituent, functional and argument structure). In canonical cases, the same unit functions as an atom in these different senses. | Yo Matsumoto, 1992
See Also MORPHOLOGICAL WORD; PROSODIC WORD.
WORDLIKENESS JUDGMENTS
(Morphology) It has long been observed that native speakers have strong intuitions about "possible words" in their language. For example, Halle (1962) and Chomsky and Halle (1965, 1968) observe certain
unattested words—like [bɪk] or [blɪk]—are judged by native speakers to be possible words of English, whereas others—[bnɪk] or [vnig]—are judged impossible. There have been many experimental studies attempting to probe the source of such wordlikeness judgments, i.e., acceptability judgements of nonce words, and such studies increasingly include sophisticated computational modeling of the judgments obtained.
One key observation about wordlikeness judgements, going back to some of the earliest work on the topic (Greenberg and Jenkins 1964, Scholes 1966, Chomsky and Halle 1968), is that they are gradient in the sense that nonce words tend to form a cline of acceptability. | Jimin Kahng and Karthik Durvasula, 2023
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