Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Feed-Fil

FEEDING

  1. (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
  2. (Examples)
     ○ The principal theoretical implication of the analysis is that two mechanisms commonly used in modeling clause type effects cross linguistically—truncation and intervention—interact. In particular, the locus of variation governing both V1 and relative ordering of {Aux, Neg, V} is whether the clause typing feature projects as a separate head, Force, high in the C-field or else is merged lower on Fin. This truncation of the left peripheral sequence feeds intervention effects in the case of V-Neg-Aux orders, by forcing a set of operators to be merged in a lower position than in non-blocking contexts.
     An expectation raised by this analysis is that other instances of truncation feeding intervention should be found cross-linguistically. | Arantzazu Elordieta and Bill Haddican, 2018
     ○ In a lexicalist theory in which affixes are objects of the lexicon and clitics are objects of the syntax, the expectation is that clitics should appear outside of affixes (since the lexicon feeds the syntax and not vice versa). | Neil Myler, 2017
     ○ Until recently, it has been standardly assumed that constructions like (1) involve A-movement of the wh-phrase from the object position to the subject position, followed by wh-movement to SpecCP.

    1.  Who was arrested?

     However, Chomsky (2008) suggests a new treatment of such constructions (see also Hiraiwa 2005). According to Chomsky, instead of A-movement feeding wh-movement, (1) involves two separate movements from the deep object position. Roughly, who moves to SpecTP from the object position, and it also moves to SpecCP from the object position, with the two movements proceeding in parallel and with only the highest copy pronounced. On this view, there is no A-A′ movement feeding in examples like (1). | Željko Bošković, 2007
     ○ By using a version of reduplication that occurs in syntax and that creates syntactic units, we create a grammar where reduplication can feed syntactic processes. It is no longer a mystery why an element that appears to be a head undergoes XP movement (i.e. moves to a Spec position) and it is no longer a mystery why a copy is left behind. | Lisa deMena Travis, 2003

FELICITOUS

  1. (Pragmatics) Of a sentence or utterance: 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).


     Austin (1962/1975) 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

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


     Hogan (2000) describes felicity conditions:
     "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."
     In this example, Hogan's speech is infelicitous because:


     | Richard Nordquist, 2025
  2. (Pragmatics) A speech act is created when speaker/writer S makes an utterance U to hearer/reader H in context C. When S says I promise to take you to a movie tomorrow, s/he might mean it, in which case the illocutionary point of the utterance would be felicitous, or s/he might secretly intend not to carry out the promise, in which case the illocutionary point would be infelicitous. The question of S's sincerity is not the only felicity condition on an illocutionary act.

    1. In addition to the sincerity condition, Austin argued for three additional kinds of felicity conditions:
    2. A preparatory condition to establish whether or not the circumstances of the speech act and the participants in it are appropriate to its being performed successfully;
    3. An executive condition to determine whether or not the speech act has been properly executed; and
    4. A fulfillment condition determined by the perlocutionary effect of the speech act.

     If all the relevant felicity conditions were satisfied for a given illocutionary act, Austin described it as happy or felicitous. Austin's felicity conditions were expressed as follows:
    (A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further,
    (A.2) the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked.
    (B.1) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and
    (B.2) completely.
    (Γ.1) Where, as often, the procedure is designed for use by persons having certain thoughts or feelings, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct on the part of any participant, then a person participating in and so invoking the procedure must in fact have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves, and further
    (Γ.2) must actually so conduct themselves subsequently.

     Now if we sin against one (or more) of these six rules, our performative utterance will be (in one way or another) unhappy. (Austin 1975)

     | K. Allan, 1997

FIGURATION

  1. (Rhetoric) A superordinate term for metaphor, metonymy and other tropes. | Jonathan 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 E. Díaz-Vera, 2015
  4. (Examples)
     ○ This study investigates the role of figurative language, especially, metaphor and metonymy, in the formation and disambiguation of novel analogy-based compounds. The focus is on surface analogy, i.e. analogy created on the model of a unique concrete form, such as bird cafeteria, after birdhouse, or mouse potato, after couch potato. The data used for the study has been selected from two online collections of neologisms as well as from a dictionary of new English words. The study adopts a Cognitive Linguistics approach to explore the nature of figurative language in the models (i.e. the source words) and the targets (i.e. the new words). The aim is to find out semantic and cognitive correspondences that may help the association of the latter to the former. As a more general aim, this study intends to show the relevance of figuration to the creation of novel analogical compounds. | Elisa Mattiello, 2017
     ○ Over the years, many scholars have recognized the importance of figuration in translation. Early work presents checklists for dealing with "troublesome" idioms (e.g., Dagut 1976, Broeck 1981), while more recent work applies Cognitive Metaphor Theory to investigate how metaphor patterns lexis across translated texts (Schäffner 2004, Schäffner and Shuttleworth 2013). | Charles Denroche, 2015
     ○ Figuration as a parameter along with idiomaticity is measured (Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994): There is some figurative connection between the expression's literal and figurative meanings. This connection could be metaphorical (as in Take the bull by the horns or she's fishing for information), but it need not be: She has me pulling my hair out and I'm scared stiff, for example, depend on hyperbole, rather than metaphor. | Daniel Sanford, 2010

FILL

  1. (Optimality Theory) We also need the counterpart of Prosodic Licensing that looks down from a given node to be sure that its immediate contents are appropriate. Let's call this family of constraints FILL, the idea being that every node must be filled properly; the idea dates back to Emonds 1970. In the case at hand, we are interested in syllable structure, and the constraint can be stated like this:
    FILL
    Syllable positions are filled with segmental material.
     The appropriate approach to epenthetic structure within OT involves this constraint. | Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky, 1993/2004
  2. (Example)
     ○ There are reasons to doubt that all logically possible rankings of constraints are actually attested. As an example, the Faithfulness constraints (the PARSE and FILL families) have been highly ranked in fragments of OT grammars proposed to date. | Mark S. Hewitt and Megan J. Crowhurst, 2020
     ○ 
      DEP(voi) or FILL(voi): voi → voi
      "Voicing features appear on the surface only if they are also underlying."

     | Jason Eisner, 1997
     ○ The constraint implicated here is obviously ONSET. When morphemic combination brings together /V+V/, the heterosyllabic parse [V.V] produces an onsetless syllable. All such faithfully parsed candidates are sub-optimal; competing with them are unfaithful candidate forms, which satisfy ONSET by positing FILL violation (that is, the empty consonant □) or unparsed segments. Of these, PARSE violators—with phonetic loss of one or the other of the V's—are never found. Thus, PARSE is undominated and so unviolated. FILL-violation is the pattern seen.
     The appearance of □ satisfies the requirement that syllables have onsets. This means that ONSET dominates FILL in the constraint ranking, as the following tableau shows:
    ONSET ≫ FILL, from /iN-koma-i/
    Candidates ONSET FILL
    ☞ .iŋ.ko.ma.□i. * *
      .iŋ.ko.ma.i. **!
     | John J. McCarthy and Alan Prince, 1993/2004

FILLER

  1. (Pragmatics) Or, filler word. For the purposes of this article, any word or sound that interpolates the main message of the speaker. Words such as like, um, uh, or ya know are considered filler words. Repetition can also be considered a type of filler. | Emily Duvall, Aimee Robbins, Thomas Graham, and Scott Divett, 2014
  2. (Pragmatics) One widely used but often overlooked feature of language are filler words, which are speech irregularities used in spoken conversation and commonly regarded as superfluous language spoken by careless speakers (Strassel 2004). | Charlyn M. Laserna, Yi-Tai Seih, and James W. Pennebaker, 2014
  3. (Pragmatics) Fillers are non-silent linguistic devices used in disfluencies to gain time while searching for words. In addition, they are frequently used intentionally to avoid words for reasons of politeness, "conspirational" motivations, or rhetorical purposes. Two syntactically distinct types of conventionalized fillers can be distinguished: placeholders and hesitatives (also called hesitators). Placeholders are referential and morphosyntactically integrated, while hesitatives are neither. Strikingly, even though fillers are cross-linguistically widespread, dedicated studies of such items in particular languages are still largely lacking. | Brigitte Pakendorf and Françoise Rose, 2025
  4. (Pragmatics) Or, discourse marker, verbal pause, filler word. Linguistic fillers fit under the umbrella term, speech disfluency. Speech disfluency incorporates:


     False starts are sentences that are cut off, whereas repaired utterances refer to a speaker's self-correction milliseconds after a slip of the tongue or a mispronunciation. Although it gets a bad rap, speech disfluency is considered to be normal by many experts and not necessarily something you need to alter despite what popular media suggests.
     The type of speech disfluency that gets the worst press are linguistic fillers. These are the utterances we use during speech that do not have a particular meaning. They are often viewed as not serving any particular purpose, and are often seen as a sign of distractedness or nervousness. They are a part of everyday speech and appear in every language, including American sign language.
     There are many reasons for using these seemingly useless phrases and utterances. Although regarded as pointless, linguistic fillers can serve many purposes. So what are the reasons that people use linguistic fillers? According to sociolinguists, filler words serve six functions:

    1. Allow for thought. These pauses such as um or eh give our brain the opportunity to catch up with our speech and decide on our next move while speaking. This is not necessarily a negative characteristic of speech. If anything, it is a signal of more considered speech with the speaker not simply blurting out words without any forethought.
    2. Promote more polite speech. When speaking, our statements are perceived as more polite with pauses or filler words. If we talk less directly, what we say will likely be received as less offensive. For example, if you ask a friend for an opinion on your new sweatshirt, and they say, I don't like it, you might take offense. However, if they say, Um, it's just ... I'm not sure I like it, you inherently understand they're telling you the truth, but they are trying not to offend.
    3. Act as a cushion (for a delicate topic). Linguistic fillers play a similar role when talking about something that might be sensitive. Instead of saying, Are you seeing a therapist?, it might be more socially acceptable to ask So, do you, like, see a therapist or ...?
    4. Emphasize what we will say next. This type of filler is often used informally in a dialect known as valley speak. Valley speak is not only spoken in the California Valley but is common among younger generations and among females no matter where they reside. Like is the common term for emphasis among this population. For example, I think this building is, like, beautiful.
    5. Communicate subtle nuances in emotion or behavior. A statement such as, I'm feeling good about this exam, indicates that the person is confident about their exam results. However, in the statement, I'm feeling, you know, like, good about this exam, there is a completely different connotation. The overtone here indicates a lack in confidence.
    6. Indicate a degree of uncertainty. If we are making a statement but we are estimating, filler words can explain that to the listener without the spoken caveat. There are 738 pages in this book means there are indeed, 738 pages in that book. However, in the statement, There are, like, 700 pages in this book, the number of pages is an educated guess.

     | Nimdzi, 2018
  5. (Pragmatics) Or, filler word, or, filled pause, or, hesitation marker, or thinking sound. These little sounds season and serve as added ingredients in our spoken word salads. We all use them and we all observe and have opinions about them. So what function do they serve?
     Repetitive sounds, filler words, and discourse markers are universal and ubiquitous, serving cognitive and interactive functions. Their usage may be unconscious on the part of the speaker, while aiding others in processing and digesting what is being said. In this sense, filler words are essential elements of spoken discourse for both speaker and listener. They serve to hold the floor or maintain a turn, and signal that something is about to be said.
     While small and seemingly harmless, verbal fillers can serve mighty syntactic roles. Michael Barbaro of the New York Times podcast The Daily contends that verbal fillers such as hmm, can be a way of

    1. "Punctuating interviews in ways that reminded you that two humans were having a real conversation".
    2. To articulate interest without applying judgment.
    3. Show curiosity.
    4. Keep the conversation going.

     Verbal fillers and conversational devices range from phonemic (the level of sound) to morphological (words) to syntactic (short phrases), and accomplish the feats of

    1. Formulating thoughts.
    2. Listening.
    3. Politeness strategies.
    4. Wait time.
    5. Hedging.
    6. Softening.
    7. Signaling approval or disdain.
    8. And more.

     Verbal fillers keep us going when speaking, by helping form thoughts and moving the conversation along. Here are some examples:


     | Anne Delaney, 2022
  6. (Syntax) Long-distance dependencies are notoriously difficult to analyze in a formally explicit way because they involve constituents that seem to have been extracted from their canonical position in an utterance. The most widespread solution is to identify a gap at an extraction site and to communicate information about that gap to its filler, as in (1).

    1.  WhatFILLER did you seeGAP?

     | Remi van Trijp, 2014
  7. (Examples)
     ○ Evidentiality: The Study

    Indicative Sentence: Show me the picture showing that someone painted a painting.


     | Dafni Vaia Bagioka, and Arhonto Terzi, 2025
     ○ Filler particles like uhm in English or ähm in German show subtle language-specific differences, and their variation in form is related to socio-linguistic variables, like gender. The use of fillers in a second language has been shown to differ from monolinguals' filler particle use in both frequency and form in different language contexts. | Marlene Böttcher and Margaret Zellers, 2024
     ○ We then proceeded to the main experiment. Participants were shown sets of three pictures, two of which were open; the third was hidden. One of the two open pictures was a filler, in the sense that it was unrelated to the story provided by the sentences participants heard. | Nikos Angelopoulos, Dafni-Vaia Bagioka and Arhonto Terzi, 2022
     ○ Speakers have a whole lexicon of words and sounds at our disposal to signal that we haven't finished speaking, known as fillers. Fillers are part of a set of features, including repetition and incomplete words, which are natural by-products of the fact that conversational speech is processed in real-time (Leech 2000). | Robbie Love, 2020
     ○ Perhaps because English and other western European languages tend to use fillers lacking morphology and syntax (preferring instead pause vowels), linguists have tended to ignore the significance of these forms for syntax. However, ... we can see that some fillers, especially those known as placeholders, may carry a range of morphological marking, including prototypical nominal marking (gender, case, number) and prototypical verbal marking (person, number, tense-aspect-mood). They may also take the morphology appropriate for adjectives and adverbs. In addition, they may occupy precisely the syntactic slot normally occupied by a regular noun or verb. | Barbara A. Fox, 2010
     ○ Could it be that in spoken language that no longer functions as a marker of subordination but merely as a filler, i.e. operating on the linear plane rather than indicating hierarchical difference? | Gunther Kaltenböck, 2009
     ○ Although it has long been observed that some children incorporate unglossable syllables into their early utterances, it has been difficult to integrate these "fillers" into theories of language acquisition. Because they straddle boundaries between phonology and morphosyntax, and between pragmatics and lexicon, they do not fit neatly into linguists' notions about "modules" of language. Fillers have been reported in quite an array of languages, and yet they seem to be more common among learners of some languages than others. Even when language is held constant, children seem to vary immensely as to whether they produce fillers at all. | Ann M. Peters, 2001

FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCY

  1. (Syntax) Long-distance dependencies are notoriously difficult to analyze in a formally explicit way because they involve constituents that seem to have been extracted from their canonical position in an utterance. The most widespread solution is to identify a gap at an extraction site and to communicate information about that gap to its filler, as in (1).

    1.  WhatFILLER did you seeGAP?

     | Remi van Trijp, 2014
  2. (Syntax) Most languages contain a number of constructions in which an argument of a verb is displaced from its canonical position to a position in the sentence at some distance from the verb, most commonly to its left. For example, in addition to the English declarative sentence in (1a), in which the NP cereal appears in canonical direct object position following the verb eat, there is also the wh-question in (1b) in which the corresponding NP which cereal appears in sentence-initial position, and no NP appears in the canonical post-verbal object position of eat.

    1. a. Kim knows that Sam likes to eat cereal for breakfast.
      b. Which cereal does Kim know that Sam likes to eat ∅ for breakfast?

     Displacements of this kind are found in questions, relative clauses, topicalization, and focus constructions, among others. We refer to the displaced NP as a filler, and refer to its canonical position as a gap. Accordingly, a focus of research on such filler-gap dependencies has been on how speakers link fillers to their corresponding gaps during real-time processing. | Sachiko Aoshima, Colin Phillips, and Amy Weinberg, 2004
  3. (Syntax) Principally, wh-questions and relative clauses, as in (1).

    1. a. Who do you think that Mary saw?
      b. The person who you think that Mary saw is Fred.

     In many analyses of these structures, a filler is matched with a co-indexed empty position, or gap, as shown in (2).

    1. a. Whoi [do you think that Mary saw __i] ?
      b. the personi [whoi you think that Mary saw __i] ...

     | John A. Hawkins, 1999
  4. (Examples)
     ○ 
    1.  The mayor [VP enraged protesters] more than Op the reporter did [VP ∅]

     Comparative Verb Phrase Ellipsis (CVPE) involves a filler-gap dependency. The gap is in the VPE site. | Masaya Yoshida, 2025
     ○ Two sentence-comprehension time experiments replicated and extended previously reported research indicating that readers initially make a quick, heuristic assignment of fillers to gaps in temporarily ambiguous sentences such as Who did John beg to sing? and Who did John beg to sing for? | Charles Clifton Jr. and Lyn Frazier, 1986

FILTER

  1. (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
  2. (Syntax) The questions that we want to consider here have arisen in a number of different contexts in recent work on the nature and use of language. Among these are the following:

    1. a. Restricting the options for transformational grammar (TG).
      b. Perceptual strategies and syntactic rules.
      c. Problems of obligatory control.
      d. Properties of the complementizer system.

     A number of questions that arise in these domains seem to fall together. In each case, we find that it is necessary to develop some notion of well-formedness for surface structures. We call a condition of this sort a (surface) filter. The notion is proposed in a limited way in Chomsky (1965) as a device to simplify and restrict the theory of transformations. The relevant considerations here were those of (1a). There is a much more far-reaching investigation and analysis of filters in Perlmutter (1968, 1971). The topic is taken up again in Chomsky (1973). We will suggest that with an appropriate concept of "surface filter", the program that falls under (1a) can be substantially advanced.
     Turning to (1b), the idea that syntactic rules may serve the function of facilitating perceptual strategies has been advanced in recent work in psycholinguistics; cf. Bever (1970), Bever and Langendoen (1971), Fodor, Bever, and Garrett (1974). Here too, it has been suggested that the point of contact may be, in part, at the level of surface filters (cf. Chomsky 1973). | Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik, 1977

 

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