*, #, ?
An asterisk indicates a reconstructed word or morpheme in historical linguistics.
  In theoretical linguistics, as Cerebus suggested, it indicates ungrammaticality. There are a few other such markers: question marks indicate relative unacceptability, and hash marks indicate anything from semantic incoherence to infelicity, a pragmatic failure.

• *John slept the baby.
• ?John ate much rice.
• #Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• #His horse sleeps until dawn. [In response to the question "How are you doing?"]

A-BINDING
(Syntax) A binding relation in which the antecedent is in an A-position. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

A-CHAIN
(Syntax) In GB theory, an A-chain is formed by the linkages between a unit and successive traces left in A-positions from which it is moved. | ?

A-MOVEMENT
(Syntax) Movement to an A-position. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

A′-MOVEMENT

1. (Syntax) Or, A-bar movement, or, non-argument movement. It displaces a phrase into a position where a fixed grammatical function is not assigned, such as the movement of a subject or object NP to a pre-verbal position in interrogatives:
   1. You think Fred loves Mary.
      Who_i do you think t_i loves Mary? (A-bar movement)
   2. You think Fred loves Mary.
      Whom_i do you think Fred loves t_i? (A-bar movement)
   | Wikipedia, 2022
2. (Syntax) Chomsky (1977) identifies several movement operations that have come to be known as instances of A-bar movement:
   • Wh-movement: Who did you tell Mary that you should meet __?
   • Topicalization: This book, I asked Bill to get his students to read __.
   • Relativization: The book which I asked Bill to get his students to read __.
     Subsequent work has expanded Chomsky's original list. Movement to initial position in V2 clauses, for example, appears to be A-bar movement, as are certain kinds of scrambling:
   • Dieses Buch habe ich schon __ gelesen. [German]
     This book have I already read.
   • Kono hon-o Taroo-wa [Mariko-ga __ yondato] omotta. [Japanese]
     this book.ACC Taroo.TOP Mariko-NOM read that thought
     'This book, Taroo thought that Mariko read.'
     A-bar movement is generally taken to be one of the two major types of phrasal movement (the other being A-movement). | Routledge Handbook of Syntax, 2014

A-POSITION
(Syntax) A position that in D-structure can be occupied by an argument. A-positions are positions to which a theta-role can be assigned (subject and object positions). A-positions are also known as argument positions. A position which is not an A-position is called an A'-position (A-bar position).
  E.g.: The NPs John and apples in the sentence John eats apples (in D-structure).
  The position occupied by operators such as who in e.g. who does he see? is an A'-position. Another term for A'-position is non-argument position. (Chomsky 1981, 1986, 1993) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

A-PREFIXING
(Morphology) A phenomenon whereby a prefix, a-, attaches to a verbal form inflected with the suffix -ing, as in the following Appalachian English examples from Wolfram (1976):

1. I know he was a-tellin' the truth, but I was a-comin' home.
2. Well, she's a-gettin' the black lung now, ain't she?

ABLAUT

1. A German word used to label the alternation of vowel sounds in related words belonging to the same paradigm or in etymologically cognate words; the inflection of a word by changing one or more of its internal vowels. It is a form of apophony and is known in English as vowel gradation. (Umlaut is also a form of apophony but is entirely unconnected to ablaut.)
     The Proto-Indo-European language was marked by the presence of movable pitch and stress patterns in related words. As these stresses moved, preceding, following or landing on the affected syllable a regular sequence of vowels was produced: short and long '-e-' and '-o-', the so-called e- and o-grades, and the reduced or zero grade in which the vowel disappeared completely. The phenomenon can be demonstrated in the changes of the second syllable in the various forms of the Ancient Greek for 'father':
   • πατήρ [nominative singular: long -e- (because of the stressed vowel in the final syllable)]
   • πατέρα [accusative singular: short e (because of the stressed vowel in the penultimate syllable)]
   • πατρος [genitive singular: the zero grade, because the syllable precedes the stress]
   There is also an adjective in which the relevant syllable has become the third:
   • απάτορα ['fatherless' accusative masculine singular: short -o-, because the syllable follows the stress].
     In the Germanic languages (with the exception of Afrikaans) the regularity of vowel gradation has survived most fully and obviously in the forms of the strong (irregular) verbs which could originally be organized into seven ablaut classes, though subsequent linguistic changes have caused verbs to switch classes or become (regular) weak. | Hull-AWE, 2017
2. Apophony in English is exemplified by internal vowel alternations (sometimes referred to as Ablaut) which signify differences in tense (sing/sang), transitivity (rise/raise), and number (goose/geese). | Ohad Cohen, 2015

ABOUTNESS TOPIC

1. (Information Structure) Topic or aboutness topic is an important information structural concept relevant for linguistic communication (for a review, see Frey 2007 and Jacobs 2001). As a pragmatic phenomenon, aboutness topic has been described as the entity the sentence is about (e.g., Reinhart, 1981). Topic has been assumed to perform "the anchoring role to the previous discourse or the hearer's mental world" (Vallduvi and Engdahl 1996). This is in line with the account that topic usually refers to information that is given due to a previous context (e.g., Givón 1983, Gundel 1988, Skopeteas et al. 2006). | Juliane Burmester, Katharina Spalek, and Isabell Wartenburger, 2014
2. (Information Structure) Or, sentence topic. The notion of topic we are dealing with is that of aboutness topic (AT). Since there are considerable differences in the way in which the notion of "topic" has been used, and since the actual operationalizability of this notion is the crux of the current contribution, we will lay out here some of the basic assumptions taken by researchers working with the notion of "aboutness topic".
    Krifka (2007), in his concise overview of the basic notions of information structure, points out that the use of the terms "topic" and comment reflect what von der Gabelentz (1869) called psychological subject and psychological predicate respectively, that is "the entity that a speaker identifies about which then information, the comment, is given" (Krifka 2007).
    This approach to topicality was further elaborated by Reinhart (1981), who adopts Stalnaker's (1978) notion of context set (a set of propositions which interlocutors accept to be true; that is, a common ground). In addition, Reinhart assumes that the common ground is structured in such a way that information is stored in terms of a pairing of an entity and a proposition (or set of propositions) about that entity. New information is added to the common ground in the form of structured propositions, where the sentence topic designates an entity and the remainder of the sentence contributes the information to be associated with that entity (just like information in a file-card system is stored on a certain file card bearing a heading).
    Building on Reinhart's approach, Krifka (2007) formulates the following definition:

   The topic constituent identifies the entity or set of entities under which the information expressed in the comment constituent should be stored in the C[common] G[round] content.

    | Philippa Cook and Felix Bildhauer, 2013

ABSOLUTE ADJECTIVE
(Grammar) Or, incomparable modifier, or, ultimate modifier, or, absolute modifier. An adjective, such as supreme or infinite, with a meaning that is generally not capable of being intensified or compared.
 According to some style guides, absolute adjectives are always in the superlative degree. However, some absolute adjectives can be quantified by the addition of the word almost, nearly, or virtually. | Richard Nordquist, 2019

ABSOLUTELY NO TAMPERING AT ALL CONDITION
(Morphosyntax) 

No Tampering Condition (NTC, Chomsky 2008)
 "A natural requirement for efficient computation is a no-tampering condition: Merge of X and Y leaves the two syntactic objects unchanged. If so, then Merge of X and Y can be taken to yield the set { X, Y }, the simplest possibility worth considering. Merge cannot break up X or Y, or add new features to them. Therefore Merge is invariably 'to the edge' and we also try to establish the inclusiveness principle, dispensing with bar levels, traces, indices, and similar descriptive technology introduced in the course of derivation of an expression."

Absolutely No Tampering At All Condition (Collins and Kayne 2023)
 "Third, once the winning vocabulary item is determined, its phonological form will be inserted into the terminal, so when the syntactic object is linearized, the phonological features of the vocabulary item are incorporated into the output. Such insertion changes the syntactic object formed (by replacing one of its morphemes with a morpheme specified for phonological form). So, it is important to stipulate that this process lies outside of syntax, which is constrained by the No Tampering Condition (no altering syntactic objects already formed)."

ABSTRACT AGREEMENT

1. (Syntax) It has become exceedingly common in contemporary linguistic theorizing to come across claims of the following sort: "It may appear that verbs in language L do not agree with their arguments, but that is just an arbitrary fact about the morpho-phonology of L. In other words, the relevant exponents in L just happen to lack segmental content. Syntactically, agreement is operative in L just as it would be in a morphologically richer language." I will refer to this type of analysis as abstract agreement, by analogy with abstract case (Vergnaud 1977, Chomsky 1981).
    Until quite recently, the existence of abstract agreement would have seemed inevitable, as a consequence of the following widely held premises:
   1. Structural case is assigned as a consequence of agreement in φ-features (Chomsky 2000, 2001).
   2. Noun phrases that are not assigned inherent case must receive structural case, or else ungrammaticality arises (Vergnaud 1977, Chomsky 1981).
    Taken together, these premises entailed that any noun phrase that could not plausibly be analyzed as a bearer of inherent case had to be the target of an agreement relation; and insofar as there was no morpho-phonological evidence of such a relation (as is the case with, e.g., direct objects in English), abstract agreement had to be at play.
    By now, however, it has become quite clear that neither (1) nor (2) is correct. | Omer Preminger, 2019
2. (Syntax) Refers to the relation between heads and specifiers. | Judith Aissen, 1996

ABSTRACT MORPHEMES
(Syntax) These are composed exclusively of non-phonetic features, such as [Past] or [pl], or features that make up the determiner node D of the English definite article eventuating as the.
 Whereas the features that make up abstract morphemes are universal, Roots are language-specific combinations of sound and meaning. In other words, Roots are open-class, and new Roots can be added to an individual's grammar at any time. The distinction is thus related to that between the functional categories and the lexical categories.
 Functional heads do not have phonetic content in the syntactic derivation. We use the adjective abstract to designate such morphemes, and one of the basic functions of morphology is to supply phonological features to abstract morphemes. | David Embick and Rolf Noyer, 2012

ABSTRACT PHONOLOGY

1. (Phonology) A phonology that recognizes underlying segments which are not realized phonetically. For instance, two underlying vowel segments /ɔ/ and /ɛ/ are posited for Nupe (a Kwa language of Central Nigeria), both of which are realized as /a/, therefore merging (absolutely neutralizing) with /a/. | Larry M. Hyman, 1970
2. (Phonology) Paul Kiparsky's (1968) question how abstract is phonology? initiated a discussion about the dissimilarity that phonological theory should allow for between phonetic reality and phonological representations. One aspect of the debate concerned abstract segments. These are objects which occur in the underlying structure of a morpheme but appear in none of its phonetic manifestations, or, worse, are even absent from the segmental inventory of the language.
    In Generative Phonology, the discussion on abstractness led to the view that abstract structures should be dispensed with in the presence of solutions that are bound to the surface in a more direct fashion. This position is expressed in subsequent work by Kiparsky (1982) and Tranel (1981), among others. It was the cornerstone of Natural Generative Phonology (Hooper 1976, Vennemann 1974) and Natural Phonology (e.g. Stampe 1973, Dressler 1974). However, the debate never came to a conclusive end.
    We believe that the questions related to abstractness, though raised in the 1970's, are still relevant for phonological theory. As a fact in point, another typical topic of the rule-ordering period has come back into the spotlight recently: Optimality Theory is seeking to cope with opacity. | Philippe Ségéral and Tobias Scheer, 2011

ACCEPTABILITY JUDGMENTS
(Grammar) Reports of a speaker's or signer's subjective sense of the well-formedness, nativeness, or naturalness of (novel) linguistic forms. Their value comes in providing data about the nature of the human capacity to generalize beyond linguistic forms previously encountered in language comprehension. For this reason, acceptability judgments are often also called grammaticality judgments (particularly in syntax), although unlike the theory-dependent notion of grammaticality, acceptability is accessible to consciousness.
 While acceptability judgments have been used to test grammatical claims since ancient times, they became particularly prominent with the birth of generative syntax. Today they are also widely used in other linguistic schools (e.g., cognitive linguistics) and other linguistic domains (pragmatics, semantics, morphology, and phonology), and have been applied in a typologically diverse range of languages.
 As psychological responses to linguistic stimuli, acceptability judgments are experimental data. Their value thus depends on the validity of the experimental procedures. | James Myers, 2017

ACCOMMODATION
(Sociolinguistics) Or, linguistic accommodation, or, speech accommodation, or, communication accommodation. The process by which participants in a conversation adjust their accent, diction, or other aspects of language according to the speech style of the other participant.
 Accommodation most often takes the form of convergence, when a speaker chooses a language variety that seems to fit the style of the other speaker. Less frequently, accommodation may take the form of divergence, when a speaker signals social distance or disapproval by using a language variety that differs from the style of the other speaker. | Richard Nordquist, 2020

ACCOMPLISHMENT
(Semantics) A type of situation (or state of affair) which is dynamic (implies change), telic (has a natural endpoint) and durative (non-punctual).

1. Words
   build, make, draw a picture, look through, walk a mile, read a book
2. Sentences
   a. They built a house last year.
   b. He read the book yesterday.

ACCUSATIVE AND INFINITIVE CONSTRUCTION
(Grammar) Or, accusativus cum infinitivo, or, accusative plus infinitive. Frequently abbreviated ACI or A+I. A syntactic construction first described in Latin and Greek, also found in various forms in other languages such as English and Spanish. In this construction, the subject of a subordinate clause is put in the accusative or objective case, and the verb appears in the infinitive form.
 This construction can be illustrated in English:

1. I believe him to be rich.

2. He is rich.

ACROSS-THE-BOARD
(Syntax) Rules apply across-the-board (ATB) if they may affect all conjuncts in a coordinate structure at the same time. Wh-movement applies across-the-board in (1).

1. I wonder which books_i [ Mary hates e_i ] _C1 and [ Sam likes e_i ] _C2

ACTUATION
(Diachronic; Sociolinguistics) The way in which changes in a language are initiated. The actuation problem is accordingly that of explaining why a specific change began in a specific language or dialect at a specific time, and as such it is distinguished, in many theories, from the problem of implementation, or transmission of the change across a community of speakers. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2003

ADDITIVE ADVERB

1. (Grammar) A type of adverb which offers a choice between two or more items, as in (1).
   1. You either leave or stay.
    | Internet Grammar of English, 1998
2. (Grammar) A linking adverb that shows addition. In English, common words that can be used as additive adverbs include additionally, moreover, further, furthermore, again, etc. | Teflpedia

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