Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
He-Hz

HEAD
(Syntax; Morphology) Or, nucleus. The word that determines the syntactic category of a phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun water. Analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound. For example, the head of the compound noun handbag is bag, since a handbag is a bag, not a hand. The other elements of the phrase or compound modify the head, and are therefore the head's dependents (Miller, 2011). Headed phrases and compounds are called endocentric, whereas exocentric ("headless") phrases and compounds (if they exist) lack a clear head. Heads are crucial to establishing the direction of branching. Head-initial phrases are right-branching, head-final phrases are left-branching, and head-medial phrases combine left- and right-branching.
 Examine the following expressions:

  1. big red dog
  2. birdsong
 The word dog is the head of big red dog since it determines that the phrase is a noun phrase, not an adjective phrase. Because the adjectives big and red modify this head noun, they are its dependents. Similarly, in the compound noun birdsong, the stem song is the head since it determines the basic meaning of the compound. The stem bird modifies this meaning and is therefore dependent on song. Birdsong is a kind of song, not a kind of bird. Conversely, a songbird is a type of bird since the stem bird is the head in this compound. The heads of phrases can often be identified by way of constituency tests. For instance, substituting a single word in place of the phrase big red dog requires the substitute to be a noun (or pronoun), not an adjective. | Wikipedia, 2020

HEAD, FUNCTIONAL OR LEXICAL
(Syntax) It is important to note that lexical heads are different from functional heads. Lexical heads are usually content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions. They often have substantive descriptive content unlike functional heads. Functional heads, on the other hand, are usually grammatical words such as determiners, complementizers, inflection (Infl), particles like infinitival to, etc. (Radford 2004) Functional heads have an essentially grammatical function. | Taiwo Oluwaseun Ehineni, 2014

HEAD BANGING

  1. (Morphology) A phonological word must be dominated by X0 and cannot contain any xn where n > 0 (words are complex head adjunction structures). These complex structures can be derived by head movement, external merge of simple or complex X0s, by Lowering, or perhaps by Local Dislocation. (Newell et al.) | Maire Noonan, 2023
  2. (Morphology) Lisa Travis coined the term head banging for approaches to wordhood that are predicated on the assumption that words at some level of the derivation must be X0s (Baker 1988, Bobaljik 2012, Piggott and Travis 2017, a.o.) | Laura Kalin, 2018

HEAD DIRECTIONALITY
(Syntax) A proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head of a phrase precedes its complements) or head-final (the head follows its complements). The head is the element that determines the category of a phrase: for example, in a verb phrase, the head is a verb. Therefore, head initial would be VO languages and head final would be OV languages. (Contemporary Linguistic Parameters 2015)
 Some languages are consistently head-initial or head-final at all phrasal levels. English is considered to be strongly head-initial, while Japanese is an example of a language that is consistently head-final. In certain other languages, such as German and Gbe, examples of both types of head direction occur. Various theories have been proposed to explain such variation.
 Head directionality is connected with the type of branching that predominates in a language: head-initial structures are right-branching, while head-final structures are left-branching (Dryer 2009). On the basis of these criteria, languages can be divided into head-final (rigid and non-rigid) and head-initial types. The identification of headedness is based on the following (Polinsky and Magyar, 2020):

  1. The order of subject, object, and verb.
  2. The relationship between the order of the object and verb.
  3. The order of an adposition and its complement.
  4. The order of relative clause and head noun.
 | Wikipedia, 2022
See Also: HEAD-FINAL, -INITIAL; HEAD PARAMETER.

HEAD-FINAL, -INITIAL
(Syntax) Head-placement rules deal with the placement of heads of phrases relative to their arguments. The head is what determines how a particular phrasal unit acts within the sentence. Prepositions are the heads of prepositional phrases, verbs the heads of verb phrases, etc.
Head-initial means that the head is placed before its argument. So you see orders like:

 Whereas with head-final orders, you see the heads placed after their arguments:  It's important to note though that while languages will show strong tendencies toward one rule or the other (such as SOV langs being largely head-final, and SVO/VSO langs being more head-initial), no language is entirely one or the other. For instance, English, while largely head-initial, has the postpostion ago as in (1).
  1. I saw him [ years ago ].
 Also note that adjuncts such as adjectives, adverbs, and sometimes relative clauses are exempt from head-placement rules, as they are extra information not required by the head to be grammatically correct (as opposed to the argument). | r/conlangs, 2016
See Also: HEAD DIRECTIONALITY, HEAD PARAMETER.

HEAD MOVEMENT CONSTRAINT

  1. (Syntax) I will claim that heads (X0s) can only move into the category that governs them. | Lisa deMena Travis, 1984
  2. (Syntax) Head movement of X to Y cannot skip an intervening head Z. (Roberts, 2000)
     Z intervenes between Y and X iff Y asymmetrically c-commands both X and Z, while Z asymmetrically c-commands X. The HMC has the effect of forcing head-movement to be cyclic, in an obvious sense. | Ian Roberts, 2015
  3. (Syntax) 
    Head Movement Constraint (Travis 1984)
    An X0 may only move into the Y0 which properly governs it.
     The HMC basically places a limit on the distance over which a head may be moved (head movement). In effect, the HMC prohibits skipping a governing head position, as in (1), where buy moves to COMP in disregard of its being properly governed only by the I0 will.
    1. * [CP What [C buyi ] [IP John [ I will ] [VP ti ] ] ]?
     Recently, it has been argued that the HMC can be derived from more general principles, such as the ECP. (Baker 1988, Chomsky 1986, Rizzi 1990, Travis 1984) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

HEAD MOVEMENT CONVENTION
(Syntax) The HMC (Travis 1984) is usually understood to constrain head movement to a configuration in which a head moves to the head which selects its maximal projection, e.g, V to T if T selects VP; V to Voice if Voice selects VP.
 Constrained by the HMC, head movement does a good job of characterizing the linear placement of words in a wide variety of languages, e.g., in French V-to-T, Germanic V2 as V-to-C, English finite Aux placement as V-to-T, English subject‐aux inversion as T-to-C, Irish verb-initiality as V-to-T, and so on. | Peter Svenonius, 2023

HEAD MOVEMENT THEORY
(Syntax; Morphology) A grand unification of three things (Emonds 1978, Travis 1984, Baker 1988, Pollock 1989, Belletti 1988):

  1. Word-formation. E.g., V to T forms an inflected verb.
  2. Word placement in the extended projection. E.g., V to T places V to the left of midfield adverbs.
  3. Movement theory. E.g., head movement obeys Relativized Minimality (Rizzi 1990).
 | Peter Svenonius, 2023

HEAD PARAMETER

  1. (Morphology; Typology) A language has either right-headed or left-headed compounds. | Geert Booij, 2009
  2. (Syntax; Typology) The position of the head is considered to be one of the main parameters of language variation. Opinions differ as to the precise definition of a parametric theory of head positions. There is the possibility to encode the position of the head directly in the X-bar schema of the language. There are also more relational approaches, which derive the position of the head from the direction of case assignment or more abstractly the direction of government.
     Just considering parametric systems which directly manipulate the position of the head, in the simplest case, we can imagine a parameter which takes one of these three values:
    Headedness parameter
    1. The head is phrasal-initial (Head First).
    2. The head is phrasal-final (Head Last).
    3. The position of the head is free (Head Variable).
     The parameter may have different values for different categories (in Dutch for instance VP is head-final, PP usually head-initial and CP always head-initial). Typologists point out that variation of this kind is usually limited because of rather powerful tendencies within languages to harmonize head-complement order across categories. | Jack Hoeksema, 1990
See Also HEAD DIRECTIONALITY; HEAD-FINAL, -INITIAL.

HEADLESS XP
(Syntax) A phrase whose head has moved out of it. E.g.,

          YP
         /  \
        /    \
       /      \
      Y        XP
     / \       /\
    /   \     /  \
   /     \   /____\
  X       Y  ...tX...
 E.g.,
  1. [VP tgave the book to Mary ], John gave tVP
 The verb gave moves out of VP, resulting in a headless VP, which moves to the topic position. | Kenshi Funakoshi, 2012, 2014

HEADLESS XP-MOVEMENT
(Syntax) Consider the following derivation. First, a head X0 moves to Y0 as in (1). Then, the remnant XP moves to a position above Y0, as in (2). Under standard conditions of chain pronunciation, the outcome of this derivation is a representation in which a seemingly "headless" XP moves leaving behind its own head X0.

  1. [WP W [YP [Y Xi Y ] [XP ti ZP ] ] ]
  2. [WP [XPj ti ZP ] [W' W [YP [Y Xi Y ] tj ] ]
 Takano (2000) noticed that sentences involving headless XP-movement are unacceptable in several languages. Similar observations have been made by Funakoshi (2012) and Arano (2018), among others. Takano formulated the relevant generalization as a condition on remnant movement.
Takano's Generalization (Takano 2000)
Remnant movement of α is impossible if the head of α has moved out of α.
 The implicit hypothesis is that there is some universal property of narrow syntactic computations preventing derivations such as (1) and (2). | Carlos Múñoz Pérez, 2021

HERDAN'S LAW
(Diachronic) Although with little-known precedents (Kuraszkiewicz and Łukaszewicz 1951), Herdan's law (Herdan 1960) (also known as Heap's law, because it was also formulated later by Heaps [1978]) describes that the average growth of new different words V in a text of size L follows

VLα, α < 1 (Herdan 1960)
 Thus, Herdan's law shows the evolution of the number V of different words in a text (types) as its size increases, measured in the total number of words (L). L obviously is obtained by the summation of the number of occurrences of each word (tokens), for each different words types that appear in the text. | Antoni Hernández-Fernández, Iván G. Torre, Juan-María Garrido, and Lucas Lacasa, 2019

HERITAGE ACCENT
(Sociolinguistics) Although most studies dealing with global accent, whether investigating second-language learners (L2s) or heritage speakers, present a dichotomy between native-like vs. foreign-like accent, it is necessary to develop a specific system that includes heritage accent because the speech of heritage speakers presents its own phonetic characteristics. The main problem with this native-like accent/foreign-like accent dichotomy is that first, heritage speakers are hard to place or do not fit at all into it. In addition, it creates a judgement where some speakers and/or language learners belong and others do not belong, no matter how much they may try or develop their proficiency. For instance, in the case of L2s, using this binary classification, highly proficient learners could still not be classified as native-like speakers because of their status as foreign language learners.
 The term was originally proposed by Benmamoun et al. (2010) as an accent different than a native or foreign accent, not only in subjective global accent perceptions but also in phonetic and phonological production and perception measurements. This proposal has, since then, continued to be supported by scholars in the field of heritage language phonetics and phonology (Boomershine and Ronquest 2019, Flores and Rato 2016, Kupisch et al. 2021, Rao 2015, 2018, Ronquest and Rao 2018 a.o.). | Sendy Monarrez Rhone, 2023

HERITAGE LANGUAGE
(Acquisition) An end-state language that is defined based on the temporal order of acquisition and, often, the language dominance in the individual (Valdés 2005). A heritage speaker acquires the heritage language as their first language through natural input in the home environment and acquires the majority language as a second language (Montrul 2008), usually when she/he starts school and talks about different topics with people in school, or by exposure through media (written texts, internet, popular culture etc.) (Benmamoun, Montrul and Polinsky 2010) As exposure to the heritage language decreases and exposure to the majority language increases, the majority language becomes the individual's dominant language, and acquisition of the heritage language changes (Valdés 2005, Montrul 2008). The results of these changes can be seen in divergence of the heritage language from monolingual norms in the areas of phonology, lexical knowledge (knowledge of vocabulary or words), morphology, syntax, semantics and code-switching, although mastery of the heritage language may vary from purely receptive skills in only informal spoken language to native-like fluency (Benmamoun, Montrul and Polinsky 2010). | Wikipedia, 2016

HERITAGE SPEAKER

  1. (Sociolinguistics) Little-Jerome (a consultant in Bloomfield 1927) is "a true bilingual;" Little-Doctor has some deficiencies; and White-Thunder is at the low extreme of the bilingualism scale. Little-Doctor and White-Thunder instantiate heritage speakers: unbalanced bilinguals, who are often recessive, with few receptive skills. Their Menominee is less fluent than that of monolingual speakers, and although Bloomfield does not discuss their linguistic biography in detail, it is possible that their paths to lesser fluency were different as well, since they belong to two different generations. Sadly, Little-Doctor may have been ahead of his peers in terms of reduced Menominee fluency. And White-Thunder, the youngest in the cohort described by Bloomfield, may represent the growing trend of moving away from the ancestral language and toward an increased use of English, even if that English may not have been to Bloomfield's standards. | Maria Polinsky, 2018
  2. (Sociolinguistics) As Carreira (2004) puts it, we do not have a "size that fits all" when it comes to defining or characterizing heritage speakers—this is why most articles about heritage speakers spend a significant portion of their introductory sections discussing issues concerning the label "heritage speaker" and connotations of that term.
     Valdés (2000) gave this definition: "individuals raised in homes where a language other than English is spoken and who are to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language."
     Roughly, we define heritage speakers as asymmetrical bilinguals who learned language X—the heritage language—as an L1 in childhood, but who, as adults, are dominant in a different language.
     Adopting this or any other definition requires addressing the distinction between heritage speakers in a broad sense and heritage speakers in a narrow sense.
     Defined broadly, as per Fishman (1981, 2006), a heritage speaker is anyone who has an ethnic, cultural, or other connection with a language, regardless of whether that person learned the heritage language as a child. Defined narrowly, a person is a heritage speaker if and only if he or she grew up learning the heritage language and has some proficiency in it. (Polinsky and Kagan 2007) | Elabbas Benmamoun, Silvina Montrul, and Maria Polinsky, 2013

HETEROCLISIS

  1. (Morphology) Nouns that can't decide what declension class they are in. | Neil Myler, 2023
  2. (Morphology) Refers to the property of a lexeme whose inflectional paradigm contains forms built upon stems belonging to two or more distinct inflection classes. Consider, for example, the declension of the Czech nominal lexeme PRAMEN 'spring, source' in Table 1. In the singular portion of its paradigm, PRAMEN inflects as a member of the 'soft-masculine' declension exemplified by POKOJ 'room'; in the plural portion of its paradigm, it inflects as a member of the 'hard-masculine' declension exemplified by MOST 'bridge'.
    1. Declension Soft-Masculine Hard-Masculine
      Singular NOM pokoj pramen most
      GEN pokoje pramene mostu
      DAT pokoji prameni mostu
      ACC pokoj pramen most
      VOC pokoji prameni moste
      LOC pokoji prameni mostĕ
      INSTR pokojem pramenem mostem
      Plural NOM pokoje prameny mosty
      GEN pokojů pramenů mostů
      DAT pokojům pramenům mostům
      ACC pokoje prameny mosty
      VOC pokoje prameny mosty
      LOC pokojích pramenech mostech
      INSTR pokoji prameny mosty

     Heteroclisis is a widely observable phenomenon in natural language: it is not restricted to lexemes belonging to any particular syntactic category, nor are Indo-European languages the only source of examples. Indeed, languages that have inflection-class distinctions tend to exhibit heteroclisis. Languages exemplifying this tendency include Hausa (Afro-Asiatic), Mongolian (Altaic), Ngiyambaa (Australian), Chukchi (Chukotko-Kamchatkan), Fula (Niger-Congo), Fur (Nilo-Saharan), Tshakhur (North Caucasian), Zapotec (Oto-Manguean), Takelma (Penutian), Lakota (Siouan), and Mari (Uralic). | Gregory T. Stump, 2006

HETEROCLITE

  1. (Grammar) An irregularly declined or inflected word. | Wiktionary, 2023
  2. (Diachronic) A word whose etymological roots come from distinct, different languages or language groups. | Wiktionary, 2023

HETEROCLITIC
(Morphology; Indo-European) Signifying a stem which alternates between more than one form when declined for grammatical case. Examples of heteroclitic noun stems in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) include

  1. *wod-r/n- 'water'
    *wódr nominoaccusative
    *udnés genitive
    *udén locative
  2. *yékw-r/n- 'liver'
    *yékwr nominoaccusative
    *ikwnés genitive
 In PIE, heteroclitic stems tend to be noun stems with grammatically inanimate gender. | Wiktionary, 2023

HIGHEST COPY
(Syntax) 

Highest Copy
The highest copy of X is the one which asymmetrically c-commands all other copies of X.
 | Neil Myler, 2023

HISTORICAL-COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

  1. (Diachronic) How languages change across time; the principles involved in phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic changes as well as the methodologies used in analyzing historical changes; a cross-section of language families; describe and classify language change; identify recurrent sound correspondences; reconstruct ancestral forms and subgroup languages; regular sound change in a wide variety of languages; also analogy, convergence, semantic change, and syntactic change. | Abd. Madjid Djuraid and M.Hum, 2019
  2. (Diachronic) The goal of historical-comparative linguistics is to bring the evidence of language to bear on explaining the origins and development of human societies, in the absence of or in conjunction with the insights achieved from the range of disciplines concerned with society (Sidwell 2010, cf. Bowern and Evans 2014). This goal is achieved through the classification of languages into families and subgroups, the reconstruction of proto-languages at different levels and the investigation of processes of linguistic change. | Harold Koch et al., 2014

HISTORICAL PRESENT

  1. (Grammar) Or, dramatic present tense, or, narrative present tense. The use of the present tense, in narrative, to refer to events which began and ended at some time previous to the moment at which the narrative itself is told.
     Two properties are characteristic of the conversational historical present (CHP) are sufficient to distinguish this feature from other occurrences of the present tense which have sometimes been confused with it.
    1. The occurrence of CHP is restricted, by definition, to conversational narrative.
    2. CHP alternates with the simple past tense in such a way that
      a. The simple past tense is always substitutable for CHP without change in referential meaning.
      b. CHP is never found in all verbs where it could have been used.
     The CHP alternation set comprises not only the simple forms of the past and present tenses but also their aspectual variants, the past and present progressive forms and the past and present perfect forms. | Nessa Wolfson, 1982
  2. (Grammar) Or, historic present, or, dramatic present, or, narrative present.  The employment of the present tense when narrating past events. It is widely used in writing about history in Latin (where it is sometimes referred to by its Latin name, præsens historicum) and some modern European languages. In English, it is used above all in historical chronicles (listing a series of events). It is also used in fiction, for "hot news" (as in headlines), and in everyday conversation (Huddleston and Pullum 2002). | Wikipedia, 2021
  3. (Grammar) A term describing the use of a present tense form while narrating events which happened in the past; for example, (1).
    1. Three weeks ago I'm walking down this road, when I see Smithers coming towards me ...
     This usage is common in contexts where the speaker wishes to convey a sense of drama, immediacy or urgency. | David Crystal, 2008

HOMOPHONE
A word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A homophone may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example rose (flower) and rose (past tense of rise), or differently, as in rain, reign, and rein. The term homophone may also apply to units longer or shorter than words, for example a phrase, letter, or groups of letters which are pronounced the same as another phrase, letter, or group of letters. Any unit with this property is said to be homophonous. | Wikipedia, 2022

HOMORGANIC CONSONANT
(Phonetics). From homo- 'same' and organ '(speech) organ'. A consonant sound articulated in the same place of articulation as another. For example, [p], [b] and [m] are homorganic consonants of each other as they share the place of articulation of bilabial. Consonants not articulated in the same place are called heterorganic. | Wikipedia, 2021

HORN SCALE
(Pragmatics) In uttering (la) below, the speaker implicates (lb) on the basis of the pair hot and warm.

  1. a. It is warm in Northern California today.
    b. '(The speaker believes) it is not hot in Northern California today.'
 The pairs (or sets) of semantically stronger and weaker expressions that license or provide a basis for implicatures like the above are called Horn scales (Horn 1972, 1989, Levinson 1983). According to the convention introduced by Horn, such a scale is indicated in angular brackets, with the items in the scale ordered from strongest to weakest (from left to right), as in 〈 hot, warm 〉. | Yo Matsumoto, 1995

HYPERCORRECTION
(Sociolinguistics) Non-standard use of language that results from the over-application of a perceived rule of language-usage prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated (Wilson 1993, Labov 1972).
 Linguistic hypercorrection occurs when a real or imagined grammatical rule is applied in an inappropriate context, so that an attempt to be "correct" leads to an incorrect result. It does not occur when a speaker follows "a natural speech instinct", according to Otto Jespersen and Robert J. Menner (1937). | Wikipedia, 2022

HYPER-RAISING

  1. (Syntax) Raising a DP from an embedded finite clause into the matrix clause. HR introduces a phase problem: the embedded clause is finite, which is supposed to be impervious to raising. | Suzana Fong, 2018
  2. (Syntax) Example (1) illustrates that raising to the matrix clause is impossible if the lower clause is tensed. This is generally taken to indicate that the subject John has its Case needs met in the lower clause, rendering it inactive for Case-checking and agreement operations in the higher clause.
    1. * John seems [ (that) <John> is sick ]
     Many Bantu languages exhibit apparent raising out of a finite clause in a construction known as hyper-raising (cf. Harford Perez 1985, Tanaka 2002, Martin and Nunes 2005, Nunes 2008, Ura 1998, Zeller 2006 for similar problems in various languages). Lubukusu and Lusaamia are two members of the Luyia subgroup of Bantu spoken in Kenya; the (a) examples below give perceptual verbs with expletive subjects, whereas the (b) examples have raised subjects and thus appear comparable to the unacceptable English example in (1); yet they are grammatical.
    1. Lubukusu
      a.
      Ka-lolekhana
      6SA-seem
      (mbo)
      (that)
      babaandu
      2people
      ba-kwa
      2SA.PST-fall
        'It seems that the people fell.'
      b.
      babaandu
      2people
      ba-lolekhana
      2SA-seem
      (mbo)
      (that)
      ba-kwa
      2SA.PST-fall
        'The people seem like they fell / The people seem to have fallen.'
    2. Lusaamia
      a.
      Bi-bonekhana
      8SA-appear
      koti
      that
      Ouma
      a-kusa
      1SA-sell
      enyumba
      9house
      eyaye
      9POSS
        'It appears that Ouma is selling his house.'
      b.
      Ouma
      a-bonekhana
      1SA-appear
      (koti)
      (that)
      a-kusa
      1SA-sell
      enyumba
      9house
      eyaye
      9POSS
        'Ouma appears as if he's selling his house / Ouma appears to be selling his house.'
     Though hyper-raising has been described in quite a few languages, it has most often been linked to circumstances in which tense and agreement in the embedded clause are less than robust. | Vicki Carstens and Michael Diercks, 2009

 

Page Last Modified February 28, 2024

 
B a c k   T o   I n d e x