AUGMENT
(Morphology)

1. (Athabaskan) An additional argument that has been advanced for the epenthetic status of conjunct [ə] concerns the vowel which appears in forms which are said to be augmented to satisfy disyllabic minimality. Verbal augmentation in Athabaskan languages is typically described via statements such as the following, on Slavey and Navajo, respectively:

    Some words do not have a meaningful prefix taken from one of the eleven slots. Instead, they add a prefix /ɛ-/ (often /hɛ/ in Hay River and Fort Providence) which carries no meaning. (Howard 1990).

    To insure syllable integrity, and to prevent the naked stem from appearing in lexical form ... a meaningless element with the shape yi-~y-~w- is added. (Young and Morgan 1987)

    Augmentation is easiest to see in forms such as (1), which appear to be morphologically unprefixed, containing only a verb stem. In (1), the augment, whose phonological shape is always a reflex of Proto-Athabaskan (PA) *ə, is emphasized. Note: Krauss and Leer (1981) reconstruct a verbal augment *ə for PA. In Slave and Ahtna, the reflex of *ə is [ɛ], in Navajo and Hupa [i] and in Galice [a].
   1. Basic verbal augmentation data: bare stems
      a.
       
       

      S. Slavey
       
       

      ɛ | tsɛ
      ɛ | zí
      ɛ | ʔɛ́h

      'she is crying'
      'it's roasting'
      's/he is paddling'

      DSS 802
      DSS 800
      DSS 46
      b.
       
       

      Sekani
       
       

      ə | tsəɣ
      OBJ ə | čʼĩ
      OBJ ə | bà

      's/he is crying'
      's/he has OBJ'
      's/he (child, animal) is eating OBJ'
    | Sharon Hargus and Siri G. Tuttle, 1997
2. (Modern Greek) An interesting issue in Greek verbal inflection is the status of the augment, which is traditionally considered to be the mark of past (see Mirambel 1959, a.o.) As such, it is often assigned a prefixal status. A slightly different view is found in Hamp (1961) who suggests that the augment is the first part of a discontinuous morpheme, the second member of which is the ending. However, a different view is expressed by Babiniotis (1972) and is later adopted by Kaisse (1982) and Ralli (1988), according to which the augment is nothing but a formative whose only function is to receive stress when the antepenultimate-syllable stress law causes a left-hand stress shift outside the confines of the word (e.g. li + s + e + s → ˈlises → élises 'you solved'). | Angela Ralli, 2003
3. (Bantu) The literature shows that the augment is a morpheme that is attached to the noun class prefix in some Bantu languages (De Blois 1970, Maho 1999, Alcock 2000, Katamba 2003, Goodness, 2013, Gambarage 2019). The Bantu languages that can take augments on their nouns are Kagulu (Petzell 2003), Otjiherero (Kavari and Marten 2009), Bena (Morrison 2011), Shinyiha (Goodness 2013), and Nata (Gambarage 2019). This entails that not all Bantu languages include augments in their nouns. For example, Kiswahili, Chichewa, and Samatengo (Katamba 2003, Maho 1999, Ndomba 2006) do not take augments.
    Studies show that in most Bantu languages, the augment appears in the form of a vowel, like in Kagulu (Petzell 2003), Bena (Morrison 2011), Zulu (Halpert 2012), Shinyiha (Goodness 2013), SuNdala varieties (Mtenje-Mkochi 2018), and Nguni (Ström and Miestamo 2020). However, in other Bantu languages, it occurs as a consonant plus a vowel, such as in Bukusu (Maho 1999), SuNdala varieties (Mtenje-Mkochi 2018), and Nata (Gambarage 2019). In addition, studies show that the augment agrees in shape with the vowel of the noun class prefix in many Bantu languages such as Bena (Morrison 2011), Shinyiha (Goodness 2013), and Nata (Gambarage 2019), as illustrated by the Shinyiha example in (1) and (2).
   1. u-mu-ntu
      AUG-CL.1-person
      'person'
   2. a-va-ntu
      AUG-CL.2-people
      'people' (Goodness 2013)
    | Emmanuel Hauli, Rafiki Sebonde, and Chrispina Alphonce, 2024

AUTOLEXICAL GRAMMAR
(Grammar) The framework of Autolexical Grammar treats a language as the intersection of numerous independent context-free phrase structure grammars, or hierarchies, each of which corresponds to a specific structural or functional aspect of the language. Semantic, syntactic, morphological, discourse-functional and many other hierarchies have been introduced in the literature, but this project focuses on the interactions among only three major hierarchies: Surface Syntax, Function-Argument Structure, and Operator Scope Structure.

1. The surface syntactic hierarchy is a feature-based grammar expressing those generalizations about a sentence which are most clearly syntactic in nature, such as agreement, case, and syntactic valency.
2. The function-argument hierarchy expresses that (formal) semantic information about a sentence which does not involve scope resolution, e.g., semantic valency and association of referential terms with argument positions, as in Park (1995).
3. The operator scope hierarchy, naturally, imposes a scope ordering on the quantifiers and operators found in the expression.

4. The linear ordering of words in the surface string is treated as a hierarchy.
5. A lexical hierarchy is introduced in order to express the differing lexical "strength" of quantifiers.

AUTOLEXICAL SYNTAX

1. (Grammar) In AS, Jerrold M. Sadock argues for a radical departure from the derivational model of grammar that has prevailed in linguistics for thirty years. He offers an alternative theory in which the various components of grammar—in particular syntax, semantics, and morphology—are viewed as fully autonomous descriptive devices for various parallel dimensions of linguistic representation. The lexicon in this theory forges the connection between autonomous representations in that a typical lexeme plays a role in all three of the major components of the grammar.
    Sadock's principal innovation is the postulation of a uniform set of interface conditions that require the several orthogonal representations of a single natural language expression to match up in certain ways. | Jerrold M. Sadock, 1991
2. (Grammar) Represents a radical departure from the approaches to modeling grammar which were developed in the 1960s and became dominant in the 1980s. It employs a theory of parallel grammatical representations, where information is organized on a number of levels, known as dimensions. Each dimension contains information relating to a single aspect of grammar, e.g., syntax, morphology, logico-semantics. Every dimension has the power of a context-free phrase-structure grammar, although the overall power of the grammar is greater than that of a context-free grammar. The dimensions are static and do not involve derivations. Instead, the representations of each dimension are compared in the interface, where any discrepancies are checked against a set of interface principles. The information derives from the lexicon, where lexical entries list properties of each item at all of the various dimensions. | Eric Schiller, 1996

AUTOMATICITY

1. (Cognition) Complex processes and judgments need to be automatized to become efficient. In driving, one is not aware of each motor activity. Person perception involves an automatic activation of stereotypes. Social psychologists estimate that 95% of routine social behaviors are automated. | Simon Garrod, 2005
2. (Cognition) Four horsemen of automaticity:
   1. Awareness of controlled processes.
   2. Intentional instigation of controlled process.
   3. Efficiency of automatic processes.
   4. Controllability (i.e., interruptibility) of controlled processes.
    Automated social cognitive processes categorize, evaluate, and impute the meanings of behavior and other social information, and this input is then ready for use by conscious and controlled judgment and decision processes. | John A. Bargh, 1994

AUTOSEGMENTAL MORPHOLOGY

1. (Morphology) A framework of morphology developed beginning in the late 1970s to account for such types of non-concatenative phenomena as root and pattern morphology, reduplication, ablaut, and consonant mutation. | Rochelle Lieber, 2013
2. (Morphology) It is concluded that autosegmental morphology is of use only for those languages, or those parts of languages, which manipulate the skeletal tier. It is further concluded that as the morphologies of Dutch, German and English overwhelmingly do not manipulate the skeletal tier, and as the description of the entire morphologies of these languages autosegmentally would moreover result in some disadvantages, this should not be attempted. Doubt is cast on any implied universality for the theory of autosegmental morphology. | Lisa Christine Matthewson, 1991
3. (Morphology) 

   Early History of Autosegmental Morphology

   1. Goldsmith (1976) Autosegmental approach to tone.
   2. McCarthy (1979) Autosegmental approach to Roots and Patterns.
   3. Marantz (1982) Autosegmental approach to reduplication.

    | Jochen Trommer, 2008
4. (Morphology) Arabic is a canonical case of avoiding similar consonants in roots, but it also loves biliteral roots with identical consonants.
   1.  /samam/ 'to poison'
    This was an elegant focus of John McCarthy's (1979) Ph.D. dissertation, where he used autosegmentalism to make such roots genuinely bilateral.

   2.           a
               / \
              /   \
          C  V  C  V  C
          |      \   /
          |       \ /
          s        m
      

    /samam/ is OK because of left-to-right "spreading", whereas */sasam/ would require right-to-left and is not OK.
    Autosegmental morphology is mostly gone, I think, due to contradictions: sometimes you want consonants on a separate tier, other times on the same. Nowadays we can use straightforward linear representation, Correspondence Theory to describe morphemes, and suppose Semitic languages are special in despising contiguity.

   3. /s₁m₂/, /a₃/
      [s₁a₃m₂a₃m₂]

    | Bruce Hayes, 2018

AUTOSEGMENTAL PHONOLOGY

1. (Phonology) A non-linear approach to phonology that allows phonological processes, such as tone and vowel harmony, to be independent of and extend beyond individual consonants and vowels. As a result, the phonological processes may influence more than one vowel or consonant at a time. | SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, 2003
2. (Phonology) The central claim of autosegmental phonology (Goldsmith 1976) is that tones, features, and length/weight (that is, moras, in the currently prevailing view) are representational entities in their own right, not simply attributes of segments. | Matthew Wolf, 2005
3. (Phonology) A framework of phonological analysis proposed by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis (1976) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
    As a theory of phonological representation, autosegmental phonology developed a formal account of ideas that had been sketched in earlier work by several linguists, notably Bernard Bloch (1948), Charles Hockett (1955) and J. R. Firth (1948). According to such a view, phonological representations consist of more than one linear sequence of segments; each linear sequence constitutes a separate tier. The co-registration of elements (or autosegments) on one tier with those on another is represented by association lines. There is a close relationship between analysis of segments into distinctive features and an autosegmental analysis; each feature in a language appears on exactly one tier.
   1. Segmental tier
       The autosegmental tier (also skeletal tier) contains the features that define the segments articulated in the phonological representation. In the segmental tier, features are assigned to segments.
   2. Timing tier
       The timing tier contains timing units that define the lengths of segments in the phonological representation. These timing units are commonly depicted as X's, and are assigned to segments.
   3. Stress tier
       The stress tier contains the features that show the distribution of stress in the phonological representation. The features in the stress tier are [±stress] and [±main], and they are assigned to the stress-bearing units of the language (syllables or moras).
   4. Tone tier
       The tone tier contains the features that show the distribution of tones in the phonological representation. The features in the tone tier are [±high pitch] and [±low pitch], and they are assigned to the tone-bearing units of the language (syllables or moras).
    | Wikipedia, 2022
4. (Phonology) Principles of Autosegmental Phonology:
   1. Multilinear representation
       The view of phonological representation as linear segmental and suprasegmental was changed by the production of multilinear phonology by John Goldsmith (1976). In this theory, phonological representation is not linear. There are many sequences, not just one string of segments. These sequences (tiers) are associated to each other by association lines (Hulst and Smith 1982).
   2. Parallel Tiers
       Autosegmental representation consists of a number of independent tiers. These tiers are associated with a central tier which is called the skeletal or skeleton tier, which consists of elements called slots. It gives the basic organization of consonants and vowels. The slots are represented by the symbols C and V. What determines the length of the segments is called the timing tier (Roca 1994).
   3. Autosegmental Representation of Tone
       Autosegmental theory views tone as an autonomous segment on a separate tier. Tones and segments are produced on separate tiers and are linked by association lines. The symbols high (H) and low (L) are used to refer to tonal elements.
   4. Contour Tones
       Tones that consist of two-level tones HL, LH. A contour tone is a combination of two or more basic tones, for example, a rising tone consists of a low tone plus a high tone. A contour tone acts like two successive tones even if it could not be broken into a sequence of two tones.
   5. Stability of Tone
       If a vowel has deleted the tone it was bearing, the tone does not disappear but moves to other vowels. The tone has stability which remains independently of other levels of representation; the tone melody stays stable despite modification of the syllabic structure.
    | Athra'a Ammar Mahdi, 2020
5. (Phonology) A theory of how the various parts of the articulatory organs—the tongue, the lips, the larynx, the velum are coordinated and related. | Suha Rasheed Hamad Alkumet, Maysoon Kadhim ali, and Nisreen Khalid Abbass, 2020

AUTOSEGMENTAL THEORY
(General) Is based upon the notion that distinctive feature bundles can be partitioned and distributed onto a number of different tiers. Autosegmental representations are therefore configurations of distinctive feature bundles.
 Some versions of autosegmental theory allow the same distinctive feature to be projected simultaneously on more than one tier, whereas other versions assume that a single distinctive feature can appear on one and only one tier. The autosegmental frameworks that in the past have not permitted duplication of a single feature on different tiers have generally been concerned with problems of autosegmental phonology—that is, with tone and harmony systems where autosegmental tiers generally do not have the status of morphemes. In contrast, the frameworks that do allow duplication of the same feature on different tiers are usually concerned with problems of autosegmental morphology—root and pattern word formation, reduplication, or consonant mutation.
 All past autosegmental analyses, whether phonological or morphological, have shared a number of assumptions:

• That phonological and morphological representations may consist of more than one level or tier—perhaps a tone tier and a segmental tier, or a skeleton tier giving the arrangement of segments into consonants and vowels and a melody tier providing all other phonetic content to each segment.
• That autosegmental tiers may be associated or synchronized with one another by some set of well-formedness conventions or linking rules.
• And that some autosegmental tiers can have the status of morphemes.

BABBLING MILESTONES
(Acquisition) Or, stages of babbling. Babies prepare for speech through crying, cooing, and then babbling (using their voice box, mouth, and breath to form sounds).

 Stages of Babbling

• Months 0-2: Crying and cooing.
• Months 3-4: Simple speech sounds (goo).
• Month 5: Single-syllable speech sounds (ba, da, ma).
• Months 6-7: Reduplicated babbling – repeating the same syllable (ba-ba, na-na).
• Months 8-9: Variegated babbling – mixing different sounds (ba de da).
• Months 10-11 Jargon – complex babbling with simple words (baba da ma ball da).
• Month 12: Real words gradually take over.

BALKAN SPRACHBUND
(Linguistic Geography) The languages spoken on the Balkan peninsula like Romanian, Albanian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Greek, together with some minority languages like Arli Romany, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian which are considered in the center of the Balkan language continuum. The six most prominent common features:

1. Substitution of synthetic declension markers by analytic ones.
2. Grammaticalization of the category of definiteness through postpositive definite articles.
3. Pronominal doubling of objects.
4. Analytic expression of futurity.
5. Analytic perfect with a have-auxiliary.
6. Loss of the infinitive and its substitution by subjunctive clauses.

BARE INFINITIVE
(Grammar) A structure which contains a verb in the infinitive form but does not contain the infinitive particle to (e.g., He won't let you help him). | Andrew Radford, 2006

BARE NOUN
(Grammar) A noun used without any quantifier or determiner to modify it (e.g., fish in Fish is expensive). | Andrew Radford, 2006

BARE PHRASE STRUCTURE

1. (Syntax) A theory of bare phrase structure is one in which there are no category labels or projection levels associated with constituents. | Andrew Radford, 2006
2. (Syntax) Improving on the traditional way of representing phrase structure, Chomsky (1995) proposed that category labels can be eliminated from syntactic representations. In his theory of bare phrase structure (BPS), the head of a phrase is used as the label of its projections. Thus the VP eat apples (as in John eats apples) will now be represented as:

   1. 
          eat
         ╱╲
         ╱    ╲
       eat      apples

    A phrase with a lexically filled specifier will be represented as shown in (2):

   2. 
            's
          ╱╲
          ╱    ╲
       John      's
             ╱╲
             ╱    ╲
          's     book

    The representations in (1) and (2) are remarkable not only for the absence of category labels. Note that apples in (1), or book in (2), is both N⁰ and NP; in the traditional representation, this lexical element would be represented with at least the structure shown in (3):

   3. 
          NP
          |
         N
          |
        apples/book

    But in BPS, there are no non-branching projections. Chomsky achieves this result by proposing a relational definition of minimal and maximal projections: A category that does not project any further is maximal, and one that is not a projection at all is minimal. By this definition, apples in (1) or book in (2) is simultaneously N⁰ and NP. | K.A. Jayaseelan, 2008

BASE
(Morphology) In reduplication, the portion of the output word which the reduplicant copies (basically, everything which isn't the reduplicant). | Sam Zukoff, 2018

BASE COMPONENT
(Generative Syntax) A module of the grammar in which D-structures are generated by means of phrase structure rules and the Projection Principle, on the basis of information from the lexicon. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

BASE-GENERATED
(Generative Syntax) Whatever is an element of a D-structure is generated by the base component, i.e. "base-generated". | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

BASE VERB CONSTRUCTION
(Grammar) The choice between one (1a, 2a) or the other (1b, 2b) type of construction is regarded as being a matter of stylistic choice:

1. a. Paul erteilt Unterricht an der Grundschule.
    'Paul gives lessons at the primary school.'
   b. Paul unterrichtet an der Grundschule.
    'Paul teaches at the primary school.'
2. a. Die Nachbarn leisteten beim Löschen des Feuers Hilfe.
    'The neighbors provided assistance in putting out the fire.'
   b. Die Nachbarn halfen beim Löschen des Feuers.
    'The neighbors assisted in putting out the fire.'

3.  Absage erteilen ('to give a rejection') – absagen ('to reject')
4.  Hilfe leisten ('to provide assistance') – helfen ('to assist')
5.  Unterricht erteilen ('to give a class') – unterrichten ('to teach or instruct')
6.  Wirkung ausüben ('to have an effect') – wirken ('to work')

Page Last Modified April 24, 2024

 

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