PILLAI SCORE

1. (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. 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
2. (Phonetics) The Pillai-Bartlett trace, often called the Pillai score or occasionally just Pillai in linguistics studies, ultimately comes from Pillai (1955) and Bartlett (1939). In the simplest model, which predicts two dependent variables (e.g., F1 and F2) using a single two-level categorical variable (e.g., /ɑ/ and /ɔ/), it returns a value that ranges between 0 and 1, with smaller values occurring when there is greater overlap between the two groups in multivariate space, and larger numbers for less overlap. In other words, small Pillai scores suggest a vowel merger. In reality, determining whether a merger is present is not quite as simple as merely observing overlap. Two vowels may occupy the same F1-F2 space but the distinction between phonemes may be maintained through some other cue like voice quality (Di Paolo and Faber 1990), duration (Labov and Baranowski 2006), or vowel trajectory (Stanley 2020). | Joseph A. Stanley and Betsy Sneller, 2023
3. (Phonetics) The Pillai-Bartlett statistic (shortened to Pillai score by Hay et al. (2006) is an output of a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) that indicates a degree of distinction between distributions while taking into account two or more dependent variables simultaneously. Pillai scores range from 0 to 1 with lower scores indicating greater similarity between distributions. They have been used in studies of both mergers and shifts (e.g., Hall-Lew 2009, Hay et al. 2006) and have been found to model the degree of overlap or distinction better than other methods due to their ability to account for multiple dimensions, skewed distributions, unequal densities, and sparse data (Hall-Lew 2010, Kelley and Tucker 2020, Nycz and Hall-Lew 2013). | Valerie Freeman, 2023

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
3. (Prosody) Having given up the more usual definition of "stress", I think it is wise, because of associations, to give up the term also. From this point on I shall therefore refer not to stress but to pitch accent, or simply accent, meaning prominence due to the configuration of pitches. | Dwight L. Bolinger, 1958
4. (Example)
    ○ The empirical evidence presented suggests that listeners are sensitive to a variety of factors that may affect the focus projection ability of pitch accents, that is the ability of a pitch accent on one word to mark focus on a larger constituent. The findings suggest that listeners' interpretation of focus structure is most sensitive to the presence or absence of a pitch accent on a focused constituent and the deaccenting of following unfocused material (pitch accent position). Preliminary evidence suggests that the status of a pitch accent as nuclear or prenuclear may also affect listeners' interpretations, though to a lesser extent than accent position. Finally, the results show that focus projection is affected only minimally, if at all, by the type of pitch accent (at least for the two accent types compared, H* vs. L+H*). | Pauline Welby, 2003
    ○ English and German differ in the realization of phrase-final rising and falling pitch accents when accents are associated with segmental material which offers successively less scope for voicing. English "compresses" rises and falls; both contours become steeper in order to complete the rise or fall in a shorter time span. German, on the other hand, truncates falling accents; falls do not become steeper, but simply end earlier. Rising accents, however, are compressed, just as in English. Within an autosegmental-metrical framework, the evidence may be interpreted as reflecting a case of two languages sharing a common inventory of phonological specifications but differing in the way these specifications are realized in F₀. | Esther Grabe, 1998

PITCH EXCURSION

1. (Phonetics) A deviation in pitch, for example in the syllables of enthusiastic speech. | Wiktionary, 2023
2. (Examples)
    ○ This paper is concerned with realizational differences of intonation, i.e. a different phonetic implementation of an identical phonological category (Ladd 1996 / 2008). In particular, we are concerned with two aspects of realizational differences, tonal alignment and pitch excursion. The aim of this paper is to propose a two-dimensional model of pitch accent realization, where both the horizontal (alignment) as well as the vertical level (excursion) of pitch implementation play an important role in characterizing a certain pitch accent category and establishing cross-dialectal differences. | Frank Kügler, 2009
    ○ This paper seeks to empirically confirm these impressionistic judgments about Chickasaw question intonation through quantitative investigation of the timing and scaling of the terminal pitch excursion. | Matthew Gordon, 2008
    ○ Increases in the effort expended on speech production will lead to greater articulatory precision, but also a wider excursion of the pitch movement. | Carlos Gussenhoven, 2002
    ○ 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 and 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 300 Hz is, musically, equal to one from 100 to 200 Hz. 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) Refers to the upper and lower limits of a speaker's vocal pitch. | Pamela Rogerson-Revell, 2011
2. (Phonetics) In studying tone and intonation, it is very important to remember that each person has her or his own pitch range, so that what is high pitch for a person with a low-pitched voice may be the same as low pitch for a person with a high-pitched voice. Consequently, whatever we say about a speaker's use of pitch must be relative to that person's personal pitch range. Each of us has a highest and a lowest pitch level for speaking, though we may occasionally go outside that range when we are very emotional. | Peter Roach, 2011
3. (Phonetics) Pitch range has been defined as the difference between minimum and maximum f0 (Cosmides 1983). This data alone conveys no information about the distribution of f0 values within that range. | David Patterson, 2000
4. (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
5. (Example)
    ○ This study compares measures of pitch range in English sentences produced by native (American) English and non-native (Italian) English speakers. The factor "language" did not reach significance for level, span, or skewness, while "sentence type" was highly significant for all the variables under study. However, the data indicate that there may be differences in the two groups' productions as regards pitch range. The English sentences produced by the Italians have overall higher pitch levels and narrower ranges than those produced by the Americans. In addition, the Italians' pitch shows overall less variation than the Americans'. | M. Grazia Busà and Martina Urbani, 2011
    ○ Our results show that a pitch range model based on linguistic dimensions of variation better captures variation in listeners' judgements than the well established measures based on speakers' long-term distributional properties of f0, such as ±2sds mean, 95th-5th percentile and 90th-10th percentile. | David Patterson and D. Robert Ladd, 1999
    ○ It has been found that listeners' differing perceptions are significantly correlated both with the linguistic community in which the listener grew up and with the pitch range of the listener's spontaneous speaking voice. | Mark Dolson, 1994

PITCH REGISTER

1. (General) Pitch register has different meanings in different fields.
   • In speech pathology or speech science it is essentially the same as vocal mode, which is a term used on a discrete scale to describe laryngeal behavior (Perkins 1977). The mode or register permitting highest pitch is called falsetto, the mode with the lowest pitch is vocal fry and the mode in between modal register.
   • In the field of intonation, the term register is sometimes used to parameterize the distance between high (H) and low (L) tones (Connell and Ladd 1990 ), equivalent to the concept of tonal space (Ladd 1992 /2012).
   • Register has also been used to express the distance between H and L tones and the lowest F₀ value realized by a specific speaker (F_ref ). If both H and L tones are downstepped, the term register shift is used (Ladd 1992 /2012); such use implies that register is the distance between the whole contour and the reference frequency (i.e. the distance between the mean F₀ and F_ref ).
   • In a less technical context register is used to refer to the phenomenon of speaking up, in which both the L and H tones are raised, not necessarily to the same extent.
    | Toni Rietveld and Patricia Vermillion, 2003
2. (Examples)
    ○ In stress-accent languages such as English and Italian, the intermediate phrase (ip) is the domain of downstep and is delimited at its right edge by a phrase accent. Moreover, pitch register is reset after an ip boundary (hence ip-internal, recursive downstep is blocked). | Mariapaola D'Imperio and Amandine Michelas, 2010
    ○ Ladd proposes to characterize pitch register in terms of binary-branching trees which are similar to those proposed for African tone languages by Huang (1980) and Clements (1981), except that they are identical (aside from labels) to the metrical and / or syntactic structures that are needed for independent reasons. Each pair of sister nodes in a tree is labeled wither [h, l] or [l, h], and each new right branch labeled "l" lowers the register by one step. | D. Robert Ladd, 1990
    ○ As we argue below, part of the Hausa (Afro-Asiatic; Nigeria) question morpheme is a High tone added to a secondary register tier, which raises the value of the final primary Low.

   1.  Question Morpheme:   L   Primary tier
                            |
                            o   Tonal node tier
                            |
                            H   Register tier
      

    Register High tones trigger an upward shift in the entire pitch register for the primary tones affiliated with them, a proposal identical in spirit to that of Hyman (1985, 1986), who introduces into the phonological representation register Low tone as the method for handling the systematic lowering of the pitch register in which certain High tones—that is, downstepped Highs—are realized. | Sharon Inkelas and William R. Lebin, 1990

PITCH TRACK
(Examples)
 ○ Syllables, words, phrases and longer units cause variations in the amplitude of the speech signal, its amplitude modulation (AM), a phonetic correlate of the sonority curve postulated in some phonological models. The signal is demodulated by taking absolute values of the low-pass filtered signal. This AM envelope is then input into spectral analysis by FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and the low frequency (LF) range of the spectrum is extracted, typically 0 to 5 Hz, where rhythm frequencies might be expected. The smoothed frequency modulation (FM) envelope (F0 estimation, pitch track), which conveys lexical tone, accentuation and intonation, is processed in the same way. | Rosemarie Tracy and Dafydd Gibson, 2023
 ○ Taking the original aural text as a starting point, the first step was to cut every single utterance with the program MP3 Cutter and introduce the audio files in the speech recognition software SFS/WASP (version 1.54), developed by Mark Huckvale (University College London), in order to obtain the waveform and pitch track of every voiced sentence. Even though this software was the tool used to analyze the pitch contour of the utterances under scrutiny, additional aural inspections were conducted by the researcher to double-check the accuracy of the findings. Double-checking is always advisable, since non-diegetic sounds and background noises might vary or alter the pitch track extracted from the speech analysis tool. | Sofía Sánchez-Mompeán, 2019
 ○ Our goal was to detect sentence stress. This task is simpler than detecting pitch accents at word, syllable and vowel level. It was important to automatically adapt the method to the speaker's pitch range and detect sentence stress with a high accuracy. As a result an intermediate pitch pattern is generated where the inappropriate stressed parts are eliminated. That can be fed to the rule-based prediction methods which transform the pitch track to the appropriate form of the sentence stress that corresponds to the grammatical rules of the language. | Péter Nagy and Géza Németh, 2016

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, 2026
3. (Acquisition) Recent studies of language development have focused attention on the early stages of emerging syntax—the use of two-word and three-word sentences sometime during the second half of the second year of life. A number of investigators have reported similar distributional phenomena in samples of early child speech. When children begin to use two words in juxtaposition there are often a small number of words that occur frequently, in relatively fixed position, in combination with a large number of other words, each of which occurs less frequently. Braine (1963) named this first group of words pivots; children's speech has since been described in the literature as pivotal, and an account of the systematic productivity of early utterances is often referred to in terms of pivot grammar. | Lois Bloom, 1971
4. (Example)
    ○ In Mandarin (Sino-Tibetan; China):
   (keneng)
   possibly

   shi
   COP

   [_PIVOT
    

   baobao
   baby

   ku-de ]
   cry-DE

   mama
   mom

   xing-le
   wake-PFV

   'It is (possibly) because of the baby crying that the mom woke up
   (# actually she didn't wake up).'

   
    | Boyan Yin, 2026

PIVOT ARGUMENT
(Examples)
 ○ I propose that if we examine closer the lexical properties of the Chinese attitudinal adverb daodi, we would find that its attitude needs to be ascribed to either the external speaker or the internal speaker when the derivation unfolds. This concept can be formalized as an unsaturated pivot argument in the semantics of daodi that is restricted by a pivot operator in the left periphery of Chinese phrase structure.

[[daodi]] = λQλx∃y. y is an attitude that is ascribed to x ∧ x holds y toward Q.

1.  Q represents the interrogative it occurs in.
2.  x represents the pivot argument to which the attitude carried by daodi is ascribed.

1. Actor Voice (AV)
   a.
    

   Cyux
   AUX

   p-hapuy
   AV.IRR-cook

   sehuy
   taro(ACC)

   sa
   DAT

   knobuy
   kitchen

   qu
   NOM

   Yuraw.
   Yuraw

     'Yuraw cooks taro in the kitchen.'
   Patient Voice (PV)
   b.
    

   Puy-un
   cook-PV

   na
   GEN

   Yuraw
   Yuraw

   qu
   NOM

   sehuy.
   taro

     'Yuraw cooked taro.'
   Locative Voice (LV)
   c.
    

   Hpuy-an
   cool-LV

   na
   GEN

   Yuraw
   Yuraw

   sehuy
   taro(ACC)

   qu
   NOM

   knobuy.
   kitchen

     'Yuraw cooks taro in the kitchen.'

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

PIVOTAL CONSTRUCTION

1. (Syntax) Nowadays, most scholars agree with the term pivotal constituent to represent the Chinese syntactic term Jianyu, while the pivotal construction is the sentence with the construction of pivotal constituent. The pivotal construction is made up of a verb-object structure and a subject-predicate structure. There's no equivalent structure in English. So, when translated, the pivotal construction of the sentence is changed. Such a construction can be represented in a simple sentence in Chinese, but in English it could be a complex sentence.
   1.  Ta Qing Wo Lai.
       He asks me to come.
   
    In this sentence, me is the object of ask and also the logical subject of come. This structure is generally derived as N₁ + V₁ + N₂ + V₂, which is a typical derivation of a pivotal construction. N₁ is the subject of the sentence. V₁ + N₂ + V₂ is a pivotal constituent, in which V₁ + N₂ is a verb-object structure and N₂ + V₂ is a subject-predicate structure. These two structures are combined by N₂, the pivotal noun, and also called Jianyu in Chinese, which means an element undertaking two syntactic functions without any inflectional change of the word form. So, N₂ has two functions: the object of V₁, and subject of V₂. V₁ is the pivotal verb, governing N₂ and having little semantic relation with V₂. According to Cui and Sheng (1990), two aspects are the points of focus.
   1.  The causative meaning of V₁, which involves a certain object and makes the object behave in a certain way.
   2.  The logical cause-and-effect relationship between V₁ and V₂.
   
    In their paper, the study of this construction is the study of V₁ and V₂. There are also a lot of studies on pivotal constructions in Chinese academic circles. They focus mainly on the naming process, deep structure analysis, classification, and acquisition by foreign learners. | Zhiyan Hu, 2018
2. (Syntax) There is no generally accepted definition and typology of pivot constructions (Franck 1985, Hakulinen 1987, Hennoste 2001, Scheutz 2005, Norén 2007, Betz 2008, Norén and Linell 2013). If one scans the literature, however, a prototypical PC would be defined on the basis of the following seven features (Scheutz 2005, see also Norén 2007, Norén and Linell 2013):
   1.  It consists of three adjacent parts: pre-pivot, pivot, and post-pivot.
   2.  The pre-pivot + pivot and the pivot + post-pivot segments construct clausal units, but the first and the last parts are incoherent from a normative grammatical perspective.
   3.  The turn could be brought to a possible syntactic completion at the end of the pivot segment.
   4.  It includes two finite verbs (main predicate verbs or finite parts of composite verb forms) appearing in the pre-pivot and post-pivot.
   5.  The pivot between the verbs fulfills the same syntactic function in the pre-pivot and the post-pivot.
   6.  It is constructed as a prosodically coherent unit (without restarts) but there could be self-repairs and pauses in the PC.
   7.  There is semantic coherence between the pre-pivot and the post-pivot.
   
    In example (1) below, P is talking about computer problems with his brother. In this example the pre-pivot is ta ei võta 'it does not get', the post-pivot is ei võta ühendust 'does not get in touch', and the pivot is noh nende klientidega 'with these customers', which is an NP in the comitative case and an adverbial with regard to both verbs.
   1. P:
       

      vaata
      check-IMP

      kas
      whether

      ‵proksi
      proxy

      on:
      be-PRES-SG3

      oõigesti
      properly

      ‵konfitud,
      configure-PTCL

      sebärast
      because

         'check whether the proxy is properly configured because'
   2.  
       

      minu=arust
      in my opinion

      ta
      it

      ei
      NEG

      võta:
      get-NEG

      noh
      PRT

      nende
      these-GEN-PL

         'in my opinion it does not get in with these'
   3.  
       

      kli‵entidega
      customer-CMT-PL

      ei
      NEG

      võta
      get-NEG

      ‵ühendust.
      connection-NFV.

         'customers does not get in touch'
   
    There are different lexico-grammatical types of PCs and different researchers have used different typologies. | Tiit Hennoste, 2013
3. (Syntax) Generally, the pivotal construction can be abbreviated as

   [N.sub.1] + [V.sub.1] + [N.sub.2] + [V.sub.2]

   which is the same as in other syntactic constructions or sentence patterns: subject-predicate structure as the object construction, serial predicate construction, fused serial predicate and pivotal construction. | Zhiyan Hu, 2018
4. (Example)
    ○ Schegloff (1979) analyzes another example in a similar manner:
   1.  How many days? you go FIVE days a week. Right?
   
    You go is interpreted here as a pivot element: on the one hand, it belongs to the question how many days you go, and on the other hand, to the answer you go five days a week. The end of the projected question serves simutaneously as the beginning of the answer it elicits.
    A pivot construction consists of three adjacent parts:
   Spoken German
   2. [des
      that

      is]_A
      is

      [was
      something

      FURCHTbares]_B
      AWful

      [is
      is

      des]_C
      that

      'That's terrible.'
   
    The pivotal element B, which forms the center of this construction, is connected to the preceding as well as to the following syntactic constituents, the initial periphery A and final periphery C. Separately, the initial part A-B and the final part B-C are each grammatically correct, whereas A-B-C taken together results in an ungrammatical syntactic structure (according to normative grammar). The pivot element is a constituent of the so-called mid-field (i.e. the position after the finite verb in declarative sentences with XV-word order) in the initial part A-B and simultaneously constitutes the front-field (i.e. the sentence initial position before the finite verb) of the final part B-C. While the final part comprises a complete sentence in any case, the initial part represents either a syntactically complete sentence as in (2) or—most often—a syntactically incomplete structure, consisting of the front field, the finite verb and at least one additional syntactic constituent, cf. (3):
   S describes a medical treatment
   3. 01
       

      da
      there

      hat
      has

      er
      he

      ihm
      him

      milliMEterweis
      milliMEter by millimeter

         'A millimeter at a time,'

      02
       

      hat
      has

      er
      he

      ihm
      him

      einigstochen
      injected.

         'he injected him.'
   
    | Hannes Scheutz, 2005

Page Created By Split April 11, 2026

 

B a c k   T o   I n d e x