COVERB

1. (Grammar) A lexical category of predicative but non-inflecting elements that can function only in concert with an inflective verb to their right. They originate from the non-rightmost verb in a serial verb construction which gradually loses its ability to function independently. | Jan Ullrich, 2023
2. (Grammar) A crucial feature of Jaminjung (Australian), which is also highly relevant for the structure of spatial expressions, is the division of predicative lexemes into two distinct lexical categories.
   1. Verbs, that is those lexemes carrying verbal inflections, constitute a closed class with around 30 members.
   2. Members of an open class of uninflected elements, termed "coverbs" here, cover a semantic area which is usually covered by verbs, but also by adverbs and adpositions, in other languages.
    The term "coverb"—rather than preverb (e.g. Nash 1986, Tsunoda 1981, McGregor this volume) or verbal particle (e.g. Hoddinott and Kofod 1976, Merlan 1994)—is used here because
   1. It does not suggest a fixed order with respect to the verb, and
   2. It does not have the connotation of a minor word class restricted in size.
   3. It also captures the dependent nature of members of this class: coverbs do not function as the main predicate in a finite clause, but have to be combined with a verb to form a complex predicate. For example, in (i) and (ii), three coverbs, mung 'look at', waga 'sit', and girrb 'be quiet' occur in combinations with different verbs.
      1. pigipigi
         pig

         mung
         look.at

         ga-yu
         3SG-BE.PRS

         yina-wurla-ngining
         DIST-DIR-L.ALL

         manamba-ngining
         upstream-L.ALL

         'a pig is looking that way, upstream' (Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, 1990s)
      2. warrgayin-ngunyi
         far-ABL

         ga-ram
         3SG-COME.PRS

         yina,
         DIST

         gamurr
         middle

         waga
         sit

         ga-yu
         3SG-BE.PRS

         girrb
         quiet

         gan-unggu-m
         3SG:3SG-SAY/DO-PRS

         'he comes from a long way over there, halfway he sits down and stops'
    | Eva Schultze-Berndt, 2009

COVERT MOVEMENT

1. (Syntax) The "single-output" model, along with the Copy Theory of Movement (Chomsky 1993, 1995, 2000), allows overt and covert movement to be recast as mere epiphenomena:
    Overt movement describes a situation in which both phonology and semantics interpret the highest copy/link in the movement chain, whereas covert movement describes a situation in which the semantics interprets a higher copy/link than does phonology.
    This contrasts with the traditional Minimalist Program framework (Chomsky 1995 et seq.), in which the difference between overt movement and covert movement derives from features-strength: strong features must be checked prior to spelling out the derivation to PF, and therefore result in movement that is phonologically detectable; checking of weak features, on the other hand, can be deferred until after spell-out, resulting in phonologically undetectable movement. Thus, within traditional minimalism, overt movement and covert movement are essentially primitives, encoded in the form of the feature-strength of those features responsible for triggering each particular instance of movement.
    Crucially, each of the two interfaces (phonological and semantic) is relatively free in choosing which copy it will privilege for interpretation. | Omer Preminger, 2009
2. (Syntax) Or, hidden movement. When movement is involved in the derivation of LF, we speak of hidden or covert movement: the effect is invisible at the level of PF. Thus in a multiple question like Who saw what, the second wh-phrase what is covertly moved to sentence-initial position in the derivation of LF. (Chomsky 1965, 1973, 1986, 1993) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

CP
(Syntax) Abbreviation for Complementizer Phrase. CP is the maximal projection of COMP (C⁰). CP is in part a "reconstruction" in X-bar theory of the category S' (or S-bar).
 Thus the (anomalous) structure generated in (1) is replaced by the X-bar structure generated in (2).

1. Chomsky 1981

           S'
           /\
          /  \
         /    \
     COMP      S
   

2. Chomsky 1986

              CP
              /\
             /  \
            /    \
     spec,CP      C'
                  /\
                 /  \
                /    \
               C      IP
   

CRASH
(Syntax) Notion in the Minimalist Program. A derivation crashes if it does not converge. (Chomsky 1993, 1995) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

CRASIS
(Phonology) From Greek κρᾶσις 'mingling'. The contraction of a vowel or diphthong at the end of a word with a vowel or diphthong beginning the following word. | Herbert Weir Smyth, 1916

CRAZY RULE
(Phonology) The basic distinction between phonological items below and above the skeleton: the former have a phonetic correlate, the latter do not; the former have arbitrary labels and may enjoy crazy computation (crazy rules), while the latter are drawn from a small set of cross-linguistically stable items (onset, nucleus etc.) which do not produce any crazy rules and whose labels are not interchangeable.
 A crazy rule is one that does not make sense phonetically speaking, that is, which is not "natural". Since Bach and Harms (1972), a small literature on crazy rules has arisen that documents particular cases such as (1).

1.  i → u / d__ (for Southern Pomoan, see Buckley 2000, 2003) (Vennemann 1972, Hyman 2001).

2.  A → B / C

3.  p → r in coda position
4.  p → r after tonic vowels

CROSS-CLAUSAL A-DEPENDENCY

1. (Syntax) Traditional theories of case and agreement treat these phenomena as bound to contexts in which the elements involved originate within the same clause, unless a clause is considered to be incomplete—i.e., deficient or reduced in some way. This view captures the distribution in (1) vs. (2) in languages like English. (1a) and (2a) are cases of so-called raising to object or exceptional case marking (ECM—a configuration in which the case of the embedded subject is determined by the matrix predicate); in (subject) raising configurations like (1b) and (2b), the subject originates in the embedded clause and raises to matrix subject position; and in (1c) and (2c), the matrix verb agrees with the embedded subject. As shown in (1) vs. (2), these A-dependencies are only possible in (certain) infinitives and not across finite clause boundaries. A common view is that the complements of ECM and raising verbs do not embed full clauses (e.g., they only combine with IPs / TPs and not CPs), hence cross-clausal A-dependencies (CCA) are possible.
   1. a. I believe her to have won the triathlon.
      b. She seems to have won the triathlon.
      c. There seem to be some misconceptions.
   2. a. * I believe (that) her won the triathlon.
      b. * She seems that won the triathlon.
      c. * It / There seem that (there) are some misconceptions.
    While such an approach works well for English, it raises many questions once we look beyond English. | Susi Wurmbrand and Magdalena Lohninger, 2019
2. (Syntax) 
   1. A-dependencies: thematic licensing, case, agreement (Move, Merge, and Binding related to these properties).
   2. Cross-clausal: Case and/or agreement are determined by / within a different predicate / clause than the Q-role of the DP involved.
   3. Phenomena: Raising, Exceptional Case Marking [ECM], raising to object, "long-distance" agreement.
    | Susi Wurmbrand, 2018
3. (Syntax) CCA are A-dependencies (e.g. raising to subject/object, agreement, case assignment) between a matrix element (e.g. predicate) and a DP inside an embedded CP complement clause, namely Hyperraising [HyR], Hyper-ECM or long-distance agreement [LDA] (summarized under the term CCA, following Wurmbrand 2019 [2018]). In languages like English or German, instances of CCA are ungrammatical:
   1.  * I believe that her won the triathlon.
   2.  * She seems that won the triathlon.
    A wide variety of unrelated languages, however, does not rule out CCA categorically. For example, Mongolian allows HyR to object in (3), and Cantonese allows HyR to subject in (4).
   3. Mongolian HyR to object (Fong 2019)
      Bat
      Bat

      nokhoi-g
      dog-ACC

      chang-aar
      loudly

      [
      [

      t
      t

      gaikhal-ta
      wonder-with

      gej
      COMP

      ]
      ]

      khel-sen.
      say-PST

      'Bat said loudly that dogs are wonderful.'
   4. Cantonese HyR to subject (Lee and Yip 2023)
      Coeng
      CL

      jyu
      rain

      gamgok/tengman
      feel.like/hear

      [
      [

      waa
      COMP

      t
      t

      m-wui
      not-will

      ting
      stop

      ].
      ]

      'It is felt/heard that the rain will not stop.'
    | Magdalena Lohninger and Ka-Fai Yip, 2023

CROSS-CLAUSAL DEPENDENCY
(Syntax) Case and agreement dependencies that are established across finite clause-boundaries have been documented in many languages. | ?

CROSS-SPEAKER ANAPHORA

1. (Discourse; Syntax) Use of pronouns by one agent to refer back to subjects mentioned or introduced by another agent. | Paul Dekker and Robert Van Rooij, 2000
2. (Discourse; Syntax) The term is used first by Francez and Berg (1994) to indicate reference by one conversational participant to a discourse entity introduced by another. Examples:
   1.  A: Someone _i murdered Smith.
       B: He _i also killed Jones.
       A: No, he _i didn't.
   2.  A: A man _i jumped off the bridge yesterday.
       B: He _i didn't jump, he _i was pushed.
   3.  A: There is an engine _i at Avon.
       B: Send it _i to Bath.
   4.  A: A woman _i is sitting at a bench over there this late.
       B: She _i lives next door.
    | Jae-Il Yeom, 2010
3. (Discourse) Francez and Berg (1994) introduced the term cross-speaker anaphora to indicate reference by conversational participant (CP) B to a discourse entity introduced by CP A. Cross-speaker anaphora is further discussed in Groenendijk, Stokhof, and Veltman 1997 and Dekker 1997, where it is noted that the phenomenon is subject to a number of constraints: e.g., it is generally not felicitous for B to follow an utterance by A like (1a) with an unqualified assertion like (1b), whereas modally qualified statements such as (1c) are possible. Groenendijk, Stokhof, and Veltman (1997) also note that under the appropriate conditions, a continuation like (1d) may be felicitous.
   1. a. A: There is an engine at Avon.
      b. B: ?? It is red.
      c. B: We should send it to Bath.
      d. B: Right/Yeah/I see it. It is red.
   
    Cross-speaker anaphora is less constrained in other types of utterances, such as questions or instructions, as shown by the fact that (2b) and (2c) are both possible continuations of (2a).
   2. a. A: There is an engine at Avon.
      b. B: Send it to Bath.
      c. B: Is it in working conditions?
   
    Indeed, examples such as the following suggest that the force of an utterance may be a better indicator of whether cross-speaker anaphora may be allowed than modal qualification:
   3. a. A: There is an engine at Avon.
      b. B: ?? It might be red.
      c. B: It might be used to carry the boxcar.
   
    | Massimo Poesio, 1998

CROSS-SPEAKER ELLIPSIS

1. (Syntax) E.g., simple bare fragment answers to wh-questions. | Ruth Kempson and Matthew Purver, 2004
2. (Syntax) Examples:
   1. Fragment answer
      A: What did Alex design?
      B: A kaleidoscope.
   2. VP ellipsis
      A: A policeman who arrested Bill read him his rights.
      B: The policeman who arrested Tom did too.
    | Nikolina Koleva, 2011

CROSS-SPEAKER SYNTAX

1. (Syntax) Is there such a thing as cross-speaker syntax? | Simeon Floyd, 2016

CROSSING COREFERENCE

1. (Syntax) Or, Bach-Peters sentence. These sentences contain at least two NP's, where in each NP there is a pronoun coreferential to the other NP:
   1. a. The woman _i who wrote to him _j saw the man _j who loves her _i.
      b. The woman _i who wrote to him _j saw her _i husband _j.
   
     This phenomenon is not entirely free; there are, in fact, severe limitations on its occurrence. So, for example, crossing coreference is not permitted in the following sentences:
   2.  * The woman _i he _j wrote to saw her _i husband _j.
   3.  * Her _i childhood friend _j saw his _j wife _i.
   4. a. * The house that belongs to the woman _i who wrote to him _j pleased her _i husband _j.
      b. * Her _i husband _j likes the house that belongs to the woman _i who wrote to him _j.
   
    Moreover, while a sentence like (5) is ambiguous between a variable (or "sloppy") reading and a constant (or "non-sloppy") reading, a similar sentence with crossing coreference is not ambiguous, as (6), where only the variable reading is possible.
   5.  Only the man _i who loves Mary saw his _i wife.
   6.  Only the man _i who loves her _j saw his _i wife _j.
   
    | Pauline Ida Jacobson, 1977
2. (Syntax) In some recent papers Karttunen (1969, 1971) has noted certain interesting facts concerning pronouns and reference, in particular with respect to sentences exemplifying the so-called Bach-Peters paradox (cf. Bach 1970), such as:
   1.  The pilot _i who shot at it _j hit the Mig _j that chased him _i.
   
    Sentences like (1), with two noun phrases such that the first contains a pronoun coreferential with the second, and the second a pronoun coreferential with the first, have been shown to present particular difficulties to the orthodox transformational approach according to which anaphoric pronouns are introduced by means of a transformation which pronominalizes noun phrases that are structurally, lexically, and referentially identical with another noun phrase, provided certain structural conditions are met. | Simon C. Dik, 1973
3. (Syntax) In English there is one type of sentence that has caused major problems for practically all linguistic theories that have tried to explain it, and none of the explanations put forward is very convincing. The sentences in question are those with crossing coreference, the so-called Bach-Peters-sentences. The standard examples are (1) and, with explicit quantifier expressions, (2).
   1.  The hunter _i who shot at it _j hit the lion _j that chased him _i.
   2.  Every man _i who wants it _j will get the prize _j he _i deserves.
   
    What is the difficulty with this type of sentence? They contain two noun phrases each of which contains a pronoun that refers to the other noun phrase, and the first pronoun is furthermore a case of backwards anaphora, or cataphora. These sentences are admittedly rare, but sentences with simple (non-crossing) cataphora are quite frequent in real world English (Carden 1982). Moreover, they are key examples of sentences where cataphora cannot, in principle, be replaced by anaphora (cf. also Mittwoch 1983). | Michael Hess, 1988

CSC
See COORDINATE STRUCTURE CONSTRAINT.

CULMINATIVITY
(Prosody) Stress and tonal accent both instantiate it.
 In his discussion of the prototypes for lexical prosodic systems, Hyman (2006, 2009) demonstrates that the common understanding of the notion of culminativity requires the separate statement of two criteria.

1. Obligatoriness: Every lexical word has at least one syllable which is marked for the highest degree of metrical prominence. The typical property to fill this function is primary stress, as in the Germanic languages and e.g. Greek. Obligatoriness is neutral as to whether there is one or several markers for the highest degree of metrical prominence.
2. Culminativity: Every lexical word has at most one syllable which is marked for the highest degree of metrical prominence. This notion narrows the possibilities down to one or zero stresses per lexical word.

CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
See TRADITIONAL TRANSMISSION.

CYCLE OF THE DEFINITE ARTICLE

1. (Diachronic) Greenberg (1978) describes a cycle in which demonstratives first become articles (stage I), then non-generic markers (stage II), and finally noun class markers (stage III). After this stage, the erstwhile demonstrative can be seen as an agreement marker. Greenberg's examples come from Niger-Congo languages, Semitic, and many other languages. He emphasizes that the cycle "constantly generates concordial phenomena". Diessel (1999), Lyons (1999), and Hawkins (1994) expand on these stages and see the initial loss of the deictic aspect as crucial (distance from the speaker/hearer). What is left is an anaphoric reference to something in the text.
    The definiteness cycle can be represented as below. Using a DP structure, the descriptive Greenbergian cycle of (1) translates into (2). The specifier becomes a head, which subsequently disappears and is replaced by a new specifier. In (3), the changes involving the features are listed.
   1. demonstrative > def. art. > case/non-generic > class marker
   2. specifier > head  > affix > zero
   3. iF > uF > zero
    | Elly van Gelderen, 2007
2. (Diachronic) Joseph Greenberg (2005) describes it: Definite articles (Stage I) evolve from demonstratives, and in turn can become generic articles (Stage II) that may be used in both definite and indefinite contexts, and later merely noun markers (Stage III) that are part of nouns other than proper names and more recent borrowings. Eventually articles may evolve anew from demonstratives. | Wikipedia, 2024
3. (Diachronic) Greenberg (1978) contains a discussion of the cycle of the definite article, the most common diachronic path through which definite articles develop cross-linguistically. Typically, definite articles arise from deictic elements, usually a distal demonstrative. Greenberg therefore considers the demonstrative to be Stage 0 in the cycle. Stage I he describes as follows: "The point at which a discourse deictic becomes a definite article is where it becomes compulsory and has spread to the point at which it means 'identified' in general, thus including typically things known from context, general knowledge, or as with 'the sun' in non-scientific discourse, identified because it is the only member of its class". Although Greenberg provides little elaboration or exemplification of the Stage-I article, he discusses Stages II and III in depth.
    Stage-II articles continue to mark identifiability, as in Stage I, but also "generally include instances of non-referential use so that they correspond grosso modo to the combined uses of a definite and indefinite article". While the use of a Stage-I article has semantic-pragmatic motivation (the marking of identifiable entities), this motivation is often lacking at Stage II, where "the choice of articles is always largely grammaticalized, being determined by the syntactic construction, and is thus redundant". Nouns in Stage-II languages are generally accompanied by a definite article: "It is usually the lexical citation form and it heavily predominates in text."
    As the article becomes more and more grammaticalized, there are fewer and fewer environments in which contrast is possible between a noun with article and one without article. When its presence is obligatory with almost all nouns, we may speak of a Stage-III article. At this stage, "the mass of common nouns now only have a single form ... the former article is a pure marker which no longer has any synchronic connection with definiteness or specificity". | Richard Epstein, 1993

CYCLIC AGREE
(Syntax) We propose that agreement displacement phenomena sensitive to person hierarchies arise from the mechanism of Agree operating on articulated φ-feature structures in a cyclic syntax. Cyclicity and locality derive a preference for agreement control by the internal argument. Articulation of the probe determines (a) when the agreement controller cyclically displaces to the external argument and (b) differences in crosslinguistic sensitivity to person hierarchies. The system characterizes two classes of derivations corresponding empirically to direct and inverse contexts, and predicts the existence and nature of repair strategies in the latter. The properties of agreement displacement thus reduce to properties of syntactic dependency formation by Agree. | Susana Béjar and Milan Rezac, 2009
See Also MULTIPLE AGREE.

CYCLIC(AL) PRINCIPLE

1. (Generative Grammar) We assume that the rules are linearly ordered and that they are applied in the given order in forming a derivation. Furthermore, this order is cyclical, in the following sense. The syntactic component generates a string with surface structure that is represented by labeled bracketing. The sequence of phonological rules is first applied to all innermost constituents of this string. Innermost brackets are then deleted, and the sequence applies to the new innermost constituents. This cyclical application is repeated until the maximal domain of phonological processes is reached. (The maximal domain is the phonological phrase, which we assume to be marked in the surface structure.) | Halle and Chomsky, 1968
2. (Generative Grammar) By which a set of rules applies first to the smallest constituents which are of a given type or types, then to the next largest such constituents, and so on. | ?

CYCLICITY
(Syntax) Basic notion of subjacency that movement is bounded, i.e. can only cross one bounding (or cyclic) node at the time. In general S (or S') and NP have been singled out as being bounding nodes. Originally, cyclicity was considered a property of rules or rule systems: a set of rules are to be applied cyclically to successively larger dominating constituents. Presently, cyclicity is subsumed under the barriers theory. (Chomsky 1977, 1986, 1993) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

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