Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
Pl-Pn

PLANNING

  1. (Psycholinguistics) Or, sentence planning, or, utterance planning. There is no real consensus on what has to be planned before an utterance.
     What people agree on is:


     | Utku Turk, Ellan Lau, and Colin Phillips, 2024
  2. (Psycholinguistics) During language production, speakers plan the message to be conveyed, select the lexical items and syntactic structure to convey that message, and then determine the sequence of phonological representations to be uttered. To the extent that speakers plan more than one word at a time before utterance initiation, such planning would be expected to draw on verbal working memory capacities. | Randi C. Martin, Hao Yan, and Tatiana T. Schnur, 2014
  3. (Examples)
     ○ Whereas in the first half of the observation period the dysfluencies are distributed relatively randomly over sentences, in the second half they tend to concentrate in function words and sentence-initial words. The decline of dysfluency rate is shown to be related to an abundant use of a few syntactic frames. It is argued that these results reflect the emergence of a component in the speech production apparatus which is specifically dedicated to serial-order planning. | Frank Wijnen, 2009
     ○ The study investigated hesitations in the spontaneous speech and story continuations of university students. Hesitations occurred less often before "embedded" clause types than before "combined" clause types in both tasks. This finding suggests that embedded clauses are more likely to be planned ahead during the preceding clause than are combined clauses, which may be planned relatively independently of the prior clause.
     Also, for each functional clause type, boundaries before non-finite (deep structure) clauses contained hesitations just as often as did full finite (surface structure) clauses. It was concluded that deep structure clauses within surface structure clauses function as speech planning units, just as surface clauses themselves do. | V.M. Holmes, 1988

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:

    1. 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

  1. (Grammar) As strictly defined, the morphological marking of event plurality on the verb. The term pluractional was coined by Newman (1980) to set apart morphemes that mark event plurality from inflectional plural agreement, that is, the marking of person on the verb. Newman used the term to describe the morphology and the meaning of some verbal morphemes of some African languages. In the descriptive linguistics literature, one finds other ways of describing the same phenomenon:

    1.  Distributive markers—in the tradition of the description of native American languages.
    2.  Verbal plurality—in Cusic's (1981) classical work Verbal Plurality and Aspect.

     In more recent analyses, the notion of pluractionality has departed from morphology to become more generally the notion of event plurality. | Ana Müller and Luciana Sanchez-Mendes, 2020
  2. (Grammar) Pluractionality is meant to be the verbal analog of plurality in the nominal domain. So, for instance, just like English has an affix -s which derives the noun dogs from the noun dog, allowing it to be predicated of plural individuals, Yup'ik (Eskimo-Aleut; USA) has the postbase -taartuq, which derives verbs that denote pluralities of events that, individually, would satisfy the underived verb.

      Yup'ik (Jacobson 1984 / 2012)
    1. a. nere- 'to eat' ∼ nerqetaartuq 'he keeps eating at intervals'
      b. ayag- 'to leave' ∼ ayaketaartuq 'he is leaving, returning, then leaving again'

     We call such verb pluractional verbs, and the morphemes that derive them pluractionals or pluractional marking. What pluractionals do is make clear that a plurality of events are being discussed, and while additionally often making clear how this plurality of events is being individuated for counting (e.g., by taking place in different locations, or with different participants, etc.). | Robert Henderson, 2019
  3. (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, 2024

PLURAL INDEFINITE
(Examples)
 ○ The Istriot (Indo-European; Croatia) quantifier uni / une is unique in the Italo-Romance domain since, generally, the plural indefinite forms derived from the Latin numeral 'one' are pronouns and never occur in attributive position (Loporcaro 2017). | Alberto Giudici and Chiara Zanini, 2021
 ○ I provide a decompositional analysis of three kinds of plural indefinites, in two related languages, European Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The three indefinites studied are bare plurals, the unos (Spanish) / uns (Portuguese) type, and the algunos (Spanish) / alguns (Portuguese) type. | Luisa Martí, 2008
 ○ Since the end of the nineties the structure and meaning of Romance plural / mass indefinite nominals has been a matter of some debate (Chierchia 1998, Bosveld-De Smet 1998, 2004, Storto 2003, Roy 2001). Meaningwise, the determiners that introduce these nominals, degli and des in (1), behave as plural or mass indefinite articles, equivalent to the English some in some people / water. Morphologically, however, degli and des appear to be composed of the preposition di 'of' incorporated with the regular form of the definite article.

  1. a. Italian
    Ho
    I.have
    incontrato
    met
    degli
    of.the
    studenti.
    students
    'I have met some students.'

    b. French
    J'ai
    I.have
    rencontré
    met
    des
    of.the
    étudiants.
    students
    'I have met some students.'
 | Roberto Zamparelli, 2008
 ○ Generalizing 'one' as an indefinite determiner for the plural is not as frequent. The plural-'one' indefinite article is found in Romance Languages: it is used in Catalan (uns, unes), Old French (uns, unes), Galician (uns, unhas), Portuguese (uns, umhas), Romanian (unii, unele) and Spanish (unos, unas). But not all Romance languages have extended the use of 'one' as indefinite article to the plural. Italian has developed a partitive article (dei, della) to convey a plural indefinite meaning similar to unos-DPs, and Modern French has substituted the old plural indefinite article uns, unes by a partitive article des. | Helena Lopez Palma, 2007
 ○ English NPs which begin with a / an (an elephant, a big lie), "indefinite descriptions", are prototypical examples of indefinite NPs. (Plural indefinite descriptions use the determiner some.) | Barbara Abbott, 2006

PLURAL SIDE

  1. (Stratificational Grammar) The plural side of a node is the side, either the top or the bottom, to which more than one line is connected. For example, a downward OR node has one line connected to the top, which thus is called the singular side, and two or more lines connected to the bottom, the plural side. An upward AND node has two or more lines connected to the top, the plural side, and one connected to the bottom, the singular side. | Glottopedia, 2017
  2. (Stratificational Grammar) AND nodes are represented with triangles, whereas OR nodes are represented with horizontal brackets. Each node has a singular and a plural side, determined by the number of nodes each side is connected to. The singular side of a node is the one possessing just one connecting line. The position of the plural side (the side linked to at least two other nodes) dictates the node's orientation: if the plural side faces upwards, then the node is upward; if the plural side faces downwards, then the node is downward. | Adolfo Marín García, 2015
  3. (Stratificational Grammar) According to the vertical convention adopted in Stratificational Grammar, whereby meanings or functions are on the uppermost stratum and phonological expression is at the lowest one, each node can have an upward direction (leading from a given stratum to a higher one) or a downward direction (leading from a given stratum to a lower one). All nodes have both a plural and a singular side, determined by how many other nodes they can be connected to on each end. On the plural side, two or more lines either converge or branch out to receive or send activation from or to several other nodes; the singular side has only one line connecting the node with a single other node by which it can be activated. | Adolfo Martín García and José María Gil, 2009
  4. (Stratificational Grammar) A typical SG node has a singular side (one terminal) and a plural side (two terminals). The node is bidirectional. In encoding, inputs are from the top; in decoding, from the bottom. This is why behavioral definitions divide a bidirectional node into two unidirectional nodes. For either of these nodes, the output is defined as a function of the input(s). | Rüdiger Schreyer, 1980
  5. (Examples)
     ○ A nection contains one line—called the nection center—which connects the singular side of one node to the singular side of another node. Other internal lines connect the plural side of one node to the singular side of another. External lines, are, by definition, lines which connect the plural side of one node to the plural side of another node; on every such line there is a nection boundary. | R. Oehrle, E. Bach, and D. Wheeler, 2008
     ○ Other internal lines connect the plural side of one node to the singular side of another, for example, a line connecting the plural side of an "upward AND" to the singular side of an "upward OR". | David C. Bennett, 2008
     ○ In this model the nodes are defined in terms of the logical nature of the relationship (AND, OR, precedence). Lines that appear to cross without a node are actually two-dimensional projections of lines that are skew in three-dimensional space. The triangle shows an AND relation, the square bracket an OR. Spacing between lines on the plural side of a node indicates precedence in either time (with AND) or choice (with OR). | William J. Sullivan, 2000
     ○ Implicit in most, if not all, definitions of the ordered AND is not only that the constituents on the plural side are temporally ordered, but also that they are temporally contiguous. | Lars Borin, 1988

 

Page Created By Split April 11, 2026

 
B a c k   T o   I n d e x