IDENTIFIABLE
(Pragmatics) A referent is identifiable if the addressee is able "to distinguish it from all other individuals in the universe of discourse" (Lyons 1977). Several sorts of factors may lead a speaker to assume that the addressee can identify a referent and, thus, to employ a formally definite NP (e.g. a pronoun, an NP with a demonstrative, or a definite article) when speaking about that referent.

1. The referent has already been mentioned in the prior discourse.
2. It is physically present in the speech context.
3. Or it constitutes common knowledge amongst the members of a speech community (e.g. the President, the cat next door).

IDENTIFICATION REQUIREMENT ON ELLIPSIS

1. (Syntax) We argue for the following identification requirement, whose roots go back to Chomsky (1965) (see Lipták 2015 for discussion):

   Identification requirement on ellipsis
   Antecedent and material properly contained within the ellipsis site must be featurally nondistinct.

    The identification requirement on ellipsis is satisfied by featural non-distinctness, as opposed to strict identity. | Rodrigo Ranero, 2019
2. (Examples)
    ○ In a split question, the tag is the focused remnant of ellipsis in a non-wh-question. For instance, the source of the tag in (1a) is (1b):
   1. a.
       

      ¿Quién
      who

      plantó
      planted

      el
      the

      roble,
      oak

      Juan?
      Juan

        'Who planted the oak, Juan?'
      b.
       

      ¿[Juan]_FOC
      [Juan]_FOC

      plantó
      planted

      el
      the

      roble?
      oak?

        'Did Juan plant the oak?
   
    The tag in (1a) is the result of deleting everything but the focus-fronted constituent Juan in (1b). Intuitively, the identification requirement on ellipsis in this example is met because in the wh-part, the constituent plantó el roble 'planted the oak' provides a suitable antecedent. | Karlos Arregi, 2010
    ○ Less is known about the workings of pseudosluicing, and it might not involve ellipsis. In the terminology of Hankamer and Sag (1976), sluicing is surface anaphora, which requires some kind of identity between the deleted material and a linguistic antecedent. Pseudosluicing, by contrast, might well be deep anaphora, which is pragmatically controlled and not restricted by any kind of linguistic identity requirement. Deep anaphora shows no evidence of having any syntactic structure at an earlier stage of the derivation. If the Malagasy construction were pseudosluicing, it would not be subject to the identification requirement on ellipsis under investigation here, and we could not use the construction to draw any conclusions about the formulation of an ellipsis parallelism requirement. | Eric Potsdam, 2007

IDENTITY

1. (Sociolinguistics) One framework for the analysis of identity as produced in linguistic interaction is based on the following principles:
   1. Identity is the product rather than the source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore is a social and cultural rather than primarily internal psychological phenomenon.
   2. Identities encompass macro-level demographic categories, temporary and interactionally specific stances and participant roles, and local, ethnographically emergent cultural positions.
   3. Identities may be linguistically indexed through labels, implicatures, stances, styles, or linguistic structures and systems.
   4. Identities are relationally constructed through several, often overlapping, aspects of the relationship between self and other, including similarity / difference, genuineness / artifice, and authority / delegitimacy.
   5. Identity may be in part intentional, in part habitual and less than fully conscious, in part an outcome of interactional negotiation, in part a construct of others' perceptions and representations, and in part an outcome of larger ideological processes and structures.
   
    | Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, 2005
2. (Syntax) In ellipsis research, theories based on syntactic identity adhere to the view that identity is calculated on the basis of syntactic representations, including LF-representations derived from surface syntactic structure.
   1.  a. John might like this movie, and Bill might, too.
       b. John might like this movie, and Bill might like this movie, too.
   
    In a case like (1), this would mean that the deleted predicate is formally identical to the predicate phrase in the antecedent: the verb and its argument are the same and have the same structural relation to each other. Semantic theories of identity on the other hand propose that the unpronounced material is similar to the meaning of the antecedent material, requiring for example that the antecedent and elided material be truth-conditionally equivalent. If identity is syntactic, antecedent and elided material should be found in the same kind of syntactic contexts and show the same syntactic composition. If identity is defined with respect to meaning, the syntactic contexts / syntactic composition could be different, as long as the formal differences do not translate into a semantic one that makes the meanings non-identical. To decide between these options, research on the identity condition has concentrated on finding the limits of tolerable and intolerable semantic and formal mismatches (terms borrowed from Thoms 2015) between the antecedent and its presumed elliptical counterpart. | Anikó Lipták, 2015

IDENTITY CONDITION ON ELLIPSIS

1. (Syntax) It is clear that ellipsis requires an antecedent of some sort:
   1.  # Mary didn't.
   
    Importantly, however, not any kind of antecedent will do. Cases abound where the context, linguistic or situational, makes it possible to understand what the missing material is intended to mean, yet the ellipsis itself is ungrammatical.
   2. The plants need water. # I was hoping you would.
   3.  a. Susan hugged Bill, but Mary didn't.
       b. * Bill was hugged by Susan, but Mary didn't.
   
    In (2), the first sentence makes it clear that the second sentence is intended to mean 'I was hoping you would water them', but ellipsis is not licensed here; informally, it seems that there is a required level of parallelism between antecedent clause and ellipsis site, and this level is not reached in (2). (3) shows that this parallelism must be structural at least to some extent: in English VP ellipsis, voice mismatches are not allowed (see Merchant 2013). As such, we can be satisfied that the identity of antecedent clause and ellipsis site must be stated at some level more fine-grained than, say, that of pure thematic relations. The precise characterization of the identity condition has been a topic of intensive research, and remains a topic of lasting controversy. Three main questions arise here:
   1.  Is the identity condition computed over syntactic or semantic representations?
   2.  How closely must the ellipsis site match the antecedent?
   3.  Do antecedents have to be linguistic?
   
    | Lefteris Paparounas, 2020
2. (Syntax) 
   1.  Someone solved the problem, but I don't know who (solved the problem).
   2.  A: Did you not tell your friends about the game today?
       B: I did, but I forgot to tell them where (the game is).
   3.  The problem was solved, but I don't know who # (solved the problem).
   4.  A: Did you not tell your friends about the game today?
       B: I did, but I forgot to tell them how long # (the game is).
   
    I believe that one of the reasons that ellipsis remains elusive to date is that the literature has been experiencing an "identity crisis"—an overreliance on the axiomatic assumption that material can be elided only if the linguistic context provides an identical copy of it. This assumption, which is at the heart of an influential line of theories known as identity theories, provides a straightforward explanation for the acceptability of some uses of ellipsis and the unacceptability of others. For example, the context in (1) is expected to enable ellipsis because it provides an identical copy of the to-be-elided material, and the unacceptability of (3) similarly follows from the fact that the antecedent has been passivized and therefore no longer satisfies the identity requirement.
    But there are also many counterexamples that suggest that the identity condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for characterizing the distribution of ellipsis. | Till Poppels, 2020

IDENTITY(DURATION)
(Optimality Theory) A constraint:

IDENTITY(duration)
Assign a violation for every consonant segment whose duration category in the output is not identical to its input category.

Judeo-Spanish (Romance; Israel, Turkey, the Balkans, North Africa)

/káro1 káɾo2/	SPACE[V_V St]	IDENT(dur)	*[.ɾV Stem]	*rV
☞ a. ká.ro1≠ká.ɾo2			*	*
b. ká.ro1,2		*!		*
c. ká.ɾo1,2		*!	*

IDENTITY QUESTION

1. (Syntax) 

   The identity question (Merchant 2019)
   What is the relationship between the understood material in the ellipsis site and its antecedent?

    | Rodrigo Ranero Echevarría, 2021
2. (Syntax) 

   The identity question
   What is the relationship between the material that has been elided and its antecedent? What type of identity does ellipsis require in order to be licensed?

    | Laura Stigliano, 2022
3. (Syntax)  The identity question tries to decipher, "What is the relationship between the understood material and its antecedent?" (Merchant 2013). The identity question has centered most of the debates since the dawn of Transformational Generative Grammar given that identity issues are at stake in one of the restrictions on the occurrence of ellipsis, namely the recoverability condition, which posits that elided elements need to be recoverable from the (either linguistic or extralinguistic) context in order for them to be omitted (Aelbrecht 2009, 2010; van Craenenbroeck and Merchant 2013). Several identity relationships have been put forward in the literature, since the ellipsis site must be identical to some antecedent phrase. However, this identity has been argued to be semantic (Dalrymple et al. 1991, Hardt 1993, Ginzburg and Sag 2000, Merchant 2001, 2004, Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, van Craenenbroeck 2010, Aelbrecht 2009, 2010, Thoms 2010, 2013), syntactic (Sag 1976, Williams 1977, Fiengo and May 1994, Chung et al. 1995) or both (Chung 2006, 2013, van Craenenbroeck 2010, Merchant 2013). | Evelyn Gandón-Chapela and Javier Pérez-Guerra, 2016

IDEOPHONE

1. (Grammar) A marked word that depicts sensory imagery. Ideophones are found in many of the world's languages. They are noted for their special forms, distinct grammatical behavior, rich sensory meanings, and interactional uses related to experience and evidentiality.
    Ideophones are:
   1.  Marked in the sense that they stand out from other words. Claims about the marked nature of ideophones abound in the literature. To take just five typologically diverse languages, ideophones are:
      • "Very striking" (Vidal 1852 on Yoruba [Niger-Congo; Nigeria]).
      • "Distinguished by their aberrant phonology" (Kruspe 2004 on Semelai [Austro-Asiatic; Malaysia]).
      • "Structurally marked" (Klamer 2002 on Kambera [Austronesian; Indonesia]).
      • "Phonologically peculiar" (Newman 1968 on Hausa [Afro-Asiatic; Nigeria]).
      • And show "distinctive phonology, involving special rules of length, tone, and stress" (Epps 2008 on Hup [Puinavean; Brazil/Columbia]).
   2.  Words, that is, conventionalized items with specifiable meanings, as opposed to "simply sounds" (Okpewho 1992) or "[a] form that conveys an impression, not meaning" (Pei 1966).
   3.  Depictions, that is, they are special in the way they signify their referents. This property can best be explained by means of an illustration. Consider the description be walking with a limp and the ideophone tyáɖityaɖi [tjáɖitjaɖi] from Éwé (Niger-Congo; Ghana, Togo), with roughly the same meaning (Westermann 1907). The former describes the way of walking whereas the latter depicts it.
   4.  Of Sensory Imagery: perceptual knowledge that derives from sensory perception of the environment and the body (Barsalou 1999, Paivio 1986).
   
    | Mark Dingemanse, 2012
2. (Grammar) A term used by Africanists of a distinct class of forms characterized by phonological structures that tend to be peculiar to them, e.g. by patterns of sound symbolism, reduplicative structures, or distinct patterns of tones. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2003
3. (Grammar) A word or phrase that does the work of representation by phonetic means. Ideophones are abundant in all known languages and constitute a counterforce to the arbitrariness of phonemes. It is naming that lies behind the Greek-derived term onomatopoeia, which simply means 'to make names'. Words described as onomatopoeic in English are called picture words; in German, Lautbilder; and in French, mots images. This reflects the fact that ideophones are often synesthetic, representing phenomena in sensory domains other than the auditory one.
    The term ideophone first came into use among linguists specializing in African and especially Bantu languages. By now the study of ideophones has become a part of the Africanist subtradition in linguistics. | Dennis Tedlock, 1999
4. (Grammar) Grammarians invented a whole series of different names for these items which were so abundant in newly discovered languages, including descriptive adverb, descriptive complement, uninflected verb, onomatopoeic vocable, adverb, substantive, etc. Finally Doke, in attempting to systematize and prescribe grammatical terminology for Bantu linguistic studies, provided them with a definition and proposed to call them:

   Ideophone (Idéophone) [Ideophon]
   A vivid representation of an idea in sound. A word, often onomatopoeic, which describes a predicate, qualificative or adverb in respect to manner, color, sound, smell, action, state or intensity. (Doke 1935)

    | F.K. Erhard Voeltz and Christa Kilian-Hatz, 2001

IDIOCONSTRUCTION

1. (Diasystematic Construction Grammar) DCxG conceptualizes the linguistic competence of multilingual speakers as one integrated network of constructions, containing language-specific idioconstructions and shared diaconstructions. | Isa Hendrikx and Kristel Van Goethem, 2024
2. (Diasystematic Construction Grammar) Short for idiosyncratic construction. Many constructions are language-specific (idioconstructions), which means that they can only be used in specific communicative contexts associated with a particular language. That's part of their pragmatic meaning. | Steffen Höder, 2021
3. (Diasystematic Construction Grammar) If, for example, a German-Swedish bilingual family living in Sweden has established a convention to use German at home and Swedish at work or at school, the language-specificity of the German word Küche 'kitchen' is represented as a pragmatic restriction on the functional side of the corresponding construction. This can be formalized as [ Küche 'kitchen' ⟨C_home⟩ ], with a shorthand notation specifying the communicative context (C_home) in angle brackets, as opposed to the Swedish equivalent [ kök 'kitchen' ⟨C_work;school⟩ ]. Constructions carrying pragmatic meaning of this type (⟨C_x⟩ ) are called idioconstructions. | Steffen Höder, Julia Prentice, and Sofia Tingsell, 2021
4. (Diasystematic Construction Grammar) 

       DIACONSTRUCTIONS AND IDIOCONSTRUCTIONS IN THE CONSTRUCTIONAL NETWORK
   
                        diaconstruction
                        formX
                        meaningX
                          /     \
                         /       \
                        /         \
                       /           \
      idioconstruction               idioconstruction
      formX (+formA)                  formX (+formB)
      meaningX (+meaningA) ⟨CA⟩        meaningX (+meaningB) ⟨CB⟩
   
   

    | Steffen Höder, 2018

Page Created By Split August 17, 2025

 

B a c k   T o   I n d e x