BECAUSE X CONSTRUCTION
(Grammar) The English because X construction (1) has a number of functional and formal equivalents in other languages such as weil X in German (2), want X in Dutch (3), but also protože X in Czech (4), among others (Konvička 2019).

1. But Iowa still wants to sell eggs to California, because money.
2. dass ich auf Bildern mit meinem Freund sehr sehr glücklich aussehe, weil aah
   'that I look very, very happy in the photos with my boyfriend, because aah'
3. Dat is 9.5 uur!!! Op een zaterdag!!! Met extra mensen omdat lowlands!!!
   'that is 9.5 hours!!! on a Saturday!!! With extra people because Lowlands!!!'
4. víš proč je ti dobře? protože TECHNO
   'do you know why you feel good? because TECHNO'

BENEFACTIVE CASE
(Case Grammar) The noun or noun phrase that refers to the person or animal who benefits, or is meant to benefit, from the action of the verb is in the benefactive case. For example, in the sentences

1. Joan baked a cake for Louise.
2. Joan baked Louise a cake.

BIDIRECTIONAL OPTIMALITY THEORY
Abbr. BiOT. Emerged at the turn of the millennium as a fusion of Radical Pragmatics and Optimality Theoretic Semantics. It stirred a wealth of new research in the pragmatics-semantics interface and heavily influenced e.g. the development of evolutionary and game theoretic approaches. Optimality Theory holds that linguistic output can be understood as the optimized products of ranked constraints. At the center of BiOT is the insight that this optimization has to take place both in production and interpretation, and that the production-interpretation cycle has to lead back to the original input. BiOT is now generally interpreted as a description of diachronically stable and cognitively optimal form-meaning pairs. It found applications beyond the semantics-pragmatics interface in language acquisition, historical linguistics, phonology, syntax, and typology. | Anton Benz and Jason Mattausch, 2020

BIGRAM MORPHOTACTIC CONSTRAINTS
(Morphology) In a paper on variable prefix ordering in Tagalog, K. Ryan (2010) labels the two-morpheme (step-by-step) ordering bigram morphotactics. "A bigram constraint X-Y, in which X and Y are (classes of) morphemes, can be taken to penalize each instance of X not immediately followed by Y (cf. local selectional restrictions, e.g. Fabb 1988). The ranking of these constraints motivates ordering restrictions [...] in which X-Y-Z is the only grammatical output for an input comprising X, Y and Z." Ryan's model assigns a weight to each bigram, which allows him to treat every possible two-morpheme combination as a constraint in the sense of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 2004), all bigrams being ranked according to their weight. The weight of a bigram depends on the frequency of occurrence of that bigram in a corpus. Ryan promotes the bigram-morphotactics analysis as a novel approach "intended to supplement, not replace, semantic factors in affix ordering such as scope". | Stela Manova, 2011

BINARY-BRANCHING CONSTRAINT

1. (Syntax) This constraint that imposes asymmetry on syntactic representations requires that syntactic structures are binary branching: that is, a category can have at most two daughters (Kayne 1984). The binary-branching constraint leads to a structural asymmetry between dependents of a head. In the ternary-branching representation in (1), Y and Z c-command each other, but in the binary-branching representations that replace (1), either Z asymmetrically c-commands Y, as shown in (2), or Y asymmetrically c-commands Z, as shown in (3).

   1.         *  X'
                /|\
               / | \
              X  Y  Z
             
   2.              X'
                  / \
                 /   \
                X'    Z
               / \
              /   \
             X     Y
                
   3            /\
               /  \         
              /____\
             X      X''
                   / \
                  /   \
                 Y     X'
                      / \
                     /   \
                    tx    Z
   
   

    | Ad Neeleman, Joy Philip, Misako Tanaka, and Hans van de Koot, 2022
2. (Syntax) Constraint proposed in Kayne (1984) which rules out syntactic structures in which a phrase contains more than two immediate constituents. I.e., no node in a tree structure may have more than two branches. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
3. (Morphology) A constraint on concatenative word formation which says that in the process of word formation only two morphemes can be concatenated at the same time. Hence, the compound a,b,c either has the structure [ [ [a] [b] ] [c] ], or the structure [ [a] [ [b] [c] ] ], but not the ternary structure [ [a] [b] [c] ]. Circumfixes are problematic with respect to this constraint. (Spencer 1991) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

BINDING

1. (Syntax) Refers to a relation in which the reference of a certain element is dependent on the reference of another element. (Gamut 1991) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Semantics) A term that is used to refer the relation obtaining between a quantifier ∀v or ∃v and the occurrences of the variable v in its scope:
   1. ∀v [ ... v ... ]
   2. ∃v [ ... v ... ]
    In the following formula only the first occurrence of x is bound by ∀ but not the second (which is not in the scope of ∀):
   3. ∀x [P(x) → Q(y)] & R(x)
    The first occurrence of x is called a bound variable, the second occurrence is called a free variable. (Gamut 1991) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

BINDING DOMAIN
(Syntax) Mainstream generative accounts (Chomsky 1981, Pollard and Sag 1994, Manning and Sag 1999, Bresnan 2002, Reinhart and Reuland 1993) sketch a very clear, uniform picture of anaphoric dependencies. "Binding" in the syntactic sense of the word is primarily limited to the predicational domain, formulated as in binding conditions A (1) and B (2):

1. a. An anaphor is bound in its Governing Category.
   b. A locally a-commanded short-distance reflexive must be locally a-bound.
   c. nuclear (reflexive) pronoun must be bound in the minimal nucleus that contains it.
2. a. A pronominal is free in its Governing Category.
   b. A pronoun must be locally a-free.
   c. A nonnuclear pronoun must be free in the minimal nucleus that contains it.

BINDING PRINCIPLES

1. (Syntax) Chomsky (1981) proposes Principles A and B governing anaphoric relations. Roughly speaking, Principle A states that a reflexive or reciprocal pronoun must be bound by a local c-commanding antecedent, and Principle B states that a personal pronoun must not be bound by a local c-commanding antecedent. | Kruijff and Oehrle, 2003
2. (Syntax) Taken from Chomsky 1986:
   • Principle A: An anaphor is bound in a local domain.
   • Principle B: A pronominal is free in a local domain
   • Principle C: An R-expression is free ([or, is free] in the domain of the head of its chain).
    Bound means co-indexed with a c-commanding antecedent; free means not co-indexed with a c-commanding antecedent. In A and B, the local domain of an anaphor or pronominal α is "the minimal governing category of α," which in turn means the "maximal projection containing both a subject and a lexical category governing α". | Margaret Thomas, 1993

BINOMINAL NOUN PHRASE

1. (Grammar) Or, of-binominal. An important phenomenon in the English language. Defined as a noun phrase that contains two related nouns, linked by the preposition of, examples include a hell of a day and a beast of a storm. | Elnora ten Wolde, 2023
2. (Grammar) BNPs involve two nominals, N¹ and N², which are in a Subject-Predicate relationship with each other, such that N¹ is the Predicate and N² the Subject. Examples are a hell of a problem, a wonder of a city, that idiot of a prime minister. | Bas Aarts, 1998
3. (Grammar) 

   ╲ N2  N1 ╲	[+] Animate	[−]Animate ([+]entity)	[−]Animate ([−]entity)
   Lexical [+]ind.	The theatrics of a loser (fiction)	A warren of passages (spoken)	A hurricane of wind (fiction)
   Lexical [−]ind.	The death of a pioneer (spoken)	A wardrobe of dresses (fiction)	A night of friction (fiction)
   Figurative	A heck of a guy (fiction)	A whale of a table! (fiction)	A ghost of a smile (fiction)
   Modificational	An excellent breed of dog (spoken)	???	A merry tinkle of laughter (fiction)

    While the table shows that the corpus data can be distributed to the 12 types of BNP, there are three points to be developed:
   1. Although only one example is presented for each type, the number of lexical [+]ind and [−]ind types is relatively higher than the others. In these types, N1s such as idiot lexically refer to a person who is stupid. This suggests that BNPs like that idiot of a doctor and a wonder of a city are conventionalized over time. Since these types of BNPs are stylized, their number seems to increase gradually.
   2. The number of "[+] animate" N2s is relatively small as a whole. In other words, [−] animate nouns tend to appear in the position of N2. In contrast with this observation, most BNPs in the literature have a [+] animate N2, such as a prime minister in an idiot of a prime minister. In order to deal with this contrast, more data on N2 need to be gathered.
   3. Finally, although examples were found for almost all 12 types, as shown in the table, we could not identify instances of N1 (modification) and N2 ([−]animate [+]entity) because it is difficult to judge whether the N2 is [−]animate ([+]entity) or not. Previous studies do not give a clear account of whether or not a modifier may appear on an N2 in a BNP. The lack of data may reflect the complexity of BNPs and the need to analyze them more properly. | Shin Tamura, Haruka Shimura, Kazuyoshi Ishikawa, and Shohei Nagata, 2021

BLEEDING
(Syntax) Antonym, feeding. A term used in generative linguistic analysis of rule ordering, and originally introduced in the context of diachronic phonology, to refer to a type of functional relationship between rules. A bleeding relationship is one where an earlier rule (A) removes a structural representation to which a later rule (B) would otherwise have applied, and thus reduces the number of forms which can be generated. If rule B is of the form X ⇒ Y, then rule A must be of the form W ⇒ Z, where W includes Z, and Z is distinct from both X and Y. In these circumstances, rule A is called a bleeding rule in relation to B, and the linear order of these rules is called a bleeding order. If the rules are applied in the reverse order, A is said to counter-bleed B. Counter-bleeding results in a non-affecting interaction in which a rule fails to realize its potential to reduce the number of forms to which another rule applies. It is also possible in a pair of rules for each rule to bleed the other (mutual bleeding). | David Crystal, 2008

BLEEDING ORDER
(Phonology) An order of rules such that one rule destroys the input of another rule. Consider the following two rules proposed by Schane (1968) for French:

1. A vowel is nasalized before a nasal.
2. A nasal is dropped in syllable-final position.

BLOCKING
(Morphology) Blocking can be defined as the non-occurrence of some linguistic form, whose existence could be expected on general grounds, due to the existence of a rival form. *Oxes, for example, is blocked by oxen, *stealer by thief. Although blocking is closely associated with morphology, in reality the competing "forms" can not only be morphemes or words, but can also be syntactic units. In German, for example, the compound Rotwein 'red wine' blocks the phrasal unit *roter Wein (in the relevant sense), just as the phrasal unit rote Rübe 'beetroot'; lit. 'red beet' blocks the compound *Rotrübe.
 Besides such cases of lexical blocking, one can observe blocking among productive patterns. Dutch has three suffixes for deriving agent nouns from verbal bases, -er, -der, and -aar. Of these three suffixes, the first one is the default choice, while -der and -aar are chosen in very specific phonological environments. Contrary to lexical blocking, the effect of this kind of pattern blocking does not depend on words stored in the mental lexicon and their token frequency but on abstract features (in the case at hand, phonological features). | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, 2019

BOUNDARY TONE

1. (Prosody) An intonational tone that is aligned with the edge of a prosodic phrase (Pierrehumbert 1980) | Scott Myers, 1996
2. (Prosody) There are two expectations we have come to have about the realization of boundary tones:
   1. Boundary tones are realized at the periphery of the constituent they belong to.
   2. Boundary tones of higher constituents are realized "outside" boundary tones of lower constituents.
    | Carlos Gussenhoven, 2000

BOUNDING NODE
(Syntax) A node that plays a role in determining whether a movement is local enough. Traditionally, NP and S (in English) or S' (in Italian) are considered bounding nodes. More recently, bounding nodes have been defined in terms of barriers. | Leticia Pablos, 2006

BOUNDING THEORY
(Syntax) Theory about the locality of movement. The main principle of Bounding theory is the Subjacency condition, which forbids movement across more than one bounding node.
 In (1) which books has been moved over two bounding nodes, NP and CP. In (ii), NP and IP are the relevant bounding nodes. In (i) the so-called Complex NP Constraint is violated, in (ii) the so-called Subject Condition. Thus, the Subjacency condition subsumes both the Complex NP Constraint and the Subject Condition.

1. *which book_i did John meet [_NP a child [_CP who read t_i ]]
2. *the man [_CP who_i [_IP [_NP pictures of t_i ] are on the table]]

BREATHY
(Phonetics; Phonology) A term used in the phonetic classification of voice quality, on the basis of articulatory and auditory criteria. Breathiness refers to a vocal effect produced by allowing a great deal of air to pass through a slightly open glottis: this effect is also sometimes called murmur. Some speakers do have an abnormally breathy voice quality as a permanent feature of their speech. What is of particular significance for linguistic analysis is that breathy effects may be used with contrastive force, communicating a paralinguistic meaning: the whole of an utterance may be thus affected, as in an extremely shocked pronunciation of Oh really!
 Breathy voice, or breathy phonation, is also sometimes encountered as a phonological characteristic, as in Gujarati, where there is an opposition between breathy and non-breathy vowels. | David Crystal, 2008

BRIDGE VERB
(Syntax) In English and many other languages, the acceptability of long-distance wh-extraction out of a finite declarative complement clause appears to vary based on the matrix verb: "bridge verbs" like think and say lead to relatively high acceptability, verbs like shout less so.

1. Who did Kim say that Jo saw __? (bridge verb)
2. ??Who did Kim stammer that Jo saw __? (non-bridge)

Page Last Modified November 29, 2023

 

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