DIACHRONIC CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR

1. (Grammar) In which the objects of study are constructions and how they change over time. | Martin Hilpert, 2021
2. (Grammar) A field of cognitive linguistics which takes a construction grammatical theoretical perspective to the study of linguistic change and which descriptively traces the development of constructions and constructicons. | Dirk Noël and Timothy Colleman, 2021

DIACHRONIC CONVENTIONALIZATION
(Sociolinguistics) Here, we come from a diachronic perspective and look at possible long-term effects of interaction within a linguistic community, which we refer to as "conventionalization". Conventionalization is considered a prerequisite for innovation (De Smet 2016) and a relevant component process in long-term, persistent change, as in grammaticalization (i.e. the transformation of lexical to grammatical items; Bybee 2010, Schmid 2015). | Elke Teich, Peter Fankhauser, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, and Yuri Bizzoni, 2020

DIACHRONIC ELLIPSIS MISMATCH
(Grammar) The expression X is derived from the source expression Y through ellipsis as a result of diachronic change/grammaticalization, but X and Y differ in their syntax and semantics. We identify four such cases in Japanese:

1. Existential indeterminates, which are derived from adjunct wh-questions:
   dare-ka, dare-ka-sira, dare-da-ka, dare-yara. 'someone'
2. Free choice indeterminates, which are derived from unconditionals:
   dare-de-mo, dare-datte, dare-darooga, dare-nisiro, dare-niseyo. 'anyone'
3. Comparative indeterminates, which are also derived from unconditionals:
   dare-yori(-mo). 'than anyone'
4. Nominal disjunctions, which are derived from adjunct alternative questions:
   A-ka, B(-ka), A-da-ka, B-da-ka. 'A or B'

DIACONSTRUCTION

1. (Diasystematic Construction Grammar) It has to be expected that categorization as a cognitively economic process does include all languages (and dialects, of course) in any situation in which the available input is multilingual, too. Interlingual identification, therefore, is categorization in very much the prototypical Construction Grammar sense: similar constructions in two different languages are taken to instantiate a common diaconstruction. | Steffen Höder, 2011
2. (Diasystematic Construction Grammar) The following ideas, which are relevant to the integration of multilingual structures, are generally agreed upon in Construction Theory:
   1. Constructions are linguistic elements that pair form with meaning (i.e. lexical meaning or grammatical function); any grammar can be described as an inventory of such constructions, covering all levels of the language system, including syntax, morphology, lexicon, and more.
   2. Some constructions are lexically or phonologically filled (such as words or morphs), while others are partially filled (for example in inflectional paradigms) and yet others are maximally schematic (such as syntactic or prosodic constructions).
   3. Constructions with different degrees of schematicity are interconnected through inheritance links within a constructional network, reflecting the fact that some constructions are productive and rule-based, while others are not predictable from more abstract structures.
   4. Speakers acquire schematic constructions on the basis of the available input, via processes of abstraction, generalization, and categorization in order to achieve a cognitively economic representation.
    In Höder (2012), I have argued that there is no a priori reason why these usage-based processes should be sensitive to (let alone be blocked by) language boundaries in multilingual environments. From a Construction Grammar perspective, one should rather expect them to involve all linguistic structures the speakers are exposed to, independently of their belonging to one language or the other. Furthermore, one should expect that the establishment and acquisition of multilingual constructions is limited only by the possibilities of formal and/or functional categorisation. Cross-linguistic categorisation is thus tantamount to the contact linguistic notion of interlingual identification (Weinreich 1964), i.e. the establishment of functional or formal equivalence between elements of different languages by multilingual speakers. This process eventually allows for the construction of linguistic diasystems, consisting of interconnected language-specific constructions and language-unspecific diaconstructions. | Steffen Höder, 2014

DIAGLOSSIA
(Sociolinguistics) Auer (2005) offers a typology of contemporary European dialect/standard constellations. He observes that in many European language areas, dialect/standard diglossia has given way to a situation with intermediate variants located between the standard and base dialects. He uses the notion of "diaglossia" to conceptualize this situation in which the dichotomy implied by the concept of diglossia is replaced by an almost fuzzy continuum of variants which are neither distinctly dialectal nor standard, and which can differ in the extent to which they resemble base dialect forms on the one hand, and standard forms on the other. Such intermediate forms are referred to with the terms diaglossia and diaglossic reportoire instead of perhaps more common terms such as regiolect and regional dialect, because "the implication [of the morpheme -lect] that we are dealing with a separate variety is not necessarily justified." It makes more sense to think of the space between base dialect and standard as a continuum with non-discrete intermediate structures, and with a "good degree of levelling between the base dialects [...] which at the same time implies advergence to the standard."
 In Europe today, Auer continues, diaglossic repertoires are found everywhere, from Norway to Cyprus and from Poland to Spain. As a typological label, diaglossia is not an empirically observable phenomenon but a concept applied to an analysis of linguistic variants in use. It is a general description of the varietal spectrum available to language users in a specific community at a given place and time. | Gijsbert Rutten, 2016

DIALECT CLUSTER

1. (Sociolinguistics) SIL defines a dialect cluster as a central variety together with all those varieties whose speakers understand the central variety at a specified threshold level or higher. If the threshold level is high, usually between 70% and 85%, the cluster is designated as a language (Grimes 1995). | Wikipedia, 2013
2. (Sociolinguistics) In a discussion on interpreting intelligibility scores, Joseph Grimes (1995) asserts that a threshold of 85% comprehension is needed before any group of speech varieties can be considered varieties of a single language; scores between 70–85% indicate that comprehension is marginal.

   At threshold levels high enough to guarantee good communication from the central dialect to its periphery (usually 85% or above), it is reasonable to speak of the dialect cluster as a single language from the linguistic point of view. Speech varieties that come together at only 70% or below are too distinct to qualify as the same language. In between, 70% to 85%, is an area of marginal intelligibility where some communication is satisfactory and some is not. The threshold depends on the risk associated with not communicating well; the final criteria are not purely linguistic. (Grimes 1995)

    | Michael Ayotte and Melinda Lamberty, 2002

DIALECT COMPETITION
(Sociolinguistics) Definition not found. Examples:

1. A social network strength factor (Hirano 2011) with adjusted technique showed the dynamic result, that certain groups of people with particular qualities resisted conforming to BKK Thai pressure. Thus, the [h] variant may receive a social meaning as a covert prestige form (Labov 2006, Trudgill 1972) rather than a stigmatized form in this dialect competition. | Ko Panyaatisin, 2016
2. The subsequent reduction in the frequency of mais [in 13th-century French] is not accompanied by a reduction in the basic types of verbal construction it can occur in. The possibility remains that dialect competition may have been a factor. As stated above, however, I have found no indication in the literature of different preferences for either plus or mais in different langue d'oïl dialects. | Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, 2013
3. In focussing this was / weren't pattern (of English past tense be), a number of the processes typical of koinéization can be observed—diffusion (the geographical and/or social spread of a linguistic form from another socio-geographic place), levelling (the eradication of marked or minority forms in situations of dialect competition, where the number of variants in the output is dramatically reduced from the number in the input), simplification (a relative diminution of grammatical irregularity and redundance) and reallocation (where two or more ingredient variants of the of the dialect mix are refunctionalized to serve new social, stylistic, or, as here, grammatical roles). | David Britain, 2001
4. DIALECT COMPETITION, 1923. We publish below the winning entries in the Competition promoted last year by the Yorkshire Dialect Society. This is the second competition that has been held ... More than a hundred competitors sent in stories and verse, ...
   • Ah set me dahn e-milking/ On Chrestmas-tide at neet,/ When t' warld semm'd still an quiet/ An gooan war t' waning leet;/ All t' beeasts i' booist an' stanning/ Contented ate their hay, ... By Douglas Charlesworth.
   • Aw like owd stuff;/ Mi ancient coit, an' seeasoned pipe;/ T'owd walking stick 'at t' wife wunce bowt,/ When we wor young an' ripe. ... By A. Farnell.
   • Aye! bonny flaar, tha'rt t' first aw've seen,/ Who cud a thowt that tha'd a been/ Wakken bi naah, an' t' wind ser keen!/ Aw felt fair capp'd/ As soon as ivver aw had me een/ Upon tha clapp'd. ... By the Rev. Harry Shaw.
    | Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, 1924

DIALECT LEVELING

1. (Sociolinguistics) Or, leveling (in American English). The process of an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features between two or more dialects. Typically, this comes about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often by language standardization. It has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialization and modernization of the areas in which they are spoken. | Wikipedia, 2022
2. (Sociolinguistics) Contact-induced linguistic accommodation commonly involves several well-defined linguistic processes and outcomes. First and foremost is leveling, the reduction in either the number of linguistic variants or the magnitude of variation among variants.
    The competition between two forms that mean the same thing, such as two lexical items, often results in the loss of one form and the retention of the other. In many but not all cases, the "winning" variant is more frequent in the initial population of speakers; for example, Trudgill et al. (2000) propose that the survival of [h] (rather than its deletion), as in hammer in New Zealand English, is due to the fact that it was more common than [h] deletion overall in the contributing dialects. A related tendency is for the "losing" variant(s) to be marked in some way, that is, associated with a particular geographic area or social group (Moag 1977, Trudgill 1986, Kerswill and Williams 2000). Perceptual salience may also boost a variant's chances of surviving the leveling process in the absence of an initial majority variant (Kerswill and Williams 2002). | Robin Dodsworth, 2017

DIASTRATIC
(Dialectology) Antonym, diatopic. Variation or study of variation across different classes, or strata, in a society. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2007

DIASYSTEM

1. (Dialectology) Or, polylectal grammar. A linguistic analysis set up to encode or represent a range of related varieties in a way that displays their structural differences (Trask 1996, Crystal 2011).
    The term diasystem was coined by linguist and dialectologist Uriel Weinreich in a 1954 paper as part of an initiative in exploring how to extend advances in structuralist linguistic theory to dialectology to explain linguistic variation across dialects. Weinreich's paper inspired research in the late 1950s to test the proposal. However, the investigations soon showed it to be generally untenable. | Wikipedia, 2022
2. (Diasystematic Construction Grammar) Consisting of interconnected language-specific idioconstructions and language-unspecific diaconstructions.
    The term diasystem was introduced by Weinreich (1954) in his strictly structuralist approach to dialectology in order to account for regular correspondences between different structures in closely related dialects, mostly in the domain of phonology. It is, however, easily extensible so as to apply to other systematic crosslinguistic correspondences as well. | Steffen Höder, 2013

DIASYSTEMATIC CONSTRUCTION GRAMMAR
(Grammar) Abbreviated DCxG. In mainstream 20th-century linguistic and grammar theory, multilingualism is usually seen as an exceptional case as opposed to monolingualism, which is seen as the prototypical case. Consequently, language systems are described as monolingual, largely variation-free, and static. On the other hand, contact linguistic research shows that, on a historic and global scale, multilingualism is clearly the rule rather than an exception. While language contact is the normal state of languages, speaker groups, and individual speakers, monolingualism in a narrow sense (i.e. monolectalism) does not even exist: all speakers are multilingual or at least multilectal to some extent, meaning that they use several different (standard) languages or various varieties/dialects productively or receptively to some degree—in other words, speakers utilize a range of linguistic resources in a way that is communicatively adequate.
 Based on these insights, this project aims at developing a socio-cognitively realistic construction grammar approach to multlilingualism and language contact (Diasystematic Construction Grammar). DCxG is normal usage-based construction grammar as applied to language contact situations and works without any additional assumptions. In particular, DCxG assumes that

1. Linguistic knowledge is cognitively stored and processed as constructions.
2. Constructions are pairings of form and function.
3. Linguistic knowledge is organized through domain-general cognitive processes.

DIATHESIS
(Syntax) From Greek διάθεσις 'grammatical voice, disposition' (Wikipedia 2020). The sense is that of the role or "placing" of a subject, e.g. as agent in relation to an active V, or as patient or "undergoer" in relation to a passive. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2007

DIATHESIS ALTERNATION

1. (Syntax) Regular alternations of the syntactic expression of verbal arguments, sometimes accompanied by a change in meaning. For example:
   1. The man broke the window ↔ The window broke
    The syntactic phenomena are triggered by the underlying semantics of the participating verbs. Levin (1993)'s seminal book provides a manual inventory both of DAs and verb classes where membership is determined according to participation in these alternations. For example, most of the COOK verbs (e.g. bake, cook, fry ... ) can all take various DAs, such as the causative alternation, middle alternation and instrument subject alternation. | Lin Sun, Diana McCarthy, and Anna Korhonen, 2013
2. (Syntax) A change in the realization of the argument structure of a verb that is sometimes accompanied by changes in meaning (Levin 1993). The phenomenon in English is illustrated in (1)-(2) below.
   1. a. John offers shares to his employees.
      b. John offers his employees shares.
   2. a. Leave a note for her.
      b. Leave her a note.
    Example (1) illustrates the dative alternation, which is characterized by an alternation between the prepositional frame 'V NP1 to NP2' and the double object frame 'V NP1 NP2'. The benefactive alternation (cf. (2)) is structurally similar to the dative, the difference being that it involves the preposition for rather than to.
    Levin (1993) assumes that the syntactic realization of a verb's arguments is directly correlated with its meaning (cf. also Pinker 1989 for a similar proposal). Thus one would expect verbs that undergo the same alternations to form a semantically coherent class. Levin's study on diathesis alternations has influenced recent work on word sense disambiguation (Dorr and Jones 1996), machine translation (Dang et al. 1998), and automatic lexical acquisition (McCarthy and Korhonen 1998, Schulte im Walde 1998). | Maria Lapata, 1999
3. (Syntax) For the purposes of this paper, I take the notion of "diathesis alternation" in a broad sense, including both familiar alternations of syntactic patterns as in examples (1a-b) and alternations of case assignment, as in the Russian examples (2a-b) and (3a-b).
   1. a. The farmers loaded the truck with (*?the/*?some) hay.
      b. The farmers loaded (the/some) hay on the truck.
   2. a.
       

      On
      He

      ždet
      waits

      podrugu.
      girlfriend-ACC

        'He's waiting for his girlfriend.' (Neidle 1988)
      b.
       

      On
      He

      ždet
      waits

      otveta
      answer-GEN

      na
      to

      vopros.
      question

        'He's waiting for an answer to the question.'
   3. a.
       

      On
      he

      ne
      NEG

      polučil
      received

      pis'mo.
      letter-ACC.N.SG

        'He didn't receive the letter.'
      b.
       

      On
      he

      ne
      NEG

      polučil
      received

      pis'ma.
      letter-GEN.N.SG

        'He didn't receive any letter.'
    | Barbara H. Partee, 2022

DIATOPIC
(Dialectology) Antonym, diastratic Variation or study of variation from one part to another of the area covered by a speech community. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2007

DIFFERENTIAL OBJECT MARKING
(Syntax) The phenomenon in which certain objects of verbs are marked to reflect various syntactic and semantic factors. One form of the more general phenomenon of differential argument marking, DOM is present in more than 300 languages. The term "differential object marking" was coined by Georg Bossong (1985, 1991).
 In languages where DOM is active, direct objects are partitioned into two classes. In most such DOM languages, only the members of one of the classes receive a marker (the others being unmarked), but in some languages, like Finnish, objects of both classes are marked (with different endings).
 In non-DOM languages, by contrast, direct objects are uniformly marked in a single way. For instance, Quechua marks all direct objects with the direct-object ending -ta, whereas English has no overt markers on any direct objects.
 A well-known DOM language is Spanish, where direct objects that are both human and specific require a special marker, the preposition a 'to' (Fernández Ramírez 1986, Pensado 1995, Rodríguez-Mondoñedo 2007, Torrego 1998):

1. Pedro
   Peter

   besó
   kissed

   a
   DOM

   Lucía.
   Lucy.

   Lit. 'Peter kissed to Lucy.'

2. Pedro
   Peter

   besó
   kissed

   el
   the

   retrato.
   picture

3. Pedro
   Peter

   vio
   saw

   (a)
   (DOM)

   la
   the

   gata.
   cat-FEM

DIFFUSION

1. (Sociolinguistics) Models of linguistic diffusion commonly track how an observed linguistic innovation spreads from a relatively narrow area or relatively narrow social group to wider areas and groups. | Marie Maegaard, 2013
2. (Sociolinguistics) In the seventies of the last century, sociolinguists applied tools and theories from human geography to analyze geographical distribution patterns of linguistic phenomena, including variation between dialects. The concept of "diffusion" turned out to be pivotal in connecting linguistic and geographical patterns.
    In diffusion models, linguistic innovations are transmitted through space.
    A diffusionist approach emphasizes external, social sources for explaining language variation (Chambers 1995), which does not mean that internal, linguistic factors do not play a prohibiting or fostering role.
    Gravity models were applied in sociolinguistics to analyze spatial diffusion patterns of linguistic features. | Marinel Gerritsen and Roeland van Hout, 2006

DIRECT SCALAR IMPLICATURE
(Pragmatics) Inferences like (1) arise when a weak scalar term like "sometimes" appears in an upward entailing context. The sentences in (2a) and (3a), which contain the scalar terms "some" and "or", respectively, give rise to the implicatures in (2b) and (3b).

1. a. John sometimes went to the movies.
   → b. John didn't always go.
2. a. Some of the students went to the movies.
   → b. Not all of them went.
3. a. John went to the movies or to the beach.
   → b. John didn't go both to the movies and to the beach.

Page Last Modified February 6, 2024

 

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