LABELING
(Syntax) Among the fundamental questions in minimalist research is why human language has φ-feature agreement and Case. Chomsky (2013) proposes a partial answer for this with his labeling algorithm. The operation Merge, which combines two elements α and β into {α, β}, is minimally required for language. This operation, he argues, must accompany an algorithm that specifies the nature of the formed object. For example, when a verbal element and a nominal element form a constituent, information must be provided whether the constituent is verbal (VP) or nominal (NP). His proposal is that φ-feature agreement plays a crucial role in this labeling process. On the other hand, it is proposed in Chomsky (2008), for example, that Case is necessary for φ-feature agreement and is valued through it. This leads to the picture in (1), where '→' means 'requires':

1.  Merge → Labeling → φ-feature agreement → Case

LABELING ALGORITHM
(Syntax) Merge is defined as producing a simple set (i.e. Merge (α, β) = {α, β}), which we may call a syntactic object (SO). The rise of Merge over X'-schemata recaptures the aspect of discrete infinity in phrase structure as recursive application of Merge (i.e. Merge (γ, {α, β}) = {γ, {α, β}}), a property specific to human beings (cf. Fujita 2009). Merge does not entail the application of projection; rather, it purely ensures set formation, hence the labeling algorithm (LA) (Chomsky 2013):

The labeling algorithm (LA)
Suppose SO = {H, XP}, H a head and XP not a head. Then LA will select H as the label, and the usual procedures of interpretation at the interfaces can proceed.

LABOV'S ATTENTION-TO-SPEECH MODEL
(Sociolinguistics) Holds that speakers shift styles in reaction to the formality of the speech situation. (Labov 1972)
 Stylistic variation is conditioned by how much attention speakers pay to their own speech as they converse. Speech registers, under this model, fall along a continuum according to self-consciousness of speech; less self-conscious varieties are labeled casual or informal, and registers characterized by more self-consciousness are termed careful or formal. Less self-conscious registers are also held to be further removed from standard or prestige language varieties than more self-conscious speech, which tends toward what the speaker perceives to be more standard speech. | Natalie Schilling-Estes, 1998

LABOV'S VERNACULAR PRINCIPLE
(Sociolinguistics) Labov's Vernacular Principle holds that the style which is most regular in its structure and its relation to the evolution of the language is the vernacular, in which the minimum attention is paid to speech. (1972) The Vernacular Principle has led sociolinguists to focus on speech which they determine to be non-self-conscious, at the expense of stylistic varieties such as performance speech, which are identified as self-conscious. | Schilling-Estes, 1998

LAMBDA (λ)

1. (Semantics) A notion developed in mathematical logic and used as part of the conceptual apparatus underlying formal semantics. The lambda operator is a device which constructs expressions denoting functions out of other expressions (e.g. those denoting truth values) in a process called lambda abstraction. The process of relating equivalent lambda expressions is known as lambda conversion. Several kinds of lambda calculus have been devised as part of a general theory of functions and logic, functions here being defined as sets of unordered pairs (graphs). The approach has proved attractive to linguists because of its ability to offer a powerful system for formalizing exact meanings and semantic relationships, and lambda notions have helped to inform a number of linguistic theories, notably Montague grammar and categorial grammar. | David Crystal, 2008
2. (Acoustics) The symbol for wavelength.

LAMBDA CALCULUS
(Mathematical Logic, Semantics) A formal system for expressing computation based on function abstraction and application using variable binding and substitution. It is a universal model of computation that can be used to simulate any Turing machine. It was introduced by the mathematician Alonzo Church in the 1930s as part of his research into the foundations of mathematics.
 Lambda calculus consists of constructing lambda terms and performing reduction operations on them. In the simplest form of lambda calculus, terms are built using only the following rules:

Syntax	Name	Description
x	Variable	A character or string representing a parameter or mathematical/logical value.
(λx.M)	Abstraction	Function definition (M is a lambda term). The variable x becomes bound in the expression.
(M N)	Application	Applying a function to an argument. M and N are lambda terms.

Operation	Name	Description
(λx.M[x]) → (λy.M[y])	α-conversion	Renaming the bound variables in the expression. Used to avoid name collisions.
((λx.M) E) → (M[x := E])	β-reduction	Replacing the bound variables with the argument expression in the body of the abstraction.

LAMINAL
(Phonetics) An articulation involving the blade of the tongue (= lamina). | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

LANGUAGE

1. (Neurocognitive Linguistics) The system used by people for their linguistic activity, i.e., the linguistic information system of the brain.
    The concept language is at best a remotely abstract one. Language is several steps removed from reality. You cannot touch, see, or feel a language. Yes, you can hear speech, but that is something different. Should we assume that because we have the word "language", there must be such things as languages?
    "Language" is just a term of English. It may be interesting to take note of the fact that many of what English calls languages do not have terms equivalent to "language".
    Such a commonly occurring word as "language" naturally encourages people to form a conceptual object within their belief systems to go with it, and to imagine that this concept must have an existence as a definite object of some kind beyond what is tangibly and observably real. What is commonly called a language is not only unobservable, it is not a physical object of any kind. It can be regarded as a very abstract object or as a logical construct, or as an illusion. Furthermore, belief in its existence as a real object tends to deny the fact that every person's linguistic system—a network existing in that person's brain—differs to varying degrees from that of every other person.
    Nevertheless, for the sake of linguistics and in recognition that this field is certainly concerned with languages in some sense of that longtime ill-defined term, neurocognitive linguistics tries to look behind the term and find the tangible and observable reality. | Sydney M. Lamb, 2006
2. (General) So, what is this thing called language? There is no single answer to this question. It is many things. It is:
   1. A definining characteristic of humanity.
   2. A tool for communication.
   3. Commonly seen as a complex system consisting of a number of subsystems.
   4. Arbitrary, generative, and multifunctional.
    | David Nunan, 2012
3. (General) I will consider five answers to the question, "What is a Language?" three or four of which have some currency in contemporary linguistics and philosophy of linguistics. It may be helpful to have the five answers listed in a brief and labelled form:
   1. A language is a natural kind. (Naturalism.)
   2. A language is an abstract object. (Platonism.)
   3. A language is a name given to a set of objects, for example, a set of grammars, lects or idiolects, characteristically taken to be properties of individual speakers. (Nominalism.)
   4. A language is a social fact, and that social fact is also a (or, in a stronger version, the only) linguistic fact. (Sociologism.)
   5. A language is a social fact, but that social fact is not a linguistic fact. (Dualism, for want of a better word to indicate a view of reality as stratified and with at least "weak" emergent properties.)
   
    The position I arrive at is that (5) is true; that in addition linguistic facts are not necessarily social facts and, as a matter of fact, frequently aren't; and that the truth of (5) is compatible with the truth of some version of (1). | Trevor Pateman, 1983
4. (General) 
   1.  (countable) A body of words, and set of methods of combining them (called a grammar), understood by a community and used as a form of communication.
   2.  (uncountable) The ability to communicate using words.
   3.  (uncountable) A sublanguage: the slang of a particular community or jargon of a particular specialist field.
   4. (countable, uncountable, figurative) The expression of thought (the communication of meaning) in a specified way; that which communicates something, as language does.
   5. (countable, uncountable) A body of sounds, signs and/or signals by which animals communicate, and by which plants are sometimes also thought to communicate.
   6. (computing, countable) A computer language; a machine language.
   7. (uncountable) Manner of expression.
   8. (uncountable) The particular words used in a speech or a passage of text.
   9. (uncountable) Profanity.
    | Wiktionary, 2025

LANGUAGE CONVERGENCE
See CONVERGENCE, LANGUAGE.

LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY

1. (Sociolinguistics) Entrenched beliefs about language (language ideologies). | Philip Seargeant, 2009
2. (Sociolinguistics) The terms ideology and language have appeared together frequently in recent anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies, sometimes joined by and, sometimes by in, sometimes by a comma in a trinity of nouns. We have had analyses, some of them very influential, of cultural and political ideologies as constituted, encoded, or enacted in language (Friedrich 1989, Pecheux 1983, Thompson 1984). This review is differently, and (on the surface) more narrowly, conceived: our topic is ideologies of language, an area of scholarly inquiry just beginning to coalesce (Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity, eds. 1992 [1998]). There is as much cultural variation in ideas about speech as there is in speech forms themselves (Hymes 1974). Notions of how communication works as a social process, and to what purpose, are culturally variable and need to be discovered rather than simply assumed (Bauman 1983). | Kathryn A. Woolard, 1994
3. (Sociolinguistics) Though the relationship of language and thought has received much academic and popular attention, "thoughts about language" by their speakers have, by comparison, been neglected, dismissed, denigrated, or proscribed as objects of study and concern until relatively recently. Language ideology, as succinctly defined by Errington (in Durranti, ed. 2001), "refers to the situated, partial, and interested character of conceptions and uses of language." These conceptions, whether explicitly articulated or embodied in communicative practice, represent incomplete, or "partially successful," attempts to rationalize language usage; such rationalizations are typically multiple, context-bound, and necessarily constructed from the sociocultural experience of the speaker.
    It is important to note that although interdisciplinary scholarship on language ideologies has been extremely productive in recent decades (Woolard 1998), there is no particular unity in this immense body of research, no single core literature, and a range of definitions. One of the most straightforward, though controversial, definitions is that of Alan Rumsey (1990): "shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world." | Paul V. Kroskrity, 2004

LANGUAGE PREDICTION
(Psycholinguistics) Language processing is predictive. To some, this is a controversial statement. However, under some interpretations, this is something that the field has known for several decades. To consider a well-known and broadly accepted piece of evidence, consider the phenomenon of garden-pathing during sentence comprehension. In sentences like (1a), the comprehender encounters a temporarily ambiguous sequence of words—a context. Upon encountering new bottom-up input (e.g. conducted in (1b)), this ambiguity is resolved to the a priori less frequent syntactic interpretation (or parse), leading to processing difficulty. This increase in processing difficulty is known as the garden path effect, and it manifests both as relatively slower per-word reading times (Ferreira and Clifton 1986, Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers, and Lotocky 1997, MacDonald, Just, and Carpenter 1992, Spivey-Knowlton, Trueswell, and Tanenhaus, 1993) and poorer comprehension accuracy (Ferreira, Christianson, and Hollingworth 2001, Ferreira and Patson 2007). If, however, the comprehender had encountered another context such as (1c), which avoided the temporary ambiguity, she would not have experienced a garden path effect. Importantly, the magnitude of the garden path effect is graded and highly dependent on the predictability of the intended parse given the preceding context.

1. a. The experienced soldiers warned about the dangers ...
   b. ... conducted the midnight raid.
   c. The experienced soldiers who were warned about the dangers ...

LANGUAGE SHIFT
(Diachronic) Or, language transfer, or, language replacement, or, language assimilation. The process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be higher status stabilize or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived by their own speakers to be lower-status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin during the time of the Roman Empire. | Wikipedia, 2022

LARYNGEAL FEATURES
(Phonetics) One proposal:

• Sources:
  • gl = glottal.
  • epl = epilaryngeal.
  • nil = no phonation.
• Larynx height (LH):
  • N = neutral larynx.
  • L = lowered larynx.
  • R = raised larynx.
• [±cet] = constricted epilaryngeal tube.
• [±sg] = spread glottis.
• [±stf] = stiff vocal folds.

LARYNGEAL NEUTRALIZATION
(Phonology) The most common phonological process involving laryngeal features is laryngeal neutralization, wherein all laryngeal distinctions are lost in syllable-final position. | Linda Lombardi, 1995

LATE-PEAK ACCENT

1. (Prosody) In early-peak or late-peak accents, f0 peaks either precede or follow the stressed syllable they are associated with. | Katharina Zahner, Sophie Kutscheid, and Bettina Braun, 2019
2. (Prosody) Previous research has demonstrated that nuclear intonation contours in German crucially differ with respect to f0-peak alignment (Kohler 1991, Grice et al. 2005, Niebuhr 2022). The f0 peak may either precede the stressed syllable (H+L*, early-peak accent), or follow it (L*+H, late-peak accent), or be aligned within the stressed syllable (L+H*, medial-peak accent). | Katharina Zahner-Ritter, Marieke Einfeldt, Daniela Wochner, Angela James, Nicole Dehé, and Bettina Braun, 2022

LEFT BRANCH CONDITION
(Syntax) Ross (1967, 1986) proposed the Left Branch Condition (LBC), which blocks movement of the leftmost constituent of an NP. The condition has been used in the literature to block extraction of determiners, possessors, and adjectives out of NP.

1. * Whose_i did you see [ t_i father ]?
2. * Which_i did you buy [ t_i car ]?
3. * That_i he saw [ t_i car ].
4. * Beautiful_i he saw [ t_i houses ].
5. * How much_i did she earn [ t_i money ]?

LEFT-BRANCH EXTRACTION

1. (Syntax) When an element (located in the left branch of a larger NP or DP) is moved via A-bar movement. | Carol-Rose Little, 2020
2. (Syntax) As noted by Ross, some languages, e.g., Latin and most Slavic languages (Ross 1986 notes this for Russian), allow LBE, as illustrated by Serbo-Croatian and Latin. (Pied-piping of the LBE remnant is also possible. (6) was provided by an anonymous reviewer and (7) is taken from Uriagereka 1988.)
   1. Serbo-Croatian
      
      Čijeg_i
      whose

      si
      are

      vidio
      seen

      [ t_i
       

      oca ]?
      father

      'Whose father did you see?'
   2. Kakva_i
      what-kind-of

      si
      are

      kupio
      bought

      [ t_i
       

      kola ]?
      car

      'What kind of a car did you buy?'
   3. Ta_i
      that

      je
      is

      vidio
      seen

      [ t_i
       

      kola ].
      car

      'That car, he saw.'
   4. Lijepe_i
      beautiful

      je
      is

      vidio
      seen

      [ t_i
       

      kuće ].
      houses

      'Beautiful houses, he saw.'
   5. Koliko_i
      how-much

      je
      is

      zaradila
      earned

      [ t_i
       

      novca ]?
      money

      'How much money did she earn?'
   6. Latin
      
      Cuiam_i
      whose

      amat
      loves

      Cicero
      Cicero

      [ t_i
       

      puellam ]?
      girl

      'Whose girl does Cicero love?'
   7. Quales_i
      what-kind-of

      Cicero
      Cicero

      amat
      loves

      [ t_i
       

      puellas ]?
      girls

      'What kind of girls does Cicero love?'
    | Željko Bošković, 2005

LEFT DISLOCATION

1. (Syntax) The construction of e.g. (1):
   1. This next man, have I got to see him?
    Distinguished from simple fronting (2) by a pronoun (him) or other anaphoric element in the normal position of the dislocated element.
   2. This next man have I got to see?
    | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2007
2. (Syntax) The sentence My mother, she is a good person is an example of a construction where a non-vocative noun phrase in initial position is set off from a following sentence that contains one or more pronouns coreferential with the initial NP. Since Haj Ross's 1967 dissertation Constraints on Variables in Syntax, this construction has been known as left dislocation. Haj's examples included:
   1. The man my father works with in Boston, he's going to tell the police that the traffic expert has set that traffic light on the corner of Murk Street far too low.
   2. My father, he's Armenian, and my mother, she's Greek.
   3. My wife, somebody stole her handbag last night.
   When the pronoun is sentence-initial, you might think that it's in apposition with the left-dislocated noun phrase. But this generally makes neither semantic nor prosodic sense. If the structure were really

   My father – he – 's Armenian.

   the phrasing would be different (and strange), and it's hard to see why one would want to add the pronoun, which would add none of the parallel information that appositives usually do.
    The third example (My wife, somebody stole her handbag last night) illustrates the fact that the pronoun need not be adjacent to the left-dislocated noun at all. (Though examples with the pronoun in subject position are by far the commonest.)
    Constructions of this general type are common across the languages of the world, and in so-called topic-prominent languages, they're the norm. The left-dislocation structure is often said to divide the sentence into topic and comment, or some similar sort of articulation of information. (This works when the initial item is a full noun phrase, referenced in the following sentence by a pronoun or pronouns, but it wouldn't work the other way around. There's a lot more to be said about the pragmatics of LD, and there's a large literature discussing it. | Mark Liberman, 2008

LEFT PART STRANDING
(Grammar) A novel ellipsis phenomenon that deletes the second part of compounds, stranding the left side of the compound in sentence-final position:

1. Deze
   this

   lift
   lift

   is
   is

   zevenpersoons,
   seven.person.ADJ

   en
   and

   die
   that

   acht
   eight

   ___ (Dutch)
    

   'This lift can carry seven people, and that one can carry eight people.'

1. It is only possible under clausal but not phrasal coordination.
2. It preferably occurs in compounds that are the adjectival predicate of a clause.
3. It preferably co-occurs with gapping or TP-ellipsis (fragments, sluicing).
4. The stranded part is necessarily contrastive.

LEFT PERIPHERY
See PERIPHERY.

LEFT UPWARD/DOWNWARD MONOTONICITY
See MONOTONICITY.

LEMMA
(Lexicology) A glossed word or phrase. | Merriam-Webster LENA recording

LENA RECORDING
(Acquisition) On Feb. 24, 2008, The New York Times Magazine featured a device called LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) in its "Idea Lab" column. LENA is being marketed to families who have children between birth and 3 years of age. According to the product's Web site, LENA enables parents to monitor the number of words their child hears and the number of conversational turns involving their child for up to 16 hours at a time through a digital language processor about the size of a cell phone. This device attaches to a child's clothing or fits into the pocket of a child-sized jumper that comes with the LENA system. After 10 or more hours of continuous recording, parents are able to download their results to a computer, obtain the number of words they spoke to their child and the number of conversational turns involving their child, and compare these data to those of others.
 We were intrigued by the Times article. The device doesn’t require audiotapes or videotapes, nor does it require hours of language-sample transcription and coding. For researchers who study the language development of children and clinicians who conduct mother-child training programs, the recording, transcribing, and coding of language samples has always been part of the daily grind. | Janna B. Oetting, Lekeitha R. Hartfield, and Sonja L. Pruitt, 2009

LENIS
See FORTIS.

LEVEL TONE
(Phonology) Or, register tone. Tone that doesn't change pitch. | Zita McRobbie-Utasi, 2011

LEVEL-TRUE
(Examples)
 ○ A significant proposal of roughly this character is the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies of Paradis (1988), with a couple of caveats: the constraints involved are a set of parochial level-true phonotactic statements, rather than being universal and violable, as we insist; and the repair strategies are quite narrowly defined in terms of structural description and structural change rather than being of the "do-unto-α" variety. | Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky, 2003
 ○ With an improved understanding of constraint interaction, a far more ambitious goal becomes accessible: to build individual phonologies directly from universal principles of well-formedness. (This is clearly impossible if we imagine that constraints must be surface- or at least level-true.) | Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky, 1993

LEVELING
(Sociolinguistics) The eradication of marked or minority forms in situations of dialect competition, where the number of variants in the output is dramatically reduced from the number in the input. | David Britain, 2001

LEVELING, MORPHOLOGICAL
(Morphology) Or, paradigm leveling. The generalization of an inflection across a linguistic paradigm, a group of forms with the same stem in which each form corresponds in usage to different syntactic environments (SIL 2015), or between words (Singh 2005). The result of such leveling is a paradigm that is less varied, having fewer forms (Hazen, 2014).
 When a language becomes less synthetic, it is often a matter of morphological leveling. An example is the conjugation of English verbs, which has become almost unchanging today, thus contrasting sharply, for example, with Latin, in which one verb has dozens of forms, each one expressing a different tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. For instance, English sing has only two forms in the present tense (I/you/we/they sing and he/she sings), but its Latin equivalent cantāre has six: one for each combination of person and number. | Wikipedia, 2022

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