F0 DECLINATION
(Prosody) Or, F₀ declination. It has been observed in many languages that the pitch contour over the course of an utterance has a downward trend, normally called F0 declination in the literature. F0 declination is expected and used for normalization by listeners, e.g., when two stressed syllables sounded equal in pitch, the second was actually lower. | Jiahong Yuan and Mark Liberman, 2014

FACE-WORK

1. (Pragmatics) Speech participants utilize linguistic politeness to avoid and reduce social friction and enhance each other's face, or public self-image, during social interaction. It is face-work that underlies the interpersonal function of language use and encompasses all verbal and nonverbal realizations that bring forth one's positive social value, namely, face. Face-work is founded in and built into dynamic social relations; these social and cultural relations and context directly affect the enactment of face-work. | Jung-ran Park, 2008
2. (Examples)
    ○ Brown and Levinson (1987/2018) have also suggested a scale—three universal, independent, and culturally sensitive social variables—to measure the degree of politeness in a certain specific social context.
   • D, the social distance.
   • P, the variable of power.
   • R, the variable of the imposition ranking.
   
    Each of these variables is specifically intrinsic to a particular act in a particular situation. The variables of D, P, and R are added values through which the amount of face work is known and understood. If the variables D, P and R are minimally considered, then, the request to the hearer to open the door will be:
   1. Please, open the window!
   
    On the contrary, if the maximization of D, P and R are meant, then the above mentioned expression would be changed to the following:
   2. It is too warm, don`t you feel? Would you mind opening the window, please?
   
    | Mian Shah Bacha, Rabia Rustum, Muhammad Umer, and Khalid Azim Khan, 2021
    ○ It is generally assumed in pragmatics that face is essentially a "socially attributed aspect of self", and that politeness is one kind of facework, alongside other forms of facework such as impoliteness, mock impoliteness, mock politeness, self politeness and so on. | Michael Haugh, 2013
    ○ The concluding paragraph of Goffman's essay "On the nature of deference and demeanor" (1956) is a revealing sketch of a characteristically Western, individualist persona which also informs the author's seminal piece "On face-work" (1955). | Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, 2003

FACTIVE PREDICATE
(Semantics) A predicate which entails or presupposes the truth of one of its arguments.
 A sentence such as John knows that Bill is ill can be true only if its propositional argument Bill is ill is true. Factive predicates are distinguished from non-factive predicates (such as believe) and counter-factives (such as pretend). Thus, the truth-value of John believes that Bill is ill does not depend on the truth-value of the proposition Bill is ill, whereas John pretends that he is ill can only be true if he is not ill. | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

FACTORIAL TYPOLOGY

1. (Optimality Theory) One of the attractive properties of OT is that it provides a simple expression of the fact that the same configuration can be avoided in different ways and to different extents in different languages. The avoided configuration violates some markedness constraint(s), and each way of avoiding it violates some faithfulness constraint. Different rankings of these constraints yield different ways of avoiding the marked configuration, as well as the case in which the marked structure is allowed. These different results can be displayed in a factorial typology, in which each possible ranking of the relevant set of constraints is shown to be attested in some language. | Scott P. Myers, 2002
2. (Examples)
    ○ The factorial typology for moraic codas, nonmoraic codas, and final extrasyllabicity is summarized in (1).

   1. Factorial Typology

   Final Consonant Type	Ranking	Language
   Moraic Codas	WBP ≫ SSP ≫ WEAKEDGE, MAX	Maitihili
   Nonmoraic Codas	SSP ≫ WEAKEDGE ≫ WBP, MAX	Malayalam
   Extrasyllabic	WEAKEDGE, MAX ≫ SSP, WBP	Russian

    | Trevor Driscoll, 2019
    ○ OT posits a universal set of constraints, and the factorial typology of the constraints, i.e. through all logically possible permutations of constraints to generate all possible constraint rankings, is predicted to produce possible grammars and exclude impossible ones. | Yen-Hwei Lin, 2015
    ○ We think that factorial typology should be given precedence over holistic conceptions of language types, both for theoretical and for practical reasons. One obvious problem with a holistic approach to language types is the fact that it is hard to decide on which phenomena a holistic typology should be based. One cannot compare languages as a whole, and it is not clear whether determining, for instance, the morphological type of a language allows more essential conclusions about a holistic language type than, let's say, the statement of its system of morphophonemics. Thus, for very practical reasons, holistic typologists will always end up doing factorial typology, at least for a start. | Daniel Hole, 2000
    ○ To construct a factorial typology of a set of constraints, we sum up all logically possible rankings of this set of constraints, and compute the different outcomes. With large sets of constraints the number of possible rankings rises steeply, as with a constraint set of size n, we must consider all n! rankings. (This equals 2 rankings for 2 constraints, 6 rankings for 3, 24 for 4, 120 for 5, 720 for 6, etc.) Fortunately, many of the individual rankings in a factorial typology produce identical surface patterns. Therefore the number of predicted patterns is much smaller than the total number of logically possible rankings. | René Kager, 1999

FAITHFULNESS CONSTRAINTS

1. (Optimality Theory) Suppose that the input-output relation is governed by conditions on the well-formedness of the output, markedness constraints, and by conditions asking for the exact preservation of the input in the output along various dimensions, faithfulness constraints. | Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky, 1993/2004
2. (Optimality Theory) In contrast with markedness constraints, faithfulness constraints make a rather different type of requirement of surface forms: that they match specific properties of other forms, for example their lexical input. Their effect is to prohibit deletions, insertions, featural changes, or other changes in mappings from inputs to outputs. Faithfulness constraints are the natural antagonists of markedness constraints, since the former preserve lexical properties that the latter may ban at the surface. | Amalia Gnanadesikan, 2004
3. (Optimality Theory) Faithfulness is the force that attempts to make the output identical to the input.
    There are three constraints representing Faithfulness:
   1. MAX-IO: each segment in the input (I) has a corresponding segment in the output (O).
       Deletion of segments is prohibited.
   2. DEP-IO: each segment in the output has a corresponding segment in the input; the output is dependent on the input, and the constraint is violated by an inserted segment.
       Insertion of segments is prohibited.
   3. IDENT (F): every feature (F) of the input segment is identical to every feature in the output segment.
       A segment in the input is identical to the corresponding segment in the output.
   
    | Zita McRobbie, 2011

FAMILIARITY MARKER
(Example)
 ○ Persian (Indo-European; Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) has a nominal suffix that indicates that the referent of the noun phrase is familiar in the sense of Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993)—that is, the hearer can locate a representation of the referent in short- or long-term memory. The suffix -E is optionally used when the referent is familiar as in example (1a); whereas the suffix -I is optionally used when the referent is unfamiliar, as in (1b).

1. a.
    

   pesar-(a)-ro
   boy-E-RA

   did-am.
   saw-1SG

     'I saw the boy.' (familiar to hearer)
   b.
    

   ye
   a-boy-I-RA

   pesar-(i)-ro
   saw-1SG

   did-am
   

     'I saw a (specific) boy.' (unfamiliar to hearer)

FAST MAPPING

1. (Acquisition) A hypothesized process enabling children to rapidly create lexical representations for the unfamiliar words they encounter. | Chris Dollaghan, 1985
2. (Acquisition) In a classic study by Carey and Bartlett (1978), preschool children were presented with two trays and prompted to: Bring me the chromium tray, not the blue one. The chromium one. One week later, a new task context was used to test what children thought chromium refers to (e.g., Show me the chromium one). Results show that 3- and 4-year-olds were able to learn the meaning of chromium even after a single exposure. This phenomenon was termed fast mapping. It captures the mental process of narrowing down the meaning of a word during a casual experience.
    Fast mapping shows the impressive ability of children to learn. It helps explain the steep learning curve during language acquisition. And it gives credence to the claim of implicit learning: the process by which information is remembered spontaneously, even when there is no specific requirement to learn. Crucially, findings on fast mapping illustrate the importance of background knowledge during learning. | Heidi Kloos and Hannah McIntire, 2025
3. (Acquisition) Carey and Bartlett (1978) introduced the term fast mapping, which has become central to developmental psychology's narrative about how words are learned. In this narrative, it is children's accuracy in fast mapping that cries out for explanation. How can children arrive at the correct meaning of a word given only indirect and incomplete evidence? Yet in Carey and Bartlett's famous "chromium" study, fast mapping was not so successful. Fewer than one in ten of the 3-year-olds appeared to have linked the word chromium to its intended meaning ('olive green'). The children who had been exposed to the word in the study's naturalistic teaching context (bring me the chromium one; not the red one, the chromium one) were scarcely more likely than controls to pick out the correct referent from an array of color patches upon hearing the word.
    For Carey and Bartlett, the demonstration of fast mapping was noteworthy not because children appropriately determined that chromium was a color word (the sort of pragmatic inference that was dissected in dozens of follow-up studies). Rather, it was noteworthy because after very few exposures children were able to create a new lexical entry and maintain it in memory for several days, and because children's exposure to the word often changed their interpretation of how the color space is lexicalized. | Daniel Swingley, 2010

FATHER-FRONTING
(Sociolinguistics; Phonology) For many English speakers in North America, the first vowel of father and that of bother are pronounced the same. In eastern New england, however, these two vowels are traditionally unmerged. For such speakers, the [a] vowel of the father lexical set is distinct from the [ɒ] or [ɑ] vowel of the bother set. The father set includes the words father, palm, calm, ma, and pa. Bother words include bother, cot, hot, socks, and shot. According to The Atlas of North American English, the fronting of the father vowel is the "aspect of the vowel system that distinguishes NeNe [North East New England] most clearly from other sections of New England." | James N. Stanford, Thomas A. Leddy-Cecere, and Kenneth P Baclawski, 2012

FAVE
(Phonetics) The FAVE (Forced Alignment & Vowel Extraction) program suite allows you to automatically align and extract large quantities of vowel formant measurements from sociolinguistic interviews or other bodies of orthographically transcribed data.
 FAVE is a pair of programs:

1. FAVE-align: A forced alignment program adapted for sociolinguistic interviews or other texts with multiple speakers. It accepts as input a sound file with its corresponding orthographic transcript, and returns a Praat TextGrid file with two tiers per speaker, a phone tier and a word tier.
2. FAVE-extract: Automatically measures the formant values for F1 and F2 for all vowels for a given speaker. Its input is a sound file, plus a corresponding aligned TextGrid with word and phone tiers for each speaker (typically the output of FAVE-align).

FEATURAL NON-DISTINCTNESS

1. (Syntax) We propose that the identification requirement on ellipsis is satisfied by "featural non-distinctness", as opposed to featural identity, an idea whose roots are found in Chomsky (1965). [I.e.,] the identification requirement on ellipsis is satisfied by featural non-distinctness, as opposed to strict identity.
    Our analysis proposes that mismatches at any level that violate featural non-distinctness are banned, whereas mismatches at any level that satisfy featural non-distinctness are allowed. | Rodrigo Ranero, 2023
2. (Syntax) To account for Kaqchikel mismatches, Ranero (2019, 2021) proposes a modified syntactic identity condition, seen in (1), which evaluates featural non-distinctness rather than true identity. He argues that Agent Focus morphology in Kaqchikel actually realizes the absence of Voice⁰, which is considered non-distinct from a Voice head in the antecedent.
   1. Syntactic identity condition (Ranero 2019, 2021)
      Antecedent and material properly contained within the ellipsis site must be featurally non-distinct.
    Under this view, syntactic identity only rules out heads which are present in both clauses but with distinct featural specifications—for instance, active and passive voice in English. However, if a head is present in one clause but absent in another, syntactic identity is satisfied because the two clauses are non-distinct. This allows Agent Focus clauses, which have no Voice⁰ head, to co-occur with any other Voice specification, while ruling out combinations of featurally-specified voices like antipassive and active. | Emily Drummond, 2021

FEATURAL RELATIVIZED MINIMALITY

1. (Syntax) According to fRM, the local relation between an extracted element and its trace is disrupted when it crosses an intervening element whose morphosyntactic featural specification matches the specification of the elements it separates. | Sandra Villata, Luigi Rizzi and Julie Franck, 2016
2. (Syntax) Friedmann, Belletti and Rizzi (2009) and Villata, Rizzi and Franck (2016) advance "featural Relativized Minimality" (1), which incorporates revisions to the original Relativized Minimality (RM) proposal put forward by Rizzi (1990).
   1. featural Relativized Minimality
      In a configuration X ... Z ... Y ..., a local relation between X and Y is disrupted when:
      1. Z structurally intervenes between X and Y (i.e., Z c-commands Y and Z does not c-command X).
      2. Z matches the specification in morphosyntactic features of X.
    RM (including featural RM) is a syntactic locality principle, governing the behaviour of various kinds of dependencies, including the A' dependencies involved in relative clauses. A dependency relationship must be established between the relative head (=X) and the position (the gap) from which movement has taken place or where the head is interpreted (=Y), in other words, the subject or object position, depending on the type of relative clause. A local dependency can be disrupted by intervening material, the disruption being worse if the intervenor shares certain kinds of features with the elements that it intervenes between. | Vera Yunxiao Xia, Lydia White, Natália Brambatti Guzzo, 2020

FEATURAL SPECIFICATIONS
(Phonology) For example, the featural specification of vowels in Bondu-so (Dogon; Mali):

	V-Place		V-Manner
	[dorsal]	[closed]	[open]	[ATR]
/i/		✓		✓
/ɪ/		✓
/u/	✓	✓		✓
/ʊ/	✓	✓
/e/		✓	✓	✓
/ɛ/		✓	✓
/o/	✓	✓	✓	✓
/ɔ/	✓	✓	✓
/a̘/	✓		✓	✓
/a/	✓		✓

FEATURE BLINDNESS
(General) A deficit in marking a specific class of linguistic features. | M. Gopnik, 1990

FEATURE CHECKING
(Syntax) Notion in checking theory. Feature checking is a relation between two elements such that one or more designated features they share are eliminated. Example:

1. who did you see

2. *you saw who

FEATURE GEOMETRY

1. (Phonology) This theory, in its simplest and most general form, characterizes segment-internal feature structure in terms of a feature tree whose terminal nodes are features, whose intermediate nodes are feature classes, and whose root node groups all features defining the segment. The principle objective of this approach is to provide a formal characterization of the class of possible phonological processes. | G.N. Clements, 2006
2. (Phonology) A fundamental problem in phonological theory is the fact that processes often operate on consistent subsets of the distinctive features within a segment, like the features that characterize place of articulation. Recent research has responded to this problem by proposing a hierarchical organization of the features into functionally related classes, grouped under nodes of a tree structure. | J.J. McCarthy, 1988

FEATURE RETRIEVAL COST
(Psycholinguistics) To predict processing difficulties at retrieval, we associate a cost to the memory buffer access: this cost grows exponentially with respect to the number of items stored (m), linearly with respect to the number of new features to be retrieved from memory (nF), and it is mitigated (linearly, again) by the number of distinct cued features (dF) by x (the region where retrieval is requested, e.g. the verbal predicate). This is the core of the "Feature Retrieval Cost" (FRC) function:

Feature Retrieval Cost (FRC)
FRC(x) = Πⁿ_i=1 (1 + nFi)^m_i / (1 + dFi)

FEEDING
(Syntax) The relation between rules which are ordered in such a way that the application of the earlier rule enlarges the set of forms that the later will apply to. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2003

FELICITOUS

1. (Pragmatics) Semantically and pragmatically coherent, fitting in the context.
   1. This sentence is grammatical, it is just not felicitous.
    | Wiktionary, 2023
2. (Pragmatics) While "constantive" utterances can be true or false, performative utterances can work or not work. Austin talked about this in terms of being happy: a performative can be happy or unhappy. A performative is happy, or "felicitous", if it does what it was meant to do. If it doesn't do what it was meant to do, it is unhappy, or infelicitous.
    There are many conditions that need to hold for a performative to work (i.e., to be felicitous).
   • The people involved need to be the ones who have the right or authority to do the thing (as as in ship namings or marriage pronouncements).
   • Some ritual, procedure, or convention associated with that performative needs to exist (e.g. I punish thee!), etc.
    Austin spends a lot of time describing and categorizing these felicity conditions, although we don't need to concern ourselves too much with the details here; the point is just that it often makes more sense to talk about whether a performative is felicitous (i.e., whether or not the conditions are met for the performative to do what it is supposed to do) than whether it is true. | Stephen Politzer-Ahles, 2022

FELICITY CONDITIONS
(Pragmatics) Several types of conditions, including the following (from English Language and Linguistics Online):

• Propositional content, which requires participants to understand language, not to act like actors.
• Preparatory, where the authority of the speaker and the circumstances of the speech act are appropriate to its being performed successfully.
• Sincerity, where the speech act is being performed seriously and sincerely.
• Essential, where the speaker intends that an utterance be acted upon by the addressee.

"Suppose I am in a play and deliver the line, I promise to kill the evil Don Fernando. I have not, in fact, promised to kill anyone. ... The speech act fails because, among other things, I must have a certain institutional authority for my words to have the appropriate illocutionary force. ... [The] speech act [also] fails because the words are uttered in a context where they are not used by the speaker, but in effect quoted from a text."

• He does not meet the propositional content condition: He is actually acting.
• He also does not meet the preparatory condition because he certainly does not have the authority to kill anyone.
• He doesn't meet the sincerity condition because he doesn't actually intend to kill anyone—as noted, he is only acting.
• And he doesn't meet the essential condition because he's not expecting that his words will be acted upon; in other words, he doesn't actually intend for someone else to kill Fernando.

FIGURATION

1. (Pragmatics) A superordinate term for metaphor, metonymy and other tropes. | Ionathan Charteris-Black, 2000
2. (Stylistics) Traditional approaches to the mechanisms of deference tend to regard "figuration" (and by extension, deference in general) as an essentially marked or playful use of language, which is associated with a pronounced stylistic effect. For linguistic purposes, however, there is no reason for assigning a special place to deferred uses that are stylistically notable—the sorts of usages that people sometimes qualify with a phrase like figuratively speaking. There is no important linguistic difference between using redcoat to refer to a British soldier and using suit to refer to a corporate executive (as in A couple of suits stopped by to talk about the new products). What creates the stylistic effect of the latter is not the mechanism that generates it, but the marked background assumptions that license it—here, the playful presupposition that certain executives are better classified by their attire than by their function. Those differences have an undoubted cultural interest, but they don't have any bearing on the more pedestrian question of how such usages arise in the first place. | Geoffrey Nunberg, 2002
3. (Cognitive; Diachronic) Refers to a meaning that is dependent on a figurative extension from another meaning.
    Figurative language has got an inherently second-order nature. Figurative expressions (such as it made my blood boil) can only be recognized as such because of their contrast with more literal expressions (as in it made me angry).
    From a diachronic perspective, figurative expressions are historically later than the corresponding conventional ones. As Croft and Cruse (2004) put it, metaphors have their own life-cycle that normally runs from a first coinage as an instance of semantic innovation (a novel metaphor requiring an interpretative strategy on the side of the language user) to a more commonplace metaphor (a conventional metaphor whose meaning has become well-established in the speakers' mental lexicon). Eventually, the literal meaning of an expression may fall out of use, interrupting its dependency relationship with the corresponding figurative meaning (a dead metaphor). | Javier A. Díaz-Vera, 2014

FILTER
(Grammar) A rule, principle, etc., formulated as an output condition on structures at some level of representation. "Filters" may be very specific or very general. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2003

Page Last Modified October 22, 2025

 

B a c k   T o   I n d e x