PHRASAL NUCLEUS

1. (Syntax) The term pair nucleus vs. satellite was introduced by Seiler (1960) for what is now commonly known as head vs. dependent. The terms "head" and "dependent" are used for the main element of a phrase (determining its distributional properties) and for the other elements. | Glottopedia, 2014, 2007
2. (Prosody) An intonational phrase has a specifiable intonational structure including a single most prominent point (the nucleus). (Halliday 1967, Hockett 1958, Lieberman 1967, Pierrehumbert 1980, Trager and Smith 1951) | Glottopedia, 2008
3. (Examples)
    ○ Each phrase in Lushootseed (Salish; USA) is built up around a Phonological Word (W) which serves as a kind of phrasal nucleus to which phonological clitics (C) are attached via one of the two processes of cliticization or phonological incorporation. As discussed in Beck (1999), whether a given lexical item is an eligible phrasal nucleus is not determined entirely by its semantic, syntactic, or morphological properties. As a rule of thumb:
   • Words belonging to major word classes tend to be phonological heads; nouns are always heads, as are derived verbs (Lushootseed has no adjectives—Beck 2002).
   • Particles are not words, unless marked for emphasis.
   • Deictics and words corresponding to English adjectives and adverbs may be either clitics or words, depending on which is needed to achieve optimal phrasing.
    | David Beck and David Bennett, 2007
    ○ The ADAM (Architecture for Dialogue Annotation on Multiple Levels) proposal for morphosyntactic and syntactic annotation is a two-layer annotation structure, containing respectively information on word category and morphosyntactic features (pos tagging), and non-recursive phrasal nuclei (called chunks). | Roldano Cattoni, Morena Danieli, Vanessa Sandrini, and Claudia Soria, 2002
    ○ The formation of phonological phrases (PhP) in Lushootseed (Salish; USA) is closely tied to the notion of the phonological word, and the building of phrases in many ways resembles the building of syllables. Like the syllable, the Lushootseed phonological phrase is built up around a single head or phrasal nucleus, and the ideal or canonical phrase allows for a single initial non-head element—the phrasal onset; on the other hand, phrasing does not allow for any element to follow the head (i.e. a phrasal coda). | David Beck, 1999
    ○ The phrase level in Telefol (Trans-New Guinea; Papua New Guinea) contains a nucleus of potentially very complex internal structure, and laterals which are not expandable. String constituent analysis does not necessarily require that all the beads in a string be the same size or shape, nor that all the laterals to a nucleus should have the same intensity of relationship. It is demonstrated here that certain items within the nucleus stand in a subordinate relationship to their head, the noun, and that certain items outside the nucleus stand in a subordinate relationship to the nucleus as such, even when it is manifested by one of the nuclear subordinates in isolation, without its noun head. | Phyllis M. Healey, 1965
    ○ Morphemically significant pitch sequences in Huichol (Uto-Aztecan; Mexico) occur principally on the final one or two feet of the phrase. The locus of occurrence of these pitch sequences is the phrase nucleus. Contrasts of all phonemic pitch levels occur in the nucleus; in the precontour which precedes it only limited pitch constrasts occur. | Joseph E. Grimes, 1959

PHRASAL VERB CONSTRUCTION
(Grammar) Among multi-word expressions, phrasal verbs (PVs) are one of the most prolific, productive and elusive structures. Broadly, PVs form multi-word structures by combining a lexical verb and an adverbial particle, as illustrated in (1-3). (1) illustrates an intransitive (henceforth [V Prt]) use of the PV break down, and (2) and (3) illustrate transitive uses of bring up and turn on. In the case of bring up, the verb is used in a verb-particle-object ([V Prt Obj]) structure and in the case of turn on the verb is used in a verb-object-particle ([V Obj Prt]) structure.

1. I just broke down in tears when I saw the letter.
2. I ventured to bring up the subject of the future.
3. The warden said that she would turn the heating on.

PHRASE STRUCTURE HYPOTHESIS FOR COMP
(Syntax)

The Phrase Structure Hypothesis for COMP (Bresnan 1972)
According to the phrase-structure hypothesis, complementizers are specified in deep structure by means of a phrase-structure rule. The rule for English would look like:

S̄ → COMP S
... that, WH (="Q"), and for

PHRASEOLOGY
(Grammar) The study of phraseological units of the language, as the branch of linguistics appeared in the 1940s. The object of phraseology is phraseological units, their nature, and the way they function in speech. However, there is a problem of terminology in linguistics connected with phraseology, since there are the following terms which are used in this branch of linguistics:

• Set expression or word-equivalent.
• Idiom.
• Set phrase.
• Fixed word-groups.
• Phraseological combinations.
• Phraseological fusions.
• Phraseological unit.

PHRASEOLOGICAL TEDDY BEAR
(Acquisition) Ringbom (1998) shows that the frequencies of individual word forms tend to differ between learners and native speakers of English, with learners having a tendency to overuse vocabulary items that have high frequencies in general corpora of English. The overuse can be related to a core vocabulary that the learners have acquired early and know well. Hasselgren (1994) compares such familiar lexical favorites to children's toys: "Stripped of the confidence and ease we take for granted in our first language flow, we regularly clutch for the words we feel safe with: our 'lexical teddy bears'."
 A hypothesis of the present study is that the same tendency will be visible in the use of lexical bundles: some bundles will seem familiar and unobjectionable to learners, who will resort to them frequently as their "phraseological teddy bears". This idea is not novel; Nesselhauf (2005) suggests that learners' occasional overuse of "certain native-speaker-like chunks" may partly result "from learners using some of them as lexical teddy bears". | Hilde Hasselgård, 2019

PHYLOGENY
(Diachronic) The application of this general term in linguistics refers to the historical (or diachronic) development and decay of language in speech communities, or as represented in historical texts; also referred to as phylogenesis. Phylogenetic study contrasts with ontogeny, for the study of development in the individual, as carried on in language acquisition. | David Crystal, 2008

Π-GESTURE
(Prosody) The π-gesture model provides an account of the properties of prosodic boundaries. While various other conceptualizations of prosodic boundaries have been proposed, the π-gesture model is discussed here because it clearly defines prosodic boundaries. Furthermore, it has explicit temporal properties and allows the examination of the coordination of prosodic events. Finally, the model allows for a structurally more gradient prosodic hierarchy, which is in line with experimental evidence.
 The π-gesture model has been developed within the Articulatory Phonology framework, where the basic phonological unit is a gesture, which specifies a constriction target as its goal (e.g. for alveolar consonants, a tongue tip constriction constitutes the constriction target). Gestures in Articulatory Phonology are both units of information, specifying lexical contrast, and units of action, with specified temporal and spatial information. That is, gestures are lexical units parametrized both phonetically and phonologically, such that there is no need for a translational component that traditionally might be posited as mediating between phonology and phonetics. | Jelena Krivokapić, 2014

PIED-PIPING

1. (Syntax) The phenomenon that when a wh-phrase is moved, it can optionally "drag along" a larger NP or PP in which it is contained.
    E.g., next to this first example, the other two are also possible:
   1. This is the book [ _NP which ] I have designed [ _NP the covers [ _PP of t ] ]
   2. This is the book [ _PP of which ] I have designed [ _NP the covers t ]
   3. This is the book [ _NP the covers of which ] I have designed t
    In some cases, pied-piping is obligatory, due to the Left Branch Condition. (Ross 1967) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Syntax) The notion of "pied-piping" has been an integral part of all versions of the theory of generative grammar that assume transformational movements since it was first introduced by Ross (1986, from his 1967 dissertation). The term itself—attributed by Ross to Robin Lakoff—refers to the phenomenon whereby some particular movement operation T, designated to displace an element A, in fact displaces additional elements together with A. More specifically, pied-piping is involved when an application of T ends up moving some constituent B that properly contains A. Ross' Pied-Piping Convention was originally meant, for instance, to extend the application of the Relative Clause Formation transformation, so that it is able to move more than just the NP immediately dominating the relative pronoun in cases such as shown in (1)–(5), where (2), (3), and (4) represent, according to Ross (1986), instances of pied-piping by the relative wh-pronoun.
   1. reports [ which ] the government prescribes the height of the lettering on ...
   2. reports [ the covers of which ] the government prescribes the height of the lettering on ...
   3. reports the [ lettering on the covers of which ] the government prescribes the height of ...
   4. the boy [ whose guardian's employer ] we elected president
   5. * the boy [ whose ] we elected guardian's employer president
    From their inception until now the existence of pied-piping effects has uniformly been assumed in the literature, and the assumed pied-piping mechanism has provided a useful descriptive tool. | Julia Horvath, 2016

PILLAI SCORE
(Phonetics) Hay et al. (2006) introduced a method for estimating the extent of overlap between vowel categories which they referred to as the "Pillai score" (Pillai). They used this method in their analysis of near and square in New Zealand English. Kennedy (2006) subsequently used it to examine caught and foot before /l/ in New Zealand English. Hall-Lew (2009) and Wong and Hall-Lew (2014) used it for analyzing cot and caught in San Francisco and New York City. The Pillai score, formally known as the Pillai-Bartlett trace, is simply a statistic that is part of the output of a MANOVA model. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) is a type of ANOVA that models variation with respect to more than one dependent variable simultaneously, such as both F1 and F2. The higher the value of the Pillai statistic, the greater the difference between the two distributions with respect to these dependent variables. Each model also provides a measure of statistical significance, with a p value generated for each Pillai statistic that indicates whether the difference between clusters is significant.
 The Pillai does not represent distance so much as a more abstracted difference: Pillai score values range from 0 to 1 in all cases, with 0 indicating no difference between two clusters and 1 indicating no similarity. The Pillai score is directly drawn from a procedure that models F1 and F2 variation simultaneously—a feature which may be desirable or not. Although the set range of Pillai scores from 0 to 1 is useful for comparison across speakers (within a corpus), the Pillai values are not expressed in units that are easy to interpret. Linguists are more likely to prefer measures that represent the difference between two acoustic categories in perceptually meaningful terms, such as Hertz. | Jennifer Nycz and Lauren Hall-Lew, 2013

PITCH ACCENT

1. (Prosody) A term used in the description of languages in which the distribution of the tones within a word is totally predictable once one has specified a particular tonal feature of the word (as in Japanese). The notion has also been applied to English, where some phonological models analyze intonation contours as a sequence of one or more pitch accents, each associated with a stress-prominent syllable in a word. | David Crystal, 2008
2. (Prosody) Or, tonal accent. A distinction is made between stress accent and pitch accent. Stress accent refers to variation in loudness, while pitch accent refers to variation in musical pitch (frequency). English or German has stress accent. Japanese has only pitch accent, with an accent of rising pitch and another of falling pitch. | Wolfgang Hadamitzky and Mark Spahn, 2008

PITCH EXCURSION

1. (Phonetics) A deviation in pitch, for example in the syllables of enthusiastic speech. | Wiktionary, 2023
2. (Phonetics) While the experiments by 't Hart (1981) placed the issue of discriminability of F₀ differences in a linguistic context, the listeners' task remained non-linguistic in the sense that they had to decide which item of a stimulus pair contained the larger pitch movement. Linguistically, the size of accent-lending F₀ excursions would in general appear to correlate with the prominence of the accent. Accordingly, in our experiment, we decided to put 't Hart's claim that differences of less than 3.0 semitones (ST) do not play a role in speech to the test in a linguistically oriented task: one which required judges to decide which of two accents that varied in F₀ excursion size was more prominent, choosing 1.5 ST as our smallest interval. As is well known, the relation between prominence and F₀ excursion is confounded by overall intonation features. As Breckenridge and Liberman (1977) and Pierrehumbert (1979) have shown, the prominence impression of F₀ excursions is a function of the serial position of the accent, later accents requiring smaller excursions than earlier ones, an effect which is generally attributed to declination (cf. Cohen, Collier and 't Hart, 1982).
    A separate, and arguably more important issue in the relation between differences in perceived prominence and F₀ excursion size differences is that of the measure in which F₀ differences should be expressed for the purposes of linguistic description. Some authors, e.g. Pierrehumbert (1979), Ladd (1983), and Liberman and Pierrehumbert (1984) present their data in Hertz, others, e.g. 't Hart & Collier (1975), Thorsen (1980), and 't Hart (1981) in ST. Expression of F₀ data in ST would seem to do justice to the perception of pitch intervals: a jump from 150 to 300Hz is, musically, equal to one from 100 to 200Hz. On the other hand, there are also indications that a given semitone interval in a low frequency range does not have the same perceptual effect as the same interval (expressed in ST) in a higher frequency range. In a pilot study on the perceptual effect of F₀ movements superimposed on a steeply descending baseline carried out by the first author, it was found that early movements created a stronger prominence impression than later movements with the same excursion in ST. Perhaps Stevens' remarks (1975) are relevant here:

   ... all musical intervals grow subjectively larger as frequency increases up to about four octaves above middle C. In other words, throughout the whole of what is usually called the musical range, intervals made up of equal frequency ratios (i.e. musical intervals) increase in perceived pitch extent with increasing frequency ... it is often thought that the musical scale based on frequency ratios is somehow a subjective scale. It is not.

    | A.C.M. Rietveld and C. Gussenhoven, 1985

PITCH HEIGHT

1. (Acoustics) Pitch is a multidimensional perceptual attribute that plays an important role in speech, language and hearing. One salient dimension of pitch is pitch height, which orders pitch from low to high. Perceptually, pitch height is a continuous vertical dimension associated with the voice fundamental frequency (F0) of sound that varies directly with frequency, and provides a basis for segregation of sound sources (Roffler and Butler 1968, Shepard 1982, Krumhansl 1990, Melara and Marks, 1990). | Ananthanarayan Krishnan, Chandan H. Suresh, and Jackson T. Gandour, 2017
2. (Acoustics) Through stimulus-response compatibility we tested whether sound frequency (pitch height) elicits a mental spatial representation. | Elena Rusconi, Bonnie Kwan, Bruno Giordano, Carlo Umiltà, and Brian Butterworth, 2005
3. (Example)
    ○ The working hypothesis of the current study is that, if voice quality can affect pitch perception, manipulating the spectral slope of a voice should be able to shift listeners' perception of pitch height. | Jianjing Kuang and Mark Liberman, 2015
    ○ These results indicate that pitch contour and pitch height are two important dimensions in sensory processing of lexical tones. | Yiu-Kei Tsang, Shiwei Jia, Jian Huang, and Hsuan-Chih Chen, 2011
    ○ It is concluded that mothers use both pitch height and pitch range to introduce the preverbal infant to the difference between non-play and play situations, and they continue to use variations in pitch height to mark the same distinction after the children have become active participants in pretend play activities. | Nadja Reissland and David Snow, 1996

PITCH RANGE

1. (Phonetics) The range of values between the highest and lowest F0 values in a given stretch of speech. In a higher pitch range, both the peaks and the troughs are higher than in a lower pitch range. | Scott Myers, 1996
2. (Phonetics) Refers to the upper and lower limits of a speaker's vocal pitch. | Pamela Rogerson-Revell, 2011

PIVOT

1. (Syntax) In everyday English conversation, talk can be produced such that it is simultaneously a grammatical ending of what precedes it, and a beginning of what follows (e.g. that's what I’d like to have is a fresh one). A range of features of phonetic design (including pitch, loudness, duration, and articulatory characteristics) are shown to be deployed in systematic ways in order to handle the dual tasks of avoiding the signalling of transition relevance at the end of the pivot, and marking out the fittedness of the pivot to both what precedes and what follows. | Gareth Walker, 2007
2. (Syntax) The syntactic pivot is the verb argument around which sentences "revolve" in a given language. This usually means the following:
   • If the verb has more than zero arguments, then one argument is the syntactic pivot.
   • If the verb agrees with at least one of its arguments, then it agrees with the syntactic pivot.
   • In coordinated propositions, in languages where an argument can be left out, the omitted argument is the syntactic pivot.
    The first two characteristics have to do with simple morphosyntax, and from them, it is quite obvious the syntactic pivot in English (and most other European languages) is called the subject. An English verb cannot lack a subject (even in the imperative mood, the subject is implied to be you and is not ambiguous or unspecified) and cannot have just a direct object and no subject; and (at least in the present tense, and for the verb to be) it agrees partially with the subject.
    The third point deserves an explanation. Consider the following sentence:
   1. I shot the deer and killed it.
    There are two coordinated propositions, and the second proposition lacks an explicit subject, but since the subject is the syntactic pivot, the second proposition is assumed to have the same subject as the first one. One cannot do so with a direct object (in English). The result would be ungrammatical or have a different meaning:
   2. *I shot the deer and I killed.
     The syntactic pivot is a feature of the morphosyntactic alignment of the language. | Wikipedia, 2021

PIVOT PARAMETER

1. (Discourse) The discourse (context) parameters we are using are as follows:
   • SOURCE: Represents the one who makes the report (e.g., the speaker).
   • ADDRESSEE: Represents the addressee of the report.
   • CURRENT: A list containing entities that are realized in the current sentence ordered according to their obliqueness.
   • CENTER: Represents the backward-looking center (Cb) of an utterance.
   • PIVOT: Represents the entity with the current point-of-view.
   
    PIVOT is as defined by Sells (1985) which represents the one from whose point-of-view the report is made. This discourse parameter was originally introduced by Kuno and Kaburagi (1975) to represent situations where the speaker identifies with the person who is represented by an NP in a sentence. Kuno and Kaburagi (1977) and Kuno (1987) use the term empathy perspective and represent this information through a binary comparison of varying degrees of empathy values. Since we will be keeping track of "where the view-point is" as a singleton parameter, we will be using the term "PIVOT" instead of "empathy perspective". | Hideto Tomabechi, 1989
2. (Examples)
    ○ The algorithm compares two approaches when performing cross-lingual clustering:
   1. Global parameter. Using a global parameter for measuring distances between all language articles for cross-lingual clustering decisions.
   2. Pivot parameter. Using a pivot parameter, where the distances between every other language are only compared to English, and cross-lingual clustering decisions are made only based on this distance.
   
    | Erik Novak, 2021
    ○ We need to ask whether pivot constructions are a syntactic structure in themselves, and if so, what formal parameters are the decisive factors. | Hannes Scheutz, 2008

PLESIONYM

1. (Semantics) Or, near-synonymn. Plesionyms are words that are almost synonyms, but not quite.
    True synonymy is quite rare. It is limited mostly to technical terms (distichous, two-ranked; groundhog, woodchuck) and groups of words that differ only in collocational properties, or the like. More frequently, words that are close in meaning are plesionyms—not fully inter-substitutable but varying in their shades of denotation, connotation, implicature, emphasis, or register (DiMarco, Hirst, and Stede 1993/1995, adapting the definitions of Cruse 1986). For example, lie, falsehood, untruth, fib, and misrepresentation all mean a statement that does not conform to the truth. But a lie is a deliberate attempt to deceive that is a flat contradiction of the truth, whereas a misrepresentation may be more indirect, as by misplacement of emphasis, an untruth might be told merely out of ignorance, and a fib is deliberate but relatively trivial, possibly told to save one's own or another's face (Gove 1984). Moreover, fib is an informal, childish term, while falsehood is quite formal, and untruth can be used euphemistically to avoid some of the derogatory implications of some of the other terms (Gove 1984; compare Coleman and Kay 1981). The following table shows a few of the ways in which plesionyms may differ. Often, plesionyms will differ in several ways at once.

   Difference	Examples
   Denotation, coarse-grained	yawl, ketch
   Denotation, fine-grained	lie, fib
   Denotation, fuzzy	forest, woods
   Emphasis	foe, enemy
   Implicature	mislay, lose
   Formality	drunk, pissed
   Attitude of speaker	skinny, slim

    It can be difficult even for native speakers of a language to command the differences between plesionyms well enough to use them with invariable precision, or to articulate those differences even when they are known. Consequently, many reference books are published to help in that task. | Graeme Hirst, 1995
2. (Semantics) In its general sense, synonymy means the identity of meaning shared by two or more different forms in certain contexts (Palmer 1981). Cruse (1986) presents a detailed discussion about the concept of synonymy in which he develops what he calls "a scale of synonymity". In this scale, the idea of synonymy is classified into three classes according to the degree of synonymity depending on two criteria.
   1. a. A criterion relating to the idea of semantic identity: the lexical items are said to be synonymous when possessing, as much as possible, the same semantic traits.
      b. A criterion covering the degree of synonymity which describes synonymous words in such a way that some pairs of synonyms are "more synonymous" than other pairs: E.g., settee and sofa are more synonymous than die and kick the bucket which in turn are more synonymous than brainy and shrewd.
   
    As a result, Cruse classifies synonymy into three categories:
   2. a. Absolute synonymy which indicates a pair of lexical items with identical contextual relations.
      b. Cognitive synonymy (also called partial synonymy) referring to lexical items that have some contextual relations in common.
      c. Plesionym which refers to lexical items which are similar in meaning but are syntactically different.
   
    | Ahmed Sahib Mubarak, 2006

PLURACTIONALITY
(Grammar) Or, verbal number. If not used in its aspectual sense, a grammatical aspect that indicates that the action or participants of a verb is, or are, plural. This differs from frequentative or iterative aspects in that the latter have no implication for the number of participants of the verb.
 Often a pluractional transitive verb indicates that the object is plural, whereas in a pluractional intransitive verb the subject is plural. This is sometimes taken as an element of ergativity in the language. However, the essence of pluractionality is that the action of the verb is plural, whether because several people perform the action, it is performed on several objects, or it is performed several times. The exact interpretation may depend on the semantics of the verb as well as the context in which it is used. The lack of verbal number does not generally mean that the action and participants are singular, but rather that there is no particularly notable plurality; thus it may be better described as paucal vs. multiple rather than singular vs. plural.
 Although English does not have verbal number as a grammatical device, many English verbs such as stampede and massacre are used when one of the participants involves a large number. English also has a number of verbs (often ending in -le, such as nibble) which indicate repetitive actions, and this is similar to some types of grammatically-marked pluractionality in other languages. | Wikipedia, 2023

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