COOPTATION
(Discourse Grammar) A cognitive-communicative operation whereby a piece of text, such as a clause, a phrase, a word, or any other unit, is inserted in a sentence. In the framework of Discourse Grammar, cooptation is understood as leading to the transfer of linguistic material from the domain of Sentence Grammar to that of Thetical Grammar (Kaltenböck, Heine, and Kuteva 2011; Heine et al. 2013)
  The operation of cooptation can be illustrated with the following utterance taken from the British component of the International Corpus of English (via Nelson, Wallis, and Aarts, 2002):

1. What I've done here I hope you don't entirely disapprove is try and limit the time taken on this item by putting it in writing.

COORDINATE STRUCTURE CONSTRAINT
(Syntax) In generative syntax, the Coordinate Structure Constraint is a constraint on movement proposed in Ross (1967) which says:

In a coordinate structure, no conjunct may be moved, nor may any element contained in a conjunct be moved out of that conjunct.

1. * which professor did you divide the cake between [ Mieke and t ]
2. * which book did you [_VP [_VP steal t from Ger] and [_VP give the paper to Jacqueline] ]

COORDINATION OF LIKES
(Syntax) In the literature on coordination, it is widely assumed that two elements may be coordinated only if they are of the same syntactic category. This assumption is known as the Law of Coordination of Likes. In addition, a common assumption with respect to initial coordination, which is characterized by the presence of a pair of elements such as either-or, both-and and neither-nor, is the assumption that the first element of the pair marks the left edge of the coordinate structure. Schwarz (1999) terms this assumption the Left Bracket Thesis. Neijt (1979), Sag et al. (1985), van Zonneveld (1992) and Grootveld (1994), among others, adopt both of these assumptions for their analysis of coordination. | Petra Hendriks, 2001

COORDINATION TEST
(Syntax) The coordination test assumes that only constituents can be coordinated, i.e., joined by means of a coordinator such as and:

• He enjoys [writing sentences] and [reading them].
• [He enjoys writing] and [she enjoys reading] sentences.
• [He enjoys] but [she hates] writing sentences.

COPULA
(Syntax) Plural copulas, copulae. A word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (a subject complement), such as the word is in the sentence The sky is blue. The word "copula" derives from the Latin noun for a "link" or "tie" that connects two different things. (Moro 1997)
  A copula is often a verb or a verb-like word, though this is not universally the case. (Pustet 2005) A verb that is a copula is sometimes called a copulative or copular verb. In English primary education grammar courses, a copula is often called a linking verb. In other languages, copulas show more resemblances to pronouns, as in Classical Chinese and Guarani, or may take the form of suffixes attached to a noun, as in Beja, Ket, and Inuit languages. | Wikipedia 2016

COPY RAISING
(Syntax) In syntax, copy raising is a kind of raising construction in which the raised element leaves a coreferential "copy" pronoun in the subordinate clause. Alternatively, the "copy" may appear in the matrix clause (as evidenced by verb agreement, for example) with the "copied" nominal remaining in the complement; see Blackfoot example below.
  Examples:

1. English
   Richard seems as if he won.
   (Compare with ordinary raising: Richard seems to have won.)
2. Modern Greek
   I kopéles fén-onde na févgh-un.
   [the girls seem-3PL that leave-3PL]
   'The girls seem to be leaving.'
3. Blackfoot
   Nitsíksstatawa kááhkanistahsi nohkówa.
   [1-want-3s 2-might-tell-3s 1-son-3s]
   "I want you to tell my son."
   (Compare without the raising:)
   Nitsíksstaa kááhkanistahsi nohkówa.
   [1-want 2-might-tell-3s 1-son-3s]

COPY THEORY OF MOVEMENT
(Syntax) Chomsky (1993) incorporates the "copy theory of movement" into the Minimalist Program. According to the copy theory, a trace is a copy of the moved element that is deleted in the phonological component (in the case of overt movement), but is available for interpretation at LF. Besides being compatible with the Inclusiveness Condition, the copy theory has the advantage of allowing binding theory to be stated solely in LF terms and dispensing with the operation of reconstruction. Furthermore, if traces are copies, they are not discrete theoretical primitives by themselves; they are either lexical items or phrases built from lexical items. By making it possible to promote this overall simplification of the theoretical apparatus in GB, the copy theory has thus become a solid pillar of the Minimalist Program. | Jairo Nunes, 1995

COPYING
(Syntax) A basic syntactic operation within the framework of Transformational Grammar which adds a duplicate of a constituent in a phrase-marker to some other part of the phrase-marker. E.g., to make a rule deriving tag questions from such sentences as He is a doctor, the verb is taken and copied to the right of the sentence (changing its status from positive to negative); the tag-subject is a pronominal copy of the main subject, placed to the right of this verb. This would be one way of generating the sentence He is a doctor, isn't he? The verb is copied only if it is auxiliary or copula, and replaced by a form of do otherwise (e.g. John knows the answers, doesn't he). | David Crystal, 2008

CORE TRANSITIVE VERB
(Grammar) The transitive verbs of a language are, loosely speaking, those verbs that display the unmarked expression of arguments for two-argument verbs. Their arguments are said to bear the core grammatical relations "subject" and "object".
 Many discussions of transitivity recognize a core—and perhaps for that reason privileged—subset of transitive verbs. These verbs have a clear semantic characterization, fitting the "agent acts on and causes an effect on patient" mold that is behind the name "transitive". Members of this set in English include cut, destroy, kill, and transitive break and open. I call these verbs, which are defined by a conjunction of syntactic and semantic properties, core transitive verbs (CTVs); these are roughly equivalent to what Andrews (1985) calls primary transitive verbs. Given this definition, CTVs are verbs that qualify as "highly" transitive in Hopper and Thompson's 1980 sense, and their arguments clearly meet Dowty's 1991 agent and patient proto-role entailments. | Beth Levin, 1999

CORONAL STOP DELETION
(Phonology) In English this involves a variable phonological process deleting coronal stops from final coda clusters. It operates variably in all varieties of English and is everywhere conditioned by the morphological status of the targeted stop.

• Many English words that are eligible for the rule are monomorphemic or underived words such as mist, pact, bold; in such cases the final stop is part of the root.
• In another class of eligible words, the final stop is a reflex of the past tense suffix -ed: e.g., missed, packed, bowled. In such words the final stops bear a functional load: deleting them creates surface homophony with the present tense and obliterates a tense distinction. Hence, Kiparsky's (1982) distinctness condition predicts that past tense /t,d/ will resist deletion, showing a lower rate of deletion than comparable monomorphemic words, e.g., missed < mist.

CORRELATE

1. (Syntax) 

   Correlate
   A node n can be a correlate for a head h iff at least one of the following conditions holds:

   1. n is a head and n and h are tokens of the same lexical item.
   2. n is coindexed with h.

    | Deniz Rudin, 2017
2. (Syntax) A node n can be a correlate of a head h iff the content of n is either lexically or referentially identical to h.
    Lexical identity is straightforward. Referential identity is defined in terms of coindexation. Consider the following data (comparable cases are discussed in Merchant 2001):
   1. I don't know who₁ t_i said what₂, or why <they₁ said it₂>_E.
   2. I think [a guy I know]₁ won a gold medal, but I don't know when <he₁ won a gold medal>_E.
   3. Someone ate at [five burger restaurants]₁, but I don't know who <ate at them₁>_E.
    Examples (1-3) show that traces, wh elements, pronouns, and full DPs, including quantified DPs, can serve as correlates for each other. | Margaret Kroll and Deniz Rudin, 2017

CORRELATIVE CONJUNCTION
(Grammar) Either of a pair of coordinating conjunctions used in ordered fashion. Typically, one is used immediately before each member of a pair of constituents.

1. English:
   Either you or I.

CORRESPONDENCE THEORY
(Phonology) The branch of phonology studying the nature of conditions that measure the similarity of two related forms (such as input and output, base and derivative, base and reduplicant). Correspondence theory originates in pre-OT days when linguists like Allan Sommerstein, Ronnie Wilbur, Sandy Chung, and Luigi Burzio (in his pre-OT incarnation) were first led to formulate conditions mandating input recoverability or similarity between related forms.
 It has become a central part of phonological theory with the advent of OT. Within OT, the theory of correspondence has the primary function of defining the limits within which markedness constraints will affect an input. Extensions of correspondence provide the basis of the OT treatment for phenomena such as:

(Using pre-OT labels:)
• Cyclic phonology.
• A subset of level ordering effects.
• Derived environment conditions.
• Opaque rule interactions, and
• Base-reduplicant identity.

COSUBORDINATION
(Syntax) Foley and Van Valin (1984) distinguish three types of clause linkage: coordination, subordination, and "cosubordination". This distinction is based on two parameters, [±dependent] and [±embedded].
 The third clause linkage type, "cosubordination", is like coordination in that neither clause is embedded in the other. It is also like subordination in that one clause is dependent on the other for some feature. Cosubordination is illustrated by the clause-chaining and switch-reference phenomena widely found in Papuan and American Indian languages. In this construction, "the juncts are not in a subordinate relationship, as one junct is not embedded in the other. However, a dependency relation exists between the juncts in that they must have the same illocutionary force and share the same absolute tense" (Foley and Van Valin 1984).

1. Examples of cosubordination ([+dependent] [−embedded]) (Foley and Van Valin, 1984)
   Abbreviations: 1= first person, 3 = third person, SG = singular; DS = different subject, SS = same subject; PST = past, PRES = present.
   a.
    

   Ní
   1SG

   réka-no
   stand-DS

   ágaa
   talk

   lá-a.
   say-3SG.PST

     'I stood up and he talked.'
   b.
    

   Nipú
   3SG

   táá-ma
   hit-SS

   pámua-la.
   walk-3SG.PRES

     'He is hitting it while walking.'

2. a. Paul sat playing his guitar for hours.
   b. Zelda lay reading a book in bed.
   c. Matthew stood singing on a street corner.

COUNTER-BLEEDING
(Syntax) Relation between ordered rules whose order is designed to avoid an effect of bleeding. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2007

COUNTER-FEEDING
(Syntax) Relation between ordered rules whose order is designed to avoid an effect of feeding. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2007

COUNTERCYCLICITY
(Syntax) Countercyclic operations allow structure building at any node in the tree instead of just at the root, i.e., they allow the capability of expanding the tree at a non-root position. | Hans-Martin Gärtner and Jens Michaelis, 2008

COUNTERFACTUAL
(Grammar) Counterfactual constructions convey the speaker's belief that the actualization of a situation was potential—possible, desirable, imminent, or intended—but did not take place, i.e. it did not belong to the actual world. "Counterfactuals" have mostly been studied in formal-semantic frameworks; a few studies have explored counterfactuals from a functional perspective (see Olguín Martínez, and Lester 2021, Van Linden and Verstraete 2008, Verstraete and Luk 2021).
 Counterfactuals are typically associated with counterfactual conditionals:

1. If I had known that, I wouldn't have appointed him.

• Clauses that are structurally similar to the main clause of a counterfactual conditional, or
• Clauses that could be regarded as a counterfactual conditional with an elided main clause.

Page Last Modified January 19, 2024

 

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