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, Baumann, and Benzmüller 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, 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. 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 NP, but it wouldn't work the other way around. There's a lot more to be said about the pragmatics of left-dislocation, 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

   e  (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.

LEIPZIG-JAKARTA LIST

1. (Comparative) The LJ list (Tadmor 2009) consists of 100 basic terms, 62 of them overlapping with the Swadesh List items, although some overlapping items differ in detail ('hand' in Swadesh List vs. 'arm/hand' in the LJ List).

   The Leipzig-Jakarta List
   1SG pronoun	2SG pronoun	3SG pronoun	ant	arm / hand
   ash	back	big	bird	to bite
   bitter	black	blood	to blow	bone
   breast	to burn (intr.)	to carry	child (kin term)	to come
   to crush/grind	to cry/weep	to do/make	dog	to drink
   ear	to eat	egg	eye	to fall
   far	fire	fish	flesh/meat	fly
   to give	to go	good	hair	hard
   to hear	heavy	to hide	to hit/beat	horn
   house	in	knee	to know	to laugh
   leaf	leg/foot	liver	long	louse
   mouth	name	navel	neck	new
   night	nose	not	old	one
   rain	red	root	rope	to run
   salt	sand	to say	to see	shade/shadow
   skin/hide	small	smoke	soil	to stand
   star	stone/rock	to suck	sweet	tail
   to take	thick	thigh	this	to tie
   tongue	tooth	water	what?	who?
   wide	wind	wing	wood	yesterday

    The 100 terms were empirically selected by Tadmor (2009) out of the World Loanword Database (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009), a lexical database consisting of 41 languages' vocabularies. The four criteria of the selection were:
   1.  Resistance to borrowability.
       Out of thousands of lexical items of the 41 languages, the researchers of the languages judged which are loanwords and which are not. And the lexical concepts that were less likely loanwords were given more credit to be selected as part of the wordlist.
   2.  Non-analyzability.
       The LJ List was to exclude meanings that are likely to be represented by compounds rather than individual morphemes. Hence, there are 'who?' and 'what?' in the list but not other interrogative pronouns, such as 'where?' or 'why?' which, according to Tadmor (2009), are likely to be polymorphemic (as e.g. 'what-place?' 'for-what?').
   3.  Universality.
       The LJ List needed to be a list of concepts that are found in all (or most) human societies. Thus, animals that are found in all human societies, such as 'dog', 'fish', 'fly', 'louse', and 'ant' are up on the list, but not the animals that are (or were) absent in some societies, such as 'cow', 'pig', or 'cat'.
   4.  Stability.
       Lexical items that have existed in a language for a longer time were given more credit to be chosen as part of the list than those which have only existed for a shorter time.
   
    | Ian Joo, 2019
2. (Examples) 
    ○ Our results showed (8.75%) and (9.75%) lexical similarity between English and Kurdish according to the Leipzig-Jakarta and Swadesh lists respectively; giving the average of (9.25%). | Mohammed Khalid Mahmood, 2022
    ○ This article will analyse the degree of mutual intelligibility between the vocabularies of Old English (Anglian) and Old Norse (Old Icelandic) with the use of the Leipzig-Jakarta List which ranks vocabulary by their resistance to borrowing. | Jonas Keller, 2020
    ○ Homogeneity of the Kipchak languages as comparable objects, according to the Leipzig-Jakarta list, is revealed. Detailed analysis of the list of vocabulary and grammar data reveals that the Chulym Turkic language belongs to the Uralian Kipchak languages. | Innokentiy N. Novgorodov, Nurmagomed E. Gadzhiakhmedov, Mussa B. Ketenchiev, Natalya V. Kropotova and Valeriya M. Lemskaya, 2019

LEMMA

1. (Lexicology) A glossed word or phrase. | Merriam-Webster
2. (Lexis) Francis and Kučera (1982) define the lemma as "a set of lexical forms having the same stem and belonging to the same major word class, differing only in inflection and / or spelling".
    Crystal (1997 [2008) defines the lemma as a "dictionary headword; an abstract representation, subsuming all the formal lexical variations which may apply: the verb walk, for example, subsumes walking, walks and walked."
    We shall define the lemma as the name of a lexical set, e.g.

   DEAL = {deal, deals, dealing, dealt, ...}.

    The term lemma is currently used to refer to a number of concepts which are undoubtedly related, but which are logically different: an ad hoc group of words, a dictionary headword, a set of inflectional variants, a label for a paradigm or set of paradigms, the name of a set of lexical items, or a set of words including spelling variants. | Gerry Knowles and Zuraidah Mohd Don, 2004

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

1. (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
2. (Examples)
    ○ In a case study of speakers in the east end of Glasgow, Macafee (1994) found evidence of dialect leveling with the loss of classical Scots vocabulary (e.g., baurlay, hippen). | Rose Stamp, Adam Schembri, Jordan Fenlon, and Ramas Rentelis, 2015
    ○ In all relevant branches of linguistics efforts so far have mainly been directed at some aspect of linguistic variation or change. Very little attention has been paid to the reduction of variation, that is, to dialect levelling.
    Structural dialect loss or dialect levelling, then, is a process which reduces the number of features separating a dialect from other varieties, including the socially more prestigious standard language.
    Dialect levelling is the process which reduces structural variation.
    Thomason and Kaufman (1988), finally, accept what they see as the traditional meaning of the notion of dialect levelling, namely 'change toward greater similarity of dialects'. | Frans Hinskins, 2015

LEVELING, MORPHOLOGICAL

1. (Morphology) Or, analogical leveling, or, regularization. The descriptive term leveling refers to a pattern of variation whereby one morphological form—the leveled form—appears variably in the morphosyntactic environments of other forms. If usage of the leveled form reaches 100%, the result is categorical (i.e. nonvariable) syncretism. However, actual usage of leveled variant forms need not increase: leveling variation may remain stable over apparent time, decline over time, or even reverse trajectory over time (e.g. Hay and Schreier 2004). | Jeffrey K. Parrott, 2007
2. (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 2003), 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, 2025

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