NANOSYNTAX

1. (Syntax) An approach to syntax in which the terminal nodes of syntactic parse trees may be reduced to units smaller than a morpheme. Each unit may stand as an irreducible element and not be required to form a further subtree.
    Some recent work in theoretical linguistics suggests that the "atoms" of syntax are much smaller than words or morphemes. From that it immediately follows that the responsibility of syntax is not limited to ordering preconstructed words. Instead, within the framework of nanosyntax (Starke 2011), the words are derived entities built in syntax, rather than primitive elements supplied by a lexicon.
    The beginnings of nanosyntax can be traced to a 1993 article by Kenneth Hale and S. Jay Keyser titled "On Argument Structure and the Lexical Representation of Syntactic Relations," which first introduced the concept of l-syntax. | Wikipedia, 2018
2. (Syntax) Over the last 30 years, empirical generalizations have led to a profound change in the kind of mental representations ("syntactic structures") attributed to speakers. The new syntactic structures are much larger, and growing by the day, and as a result, their ingredients (their terminal nodes) are getting much smaller. This turns out to contradict a fundamental tenet of the field: the deeply ingrained assumption that the ingredients of syntactic structure (the terminal nodes) are lexical items, "words" or "morphemes". The contradiction stems from the fact that orthodoxy views syntax as away of arranging lexical items. But as syntactic structures grew, not only did their terminals become "much smaller", they became submorphemic—smaller than individual morphemes.
    As a consequence, the terminals cannot be lexical items (morphemes or words), and hence syntax cannot be a device to arrange lexical items into structures. The field is thus in a position in which its fundamental assumptions are at odds with the results of its best research. We therefore need to reconsider the orthodoxy, questioning the very premise that syntax operates on lexical items. Nanosyntax is the result of doing that.
    An immediate consequence of terminals being submorphemic is that many—perhaps most—morphemes will span several terminals. And therefore they will correspond to an entire subtree rather than corresponding to a terminal. This means that the lexicon contains subtrees, ie. syntactic trees, paired with phonological and conceptual information. Lexical entries will be minimally of the form ＜ phonological information, syntactic tree, conceptual information ＞ , and spellout becomes an operation matching the tree constructed by syntax to the (sub-)trees stored inside lexical entries (Starke 2002).
    Conversely, syntax must now apply the same principles uniformly to features, "morphemes", "words" and "phrases"—they are all constituents in a rich syntactic tree, with features as terminals and all others as non-terminals.
    Many avenues of research are opened by nanosyntax. E.g., the phrasal spellout aspect of nanosyntax offers at long last an avenue into idioms. | Michal Starke, 2010

NASAL CLUSTER DISSIMILATION

1. (Phonology) A process whereby underlying nasal-stop clusters (NC) lose their nasal feature in the presence of another nasal-stop cluster: /...NC...NC.../ → [...NC...C...] (Blust 2012, Dixon 2004, Jones 2001, Stanton 2018).
    There is local NCD, targeting only NCs in adjacent syllables, and non-local NCD, targeting NCs in non-adjacent syllables. | Andrew Lamont, 2019
2. (Phonology) A phenomenon in which two nasal+stop clusters interact in such a way that one cluster dissimilates, so that it is no longer a nasal+stop. | Erich R. Round, 2023

NATURAL CLASS

1. (Phonology) One function of distinctive features is to provide a formal means of expressing the notion of a natural class (cf. Harms 1968), such that a phonological rule which applies to a natural class of segments may be expressed in a simpler way than a rule applying to some other class of segments. | Max W. Wheeler, 1972
2. (Phonology) We discuss a set-theoretic treatment of segments as sets of valued features and of natural classes as intensionally defined sets of sets of valued features. In this system, the empty set { } corresponds to a completely underspecified segment, and the natural class [ ] corresponds to the set of all segments, making a feature ±SEGMENT unnecessary. | Alan Bale, Charles Reiss, and David Ta-Chun Shen, 2019
3. (Phonology) In "Greek-Letter Variables and the Sanskrit ruki Class", Linguistic Inquiry 1 (1970), 549-55, A. Zwicky notes that the change of dental s into retroflex ṣ after immediately preceding r, u, k, or i in Sanskrit can be described with or without Greek variables, depending on the feature system employed. In the feature system of Jakobson and Halle (1956), the ruki class can be described by the matrix

   ⎡
   ⎣

   α consonantal
   α compact

   ⎤
   ⎦ ,

   which refers to the liquids (of which only r occurs before s in Sanskrit) and to all palatals and velars (of which only k occurs before s) if α = ＋, and to all non-low glides and vowels (of which only the high vowels occur before s) if α = －. In the feature system of Chomsky and Halle (1968), the ruki class can be described as

   ⎡
   ⎣

   － anterior
   － low

   ⎤
   ⎦ .

    These notations, to the extent that they are legitimate (which is doubtful and is, in fact questioned by Zwicky in his note), allow descriptions of the ruki class requiring fewer feature specifications than are needed to characterize any one of its members. They suggest, thus, that the ruki class is a natural class, according to the definition of Halle (1964). Zwicky asks therefore: "Is then, the Sanskrit ruki class a natural one? In fact, is the Sanskrit s-retroflexion a single process, or is it two (or more) processes unified only by virtue of their effects?" | Theo Vennemann, 1974

NATURAL INFORMATION FLOW

1. (Information Structure) According to this cross-linguistic principle, utterances are prototypically structured to move from what is most known to what is least known. Stated another way, presupposed or topical information is most naturally placed before focal information, as much as the syntactic typology of the language allows.
    In the following example, the underscored constituents are the focal information, the plain italics are presupposed.
   1. Once upon a time there was a handsome prince.
   2. The prince lived in a large, ornate castle, which was surrounded by a moat.
   3. The prince wanted to see the world.
    The principle of natural information flow represents the default ordering of constituents when a speaker has no particular reason to use a marked order or structure. When speakers use a marked order, it means that they have pragmatically chosen to signal the presence of a particular feature, such as discontinuity or added prominence. | Steven E. Runge, 2012
2. (Information Structure) Here refers to the most natural order to present bits of information which are relevant to the unfolding discourse, e.g., other things being equal, a chronologically earlier event is reported first, the reason is stated before the result, and a more important participant is introduced first when two participants are related socially or by kinship. Natural information flow thus predicts a largely iconic ordering of events matching the chronological order, but with an intricate interplay between dominant and ancillary statuses of events (cf. Longacre 1989). | Shin Ja Joo Hwang, 1994

NATURAL LANGUAGE TOOLKIT
(Computational) A leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. It provides easy-to-use interfaces to over 50 corpora and lexical resources such as WordNet, along with a suite of text processing libraries for classification, tokenization, stemming, tagging, parsing, and semantic reasoning, wrappers for industrial-strength NLP libraries, and an active discussion forum.
 Thanks to a hands-on guide introducing programming fundamentals alongside topics in computational linguistics, plus comprehensive API documentation, NLTK is suitable for linguists, engineers, students, educators, researchers, and industry users alike. NLTK is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Best of all, NLTK is a free, open source, community-driven project. | NLTK.org

NEGATIVE CONCORD

1. (Grammar) Or, popularly, double negatives. A phenomenon in which more than one negative element occurs in a sentence, but the sentence is interpreted as only being negated once.
   1. I don't never heard of that before. (Feagin 1979)
   2. Nothing don't come to a sleeper but a dream. (Green 2002)
   3. I ain't never been drunk.
      'I've never been drunk.' (Alabama English; Feagin 1979)
   4. Nobody ain't doin' nothin' wrong.
      'Nobody is doing anything wrong.' (West Texas English; Foreman 1999)
   5. I don't never have no problems.
      'I don't ever have any problems.' (African American English; Green 2002)
    | Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, 2018
2. (Grammar) Multiple negatively marked elements (or, more generally, elements that are able to be negative in isolation) co-occur to convey one single logical negation: they build an interpretive chain. | Giuseppina di Bartolo, Chiara Gianollo, and Beatrice Marchesi, 2023
3. (Grammar) Like Standard English, Chinese is well known as a double negative language, yet there are occasions where two negatives co-occur such as in (1). The two negatives in Southern Min, namely m and bian, do not yield a positive reading, however.
   1. Southern Min (from a Taiwanese popular song)
      tsit.si
      temporarily

      sit
      lose

      tsi
      hope

      m
      M

      bian
      need.not

      uan.than
      sadden

      'You need not feel saddened due to your temporary loss of hope.'
    Lien (2008) briefly notes cases like this as an instance of negative concord. | Hui-Ling Yang, 2011

NEGATIVE CONCORD ITEM (NCI)

1. (Grammar) In Negative Concord systems multiple expressions of negation co-occur in a sentence yielding one single semantic negative operator: in other words, sentence negation is marked in multiple places in the sentence, on elements that have to be interpreted in the scope of the negative operator (pronouns, determiners, adverbs; cf. 1a). These elements are called n-words or Negative Concord Items (NCIs): they build an interpretive chain with other expressions of negation in the clause; however, they can also have negative import in isolation, most clearly in negative short answers, and this is what differentiates them from negative polarity items (NPIs) (1b).
   1. Negative Concord and NCIs (Italian)
      a.
       

      Non
      not

      ha
      has

      visto
      seen

      niente
      nothing

      nessuno.
      nobody

        'Nobody saw anything.'
      b.
       

      A:
       

      Ci
      there

      sono
      are

      bambini
      children

      tra
      among

      i
      the

      passeggeri?
      passengers
      b.
       

      B:
       

      Nessun
      no

      bambino
      child

      /
      /

      * Alcun
      any

      bambino
      child

        'A: Are there children among the passengers? B: No children.'
    In some languages (like Classical Greek, but also Romanian and Italian) the NCIs contain etymologically negative morphemes; in other languages (like Modern Greek and the well-known case of Modern French) they have a non-negative etymological origin. | Chiara Gianollo, 2021
2. (Grammar) In French, sequences of potentially negative expressions like personne and rien, referred to here as Negative Concord Items (NCI) (Watanabe 2004), can have two possible interpretations; a sentence like (1) can have a Negative Concord (NC) reading as in (2) or a Double Negation (DN) reading as in (3), in which two negations cancel each other out to produce a positive reading.
   1. Personne ne dit rien.
   2. Nobody says anything. = Everyone is silent. = NC
   3. Nobody says nothing. = Everybody talks. = DN
    | Viviane Déprez and Jeremy Yeaton, 2018

NEGATIVE CONCORD SYSTEM
(Grammar) Cross-linguistically, in a strict Negative Concord system, if a Negative Concord Item (NCI) is used, a co-occurring negative marker is always obligatory.
 In a non-strict Negative Concord system, it depends on the area of the clause where the NCI is found: in the area that precedes the finite verb, an NCI is sufficient to express sentential negation, without the presence of the negative marker; in the area that follows the finite verb, an NCI has to co-occur with another negative element (the negative marker or another NCI) in the pre-verbal area. In the non-strict system of Standard Modern Greek, a negative marker co-occurs with a negative indefinite in all sentential contexts, independently of the respective position. | Giuseppina di Bartolo, Chiara Gianollo, and Beatrice Marchesi, 2023

NEGATIVE EMOTIVE
(Semantics) Negative emotive words (NEWs) are those words that, on their own, without context, have a semantic content that may be associated with negative emotion, but in some cases they may lose it in part or completely (Szabó and Bibok 2019). It is probably a language-independent feature, and it cannot be regarded as a new linguistic phenomenon (Andor 2011, Jing-Schmidt 2007). The prior semantic content of Hungarian NEWs is typically characterized by the following emotions: fear, disgust, anger and sadness.
 More and more authors have been investigating NEWs (e.g. Dragut and Fellbaum 2014, Jing-Schmidt 2007, Kugler 2014, Laczkó 2007, Nemesi 1998, Partington 1993, Paradis 2001, 2008, Péter 1991, Szabó and Bibok 2019, Tolcsvai Nagy 1988, Wierzbicka 2002), and these papers mainly or exclusively focus on the intensifying function of these words (negative emotive intensifiers). In this case a negative word becomes an intensifier of another word (Szabó 2018), as in brutálisan gyors (lit. 'brutally fast', i.e. 'really fast'), félelmetesen jó (lit. 'terrifyingly good', i.e. 'awesome good') and őrült nagy (lit. 'crazy big', i.e. 'very big'). These words are therefore similar in function to the intensifier nagyon 'very'. We call this linguistic phenomenon polarity loss (Szabó and Bibok 2019).
 At the same time, there is another usage of NEWs that is rarely discussed in the literature, namely the case where the examined word, despite its negative semantic content, expresses a positive evaluation of the speaker, e.g. brutális alaplap (lit. 'brutal motherboard', i.e. 'high quality motherboard'). We call this phenomenon polarity shift. In contrast to the intensifier function, these words have no intensifying role in this case (Szabó and Bibok 2019). | Martina Katalin Szabó, Veronika Vincze, and Károly Bibok, 2022

NEGATIVE POLARITY ITEM
(Grammar) NPIs are words or phrases that are ungrammatical in positive statements, but grammatical in their negated counterpart (Ladusaw 1979, Giannakidou 1979, Horn 2010). Contrast the following:

1. I don't have any cats.
2. * I have any cats.

3. * Any cats Dorothy doesn't have.
4. Dorothy doesn't have any cats.

NEGATIVE SPREAD
(Grammar) Negative Doubling in West-Germanic can be split into two phenomena:

1. The negative feature of negative expressions such as Dutch niets 'nothing' and nooit 'never' may be distributed over any number of indefinite expressions following the negative constituent.
2. If no such indefinite expression is present, niet-2 (in German, nicht-2) may be inserted.

1. a.
    

   Ik
   I

   win
   gain

   nooit
   never

   niks
   nothing

   (Drechterland,
    

   Netherlands)
    
   b.
    

   Ik
   I

   heb
   have

   nooit
   never

   geen
   no

   problemen
   problems

   met
   with

   har
   her

   gehad
   had

   (substandard)
    
   c.
    

   Hai
   He

   het
   has

   naarns_i
   nowhere_i

   gain
   no

   schuld
   guilt

   t_i
   t_i

   aan
   for

   (Groningen,
   

   Netherlands)
   

     'He is not to blame for anything'

NEUTER AGREEMENT CONSTRAINT
(Syntax) Whereby neuter arguments fail to control agreement on adjectives, yielding ungrammaticality. The existence of the NAC is particularly striking given that neuter forms exist in various positions and cases, suggesting the NAC is not a result of the language lacking certain agreement forms. We propose instead that the NAC is due to the lack of gender features on neuter arguments. When agreement is obligatory between a nominal argument (controller) and an agreeing expression (target), the target must receive gender features. As we show, neuter arguments in Lithuanian lack gender features altogether (cf. Kramer 2015), and are therefore ineligible to confer targets with the requisite features. | Luke Adamson and Milena Šereikaitė, 2018

NEUTRAL NEGATIVE
(Grammar) Expressing that something is factually not the case. It contradicts or denies. | Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek, 2019

NEUTRAL WORD ORDER
(Syntax) Discussions of word order in languages with flexible word order in which different word orders are grammatical often describe one of the orders as the (pragmatically) unmarked or neutral word order, while other grammatical orders are all described as being marked in some way. In most languages in which one order has been so characterized, the order described as unmarked is also the order which occurs most frequently in spoken or written texts. It is widely assumed, in fact, that this is a necessary characteristic of unmarked word order, that it is part of what it means to be unmarked that the unmarked word order be most frequent. For example, Greenberg (1966) claims explicitly that the unmarked order in a language is "necessarily the most frequent". There are instances, however, in which this assumption has been questioned, in which descriptions of word order in particular languages have claimed that a particular order is unmarked or neutral, even though that order is not significantly more frequent than other orders, and may in fact be less frequent than at least some other orders. | Matthew S. Dryer, 1995

NEUTRALIZATION

1. (Phonology) The elimination of phonological contrast in certain phonetic environments. One of the most well-studied examples of neutralization is final devoicing, the merger of voiced and voiceless obstruents into voiceless obstruents in word-final position. | Olga Dmitrieva, Allard Jongman, Joan Sereno, 2010
2. (Phonology) Phonemes that are contrastive in certain environments may not be contrastive in all environments. In the environments where they do not contrast, the contrast is said to be neutralized. In these positions it may become less clear which phoneme a given phone represents.
    Absolute neutralization is a phenomenon in which a segment of the underlying representation is not realized in any of its phonetic representations (surface forms). The term was introduced by Paul Kiparsky (1968), and it contrasts with contextual neutralization where some phonemes are not contrastive in certain environments.
    An example of neutralization is provided by the Russian vowels /a/ and /o/. These phonemes are contrasting in stressed syllables, but in unstressed syllables the contrast is lost, since both are reduced to the same sound, usually [ə]. | Wikipedia, 2022

NEUTRALIZING RULES
(Phonology) A fundamental distinction is made between neutralizing and non-neutralizing rules, and all theories of phonology have appealed to the distinction in the statement of grammatical principles, phonological descriptions and/or the explanation of substantive properties of rules. The assumption has always been that neutralization rules phonetically merge or obliterate the differences between segments which are phonologically contrastive in other contexts and other levels of representation. | Daniel A. Dinnsen and Jan Charles-Luce, 1984

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