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

DIACONSTRUCTION
(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

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 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

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

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.

DISCOURSE COMMITMENT

1. (Pragmatics) The set of publicly held beliefs that can be ascribed to the author of a text or a hypothesis. | Andrew Hickl and Jeremy Bensley, 2007
2. (Pragmatics) A commitment is a self-binding resolution to act as though a given proposition is true. This definition has its roots in Austin (1962), who argues that the effect of speech acts involves "committing" the speaker to "certain future conduct." The idea that commitments are propositional in nature is due to (Hamblin 1970), which allows for immediate parallels with the idea of the common ground. Formally, commitments can be captured by articulating the common ground into a number of discrete sets for propositions that the individual interlocutors are committed to. These sets are known by various names, including commitment-stores (Hamblin 1970), commitment-slates (Hamblin 1971), and speaker beliefs (Gunlogson 2003), although I will employ Farkas and Bruce's (2010) discourse commitments, abbreviated as DCs. To arrive at the classical common ground, one need simply intersect the interlocutors' commitments; whatever lies within this set is shared. | Oliver Northrup, 2014

DISCOURSE DEIXIS

1. (Pragmatics) There is ample evidence that subsequent reference can be made to some aspect of a sequence of clauses in text. Also not in dispute is the fact that such subsequent reference is most often done via deictic pronouns: Of 79 instances of prominal reference_m to clausal material found in five written texts, only 14 (~18%) used the pronoun it while the other 65 (~82%) used either this or that (17 instances of that and 48 of this).
    On the other hand, looking at all instances of pronominal reference_m using it to discourse entities evoked by NPs, of 41 such references, 39 (~95%) used it while only 2 (~5%) used this or that. Because of this, I will call this type of reference "discourse deixis".
    The first thing to note about discourse deixis is that the referent_m is often distinct from the things described in the sequence. For example,

   There's two houses you might be interested in:

   House A is in Palo Alto. It's got 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, and was built in 1950. It's on a quarter acre, with a lovely garden, and the owner is asking $425K. But that's all I know about it.

   House B is in Portola Vally. It's got 3 bedrooms, 4 baths and a kidney-shaped pool, and was also built in 1950. It's on 4 acres of steep wooded slope, with a view of the mountains. The owner is asking $600K. I heard all this from a friend, who saw the house yesterday.

   Is that enough information for you to decide which to look at?

   In this passage, that in the second paragraph does not refer to House A (although all instances of it do): rather it refers to the description of House A presented there. Similarly (all) this in the third paragraph does not refer to House B (although again, all instances of it do): rather it refers to the description of House B presented there. That in the fourth paragraph refers to the descriptions of the two houses taken together.
     The next thing to note is that the only sequences of utterances that appear to allow such pronominal reference, are ones that intuitively constitute a discourse segment. | Bonnie Lynn Webber, 1988
2. (Pragmatics) Or, text deixis. Deictic reference to a portion of a discourse or discourse representative relative to the speaker's "current" "location" in the discourse. Therefore, discourse deixis is deixis in text. Discourse deixis has to do with the choice of lexical or grammatical elements which indicate or otherwise refer to some portion or aspect of the ongoing discourse—something like, for example, the former. Most commonly, the terms of discourse deixis are taken from systems of deictic and non-deictic time semantics, for the very good reason that any point in a discourse can be thought of as a point in time—the time at which that portion of the discourse is encoded or decoded—with preceding portions of the discourse conceived as occurring earlier in time, later portions thought of as occurring later in time. Expressions in discourse deixis taken directly from non-deictic time semantics are words like earlier and later, and phrases like the preceding X and the following X. So, a text, whether in its written or oral realization, is closely related to the concepts of space and time. Since discourse unfolds in time, it seems natural that time deictic or space-deictic words can be used to refer to portions of the discourse as in the following examples:
   1. I bet you haven't heard this joke.
   2. That was the funniest story I've ever heard.
   3. There's a nice point to discuss in class.
   4. Here's a powerful argument.
    An interesting point about the use of spatial deictic terms to express discourse deixis is that the proximal-distal distinction in space deixis acquires temporal status in relation to the unfolding of the text. | Youwen Yang, 2011

DISCOURSE MARKER
(Grammar) Any of a variety of units whose function is within a larger discourse rather than an individual sentence or clause. E.g., Greek καί (kai 'and'), γάρ (gar 'for'), δέ (de 'but'). | Gunnel Melchers and Philip Shaw, 2013

DISCOURSE PARTICLE

1. (Pragmatics) Lexemes such as like, well, oh, you know are commonly used in spoken English, yet native speakers, if asked, would be unable to explain why they use such words or what they mean. In reality, such lexemes have legitimate linguistic functions as "discourse particles", which indicate logical relationships between utterances, anticipate the following items, and mark other discourse functions.
    These DPs perform a number of important sociolinguistic functions. For example, well indicates a dispreferred or unexpected response or a transition; you know indicates foregrounding or common knowledge with deference to face-politeness; and like marks new or salient information. Some act as fillers for pauses (hmm, uh), and others may also be extended for use as fillers. These and other markers are necessary for not only making speech sound natural, but also for providing smooth transitions, indicating logical flow of information, and filling otherwise awkward pauses. | English Wiki contributors, 2023
2. (Pragmatics) Or, modal particle. Grosz (2016) characterizes German discourse particles as "a closed class of functional (= grammatical [AvK ML]) elements that contribute to common ground management in the spirit of Krifka (2008)". This means that they encode pragmatic instructions to the addressee on the relation between the propositional content of the clause and the common ground between speaker and hearer.
    Particles are used abundantly in spoken Dutch and German. They are presuppositional in the sense that they express the speaker's response to shared knowledge between speaker and audience in the common ground/context. Particles form a closed word class, they have an invariant form and are uninflected. They are typically unstressed, and they occur in fixed positions in the clause. | Ans van Kemenade and Meta Links, 2020
3. (Pragmatics) Discourse particles fulfil many different functions. They contribute to text structuring, dialogue management, turn-taking, politeness, and more. Research-problem areas include: definition; the functional spectrum of the items considered; the model of polyfunctionality proposed; and the broader framework of the model. | Kersten Fischer, 2021
4. (Pragmatics) These particles form part of a heterogeneous class of elements that have traditionally been subsumed under umbrella terms such as Modalpartikeln 'modal particles' (Weydt 1977, Thurmair 1989, Meibauer 1994), Abtönungspartikeln 'downtoners' (Weydt 1969), and Diskurspartikeln 'discourse particles’ (Abraham 1991, Kratzer 1999, Zimmermann 2011).
    The term "Modalpartikeln" 'modal particles' is most prominent in German linguistics, where these particles are classified as a separate part of speech (Pittner and Berman 2015). However, Thurmair (1989) emphasizes that the notion of "modality" in the label "modal particles" historically originated as a vague notion that roughly corresponds to "making a non-truth-conditional contribution". It should thus not be confused with the currently more widespread use of the term modality in the context of (sub-)sentential modality (as in Kratzer 1981, 1991, and Portner 2009); sentential modality is typically exemplified by modal auxiliaries such as may and by modal adverbs such as maybe.
    As a consequence, the recent move (particularly in English texts) of using the label "discourse particles" (instead of "modal particles") is justified by a goal of avoiding terminological confusion.
    For German, Thurmair (1989) lists seventeen elements of this class (aber, auch, bloß, denn, doch, eben, eigentlich, einfach, etwa, halt, ja, mal, nur, ruhig, schon, vielleicht, wohl), though the exact number is unclear. | Patrick G. Grosz, 2016

DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION STRUCTURE
A discourse representation structure (DRS) is a mental representation built up by the hearer as the discourse unfolds. A DRS consists of two parts: a universe of so-called discourse referents, which represent the objects under discussion, and a set of DRS-conditions which encode the information that has accumulated on these discourse referents. The following DRS represents the information that there are two individuals, one of which is a farmer, the other a donkey, and that the former chased the latter:

1. [x, y: farmer(x), donkey(y), chased(x,y)]

2. A farmer chased a donkey.

DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION THEORY

1. (Semantics) One approach to dynamic semantics is discourse representation theory (DRT, Kamp 1981). Meanings in DRT are so-called discourse representation structures (DRSs). These structures are a type of database that contains specific pieces of information. In and of itself a DRS is a static object, but DRT can be said to be a dynamic semantic framework because it allows us to understand the process of composing meanings as a process of merging DRSs. In this way, information change becomes an integral part of the interpretation process. | Rick Nouwen, Adrian Brasoveanu, Jan van Eijck, and Albert Visser, 2022
2. (Semantics) Two features that set DRT apart from other varieties of dynamic semantics is that it is representational and non-compositional. In the 1980s, the founding years of dynamic semantics, these features made DRT a controversial theory, though by now those controversies have abated. DRT's main innovation, beyond the Montagovian paradigm which was then considered orthodox, is that it introduced a level of mental representations, called discourse representation structures (DRSs). The basic idea is rather straightforward. It is that a hearer builds up a mental representation of the discourse as it unfolds, and that every incoming sentence prompts additions to that representation. This picture has always been commonplace in the psychology of language. DRT's principal tenet is that it should be the starting point for semantic theory, too.
     A theory of the DRT family consists of the following ingredients:
   1. A formal definition of the representation language, consisting of:
      1. A recursive definition of the set of all well-formed DRSs.
      2. A model-theoretic semantics for the members of this set.
   2. A construction procedure, which specifies how to extend a given DRS when a sentence comes in.
     Technically, this is very similar to earlier work in formal semantics, with two exceptions: the interpretation process always takes the previous discourse into account, and the level of semantic representations is claimed to be essential. | Bart Geurts, David Beaver, and Emar Maier, 2020

DISCOURSE TOPIC
(Discourse) The central participant or idea of a stretch of connected discourse or dialogue. The topic is what the discourse is about. The notion is often confused with the related notion of sentence-level topic/theme, which is frequently defined as "what the sentence is about" (Sapir 1921). Discourse topics have been of considerable interest to linguists because of the relations between the topic of a discourse and various aspects of the grammatical structure of the sentence, including strategies for referent-tracking (including the use of voice [Givón 1994], inversion [Zúñiga 2006], switch-reference markers, and obviation), topic-chaining, and pronominalization. | Wikipedia, 2022

DISCOURSE UNIT
(Discourse) DUs have been studied as basic analytic units in research on cross-linguistic comparative analysis of spontaneous speech segmentation (Park 2002). Technically, a DU was characterized as a part of an utterance including a predicate and the predicate's key arguments, and was structurally encoded as a clause. The main predicate was the semantic core of the DU, and annotators used it as a clue to the boundaries of a DU. | Zhang, Li, et al, 2021

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