CLAUSE BOUNDARY IDENTIFICATION
(Computational) A useful technique for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. This is a method of specifying the beginning and ending of main and subordinate clauses. Numerous techniques are used to recognize clause boundaries for different languages where some are rule-based (Harris 1997, Vilson 1998) and others are statistical approaches using machine learning techniques (Vijay and Sobha, 2008). | Daraksha Parveen, Ratna Sanyal, and Afreen Ansari, 2011

CLAUSE-EMBEDDING PREDICATE

1. (Syntax) A verb like know and guess in English, which can be immediately followed by a clause as in I know that it's raining out. | Jennifer Culbertson and Wataru Uegaki, 2022
2. (Syntax) "Clause-embedding predicates", like know and believe, are a central case in the study of projection. | Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Mandy Simons, and Judith Tonhauser, 2018
3. (Syntax; Semantics) Recent work has explored semantic universals in the domain of "clause-embedding predicates" like know, agree, and wonder (Spector and Egré 2015; Theiler, Roelofsen and Aloni 2018; Uegaki 2019; Steinert-Threlkeld 2020). | Floris Roelofsen and Wataru Uegaki, 2020
4. (Syntax; Pragmatics) When a speaker uses a factive "clause-embedding predicate" like know in (1) in a conversation, the listener can infer that the speaker is committed to the truth of the proposition p: that Julian dances salsa.
   1. John knows that Julian dances salsa.
    | Dingyi Pan and Judith Degen, 2023

CLAUSEMATE CONDITION
(Syntax) 

The Clausemate Condition (CMC) on Multiple Sluicing (MS) (Takahashi 1994)
The wh-remnants in a MS construction must originate in the same (finite) clause.

1. English (Lasnik 2014):
   1. [_CP1 Fred thinks [_CP2 that a certain boy talked to a certain girl]].
      I wish I could remember which boy to which girl.
   2. * [_CP1 A certain boy said [_CP2 that Fred talked to a certain girl]].
      I wish I could remember which boy to which girl.
2. Spanish (Rodrigues et al. 2009):
   1. [_CP1
       

      Juan
      Juan

      dijo
      said

      que
      that

      [_CP2
       

      unos
      some

      estudiantes
      students

      van
      will

      a
       

      hablar
      talk

      con
      with

      un
      a

      profesor]],
      professor

      pero
      but

      no
      not

      recuerdo
      remember

      qué
      what

      estudiante
      students

      con
      with

      qué
      what

      professor.
      professor
   2. * [_CP1
       

      Unos
      some

      estudiantes
      students

      dijeron
      said

      que
      that

      [_CP2
       

      Juan
      John

      va
      will

      a
       

      hablar
      talk

      con
      with

      un
      a

      profesor]],
      professor

      pero
      but

      no
      not

      recuerdo
      remember

      qué
      what

      estudiante
      students

      con
      with

      qué
      what

      profesor.
      professor
   
    | Álvaro Cortés Rodríguez, 2022

CLEFT

1. (Syntax) In cleft sentences the copula is preceded by it and followed by a NP and a relative clause. | ?
2. (Syntax) Cleft sentences are composed of four structural subparts:
   1. cleft pronoun + copula + clefted constituent + cleft clause
      it + is + the woman + who buys the house
    | Nancy Hedberg, 2008
3. (Syntax) At least three different analyses have been proposed for the so-called "Cleft-sentence" construction in English. The construction type is well illustrated by the following example:
   1. It is the wife who decides.
    | Robert B. Lees, 1963
4. (Syntax) Most linguists who concern themselves with the structure of English would be familiar with the term "cleft sentence", and would use the term to designate expressions like (1).
   1. It was the butler who served the wine.
    Others might include in this category sentences like (2).
   2. The one who served the wine was the butler.
    Yet a few others might regard sentences such as (3) as cleft sentences, too.
   3. The butler was the one who served the wine.
    The first linguist in the 20th century to draw attention to these sentence patterns was Otto Jespersen. He described the IT-clefts, e.g., sentence (1) above, in some detail in his Modern English Grammar (1965). To be sure, he did not call them "cleft sentences" there. However, in 1937, the term appears prominently in his Analytic Syntax (1969), along with some speculations about how this construction arose. As he saw it, the phrase it is plus the connective, if present, is superimposed upon the simple sentence, which is the semantic substance of the cleft. Thus, the expression (4) results from the insertion of the clefting elements it is ... who into the simple sentence (5).
   4. It is the wife who decides.
   5. The wife decides.
    | Edward G. Fichtner, 2015

CLITIC
(Morphology; Syntax) Element which, like affixes, cannot occur freely in syntax but is in need of a host. A "clitic" can thus be regarded as a kind of bound morpheme. A typical clitic will attach itself to a host, that is, a (fully inflected) word or phrase. The observation that they can attach to inflected words distinguishes, among other things, clitics from affixes. Clitics come in two types: proclitics and enclitics. Proclitics attach themselves to the left of the host, while enclitics attach themselves to the right of the host.
 Example: In French, object pronouns are clitics which are either proclitics, as me and les in (1), or enclitics, as les in (2):

1. il
   he

   me
   to-me

   les
   them

   a
   has

   donnés
   given

   'he has given them to me'
2. donnez-les-moi
   give-them-me

   'give them to me'
3. il me_i les_j a donnés e_i e_j

CLITIC DOUBLING
(Syntax) The use of (mostly object) clitic pronouns together with a coreferential noun phrase, especially in the Romance and Balkan languages.

1. Romanian
   L-am
   3SG.M.CL-I.have

   văzut
   seen

   pe
   ACC

   Petru.
   Petru

   'I've seen Petru.'
2. Macedonian
   Jana
   Jana

   go
   3SG.M.ACC.CL

   vide
   saw

   volk-ot.
   wolf-DEF

   'Jana saw the wolf.'

CLITIC LEFT DISLOCATION

1. (Syntax) The work of Cinque (1990) on Italian, and Iatridou (1995) and Anagnostopoulou (1994) on Greek, has demonstrated the possibility of a left-peripheral XP, apparently in an A'-position, and associated with a clitic, but which is not a case of left-dislocation of the English kind. This is the construction known as "Clitic Left Dislocation" (CLLD).
    CLLD has been exemplied in the literature in various languages:
   1. Italian
      In
      in

      quella
      that

      città,
      town

      non
      not

      ci
      there

      sono
      am

      mai
      ever

      stato.
      been

      'I have never been in that town.'
   2. French
      Au
      to-the

      pape,
      pope

      personne
      no-one

      n'oserait
      NEG-would-dare

      lui
      to-him

      parler
      speak

      ainsi.
      thus

      'No one would dare to speak to the pope like that.'
   3. Greek
      Ta
      the

      klidia
      keys

      ta
      them

      stilame
      sent

      sti
      to-the

      Maria.
      Maria

      'We sent the keys to Maria.'
   4. Lebanese Arabic
      fakkart
      thought

      ʔinno
      that

      Naadya
      Nadia

      Seef-a
      saw-her

      Kariim
      Kerim

      mbeerih.
      yesterday

      'I thought that Kerim saw Nadia yesterday.'
    Some characteristics:
   • The peripheral XP is not necessarily nominal.
   • The coreferent is a clitic pronoun. It is not necessarily a true resumptive pronoun.
   • CLLD is not restricted to root clauses.
   • Focal stress is not on the peripheral XP.
    | Theodora Alexopoulou, Edit Doron and Caroline Heycock, 2006
2. (Syntax) Clitic Left Dislocated NPs in Greek and certain Romance languages (Italian, Catalan, Romanian) have long been associated with a given, discourse-linked or topic interpretation (Philippaki-Warburton 1985, Cinque 1990, Dobrovie-Sorin 1990, Anagnostopoulou 1994, Schneider-Zioga 1994, Iatridou 1995, Tsimpli 1995). More recently, they were analyzed as links (Vallduví 1992, Vallduví 1995 for Catalan; Alexopoulou 1999 for Greek).
   1. Pii

      simetehoun

      s'

      afti

      tin

      paragogi?

      'Who contributed to this production?'
      Tin
      the

      parastasi
      performance-FEM.ACC

      ti
      FEM.3SG.ACC

      skinothetise
      directed-3SG

      o
      the

      Karolos
      Karolos-NOM

      Koun.
      Koun

      'Karolos Koun directed the performance.'
    | Theodora Alexopoulou and Dimitra Kolliakou, 2001

CLITICIZATION
(Morphosyntax) A process by which a complex word is formed by attaching a clitic to a fully inflected word.

1. In Je t'aime (French, 'I love you'), the clitic t' ('you') is attached to the verb aime ('love').

CLOSED SYLLABLE SHORTENING

1. (Phonology) When underlying long vowels shorten in closed syllables, as in (1).
   1. Pāli
      /jaː-nta/ → [jan.ta]
      go-PRESENT PARTICIPLE
    | Paul de Lacy, 2006
2. (Phonology) Another shortening process in Old English was closed syllable shortening (CSS) (Luick, 1914/1964). According to Luick, at the early stages CSS occurred when a long vowel was followed by three consonants, as in brĕmblas from * brēmblas 'brambles'. Later, CSS also applied if the long vowel was followed by two consonants as in ĕnlefan from * ǣnlefan 'eleven'. | Aditi Lahiri and Paula Fikkert, 1999

CLUSIVITY
(Grammar) A distinction (Filimonova 2005) between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we". Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee (that is, one of the words for 'we' means 'you and I and possibly others'), while exclusive "we" specifically excludes the addressee (that is, another word for 'we' means 'he/she/they and I, but not you'), regardless of who else may be involved.
 While imagining that this sort of distinction could be made in other persons (particularly the second) is straightforward, in fact the existence of second-person clusivity ('you' vs. 'you and them') in natural languages is controversial and not well attested (Simon 2005). While clusivity is not a feature of standard English language, it is found in many languages around the world. | Wikipedia, 2022

CLUSTER ANALYSIS

1. (Methodology) A family of computational methods for identification and graphical display of structure in data when the data are too large either in terms of the number of variables or of the number of objects described, or both, to be readily interpretable by direct inspection. All the members of the family work by partitioning a set of obects in the domain of interest into disjoint subjects in accordance with how relatively similar those objects are in terms of the variables that describe them.
    Example: The objects of interest in a certain set of tables are speakers, and each speaker's phonetic usage is described by a set of variables. Any two speakers' usage will be more or less similar depending on how similar their respective variable values are: if the values are identical then so are the speakers in terms of their usage, and the greater the divergence in values the greater the differences. Cluster analysis of the data in a table groups, say, 24 speakers in accordance with how similar their frequency of usage of 12 phonetic segments is.
    There are various kinds of cluster analysis. One of the most frequently used is hierarchical clustering. | Hermann Moisl, 2015
2. (Methodology) To construct a purely statistical discrimination model, we started experimenting with a statistical technique known as cluster analysis. Succinctly, cluster analysis classifies a set of observations into two or more mutually exclusive groups based on the combination of interval variables. The purpose of cluster analysis is to discover a system of organizing observations into groups, where members of the group share properties. Cluster analysis classifies unknown groups while discriminant function analysis classifies known groups. A common approach to performing a cluster analysis is to first create a table or matrix of relative similarities or differences between all objects and second to use this information to combine objects into groups. The table of relative similarities is called a proximity or dissimilarity matrix. | Pascual Cantos Gómez, 2002

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