Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Q

Q-DELETION

  1. (Syntax) Ellipsis is a grammatical operation that deletes the instructions for vocabulary insertion (VI) at PF. In principle, any object built up in the syntax can be subject to ellipsis in this sense, and as we will see, many syntactic objects meet the conditions for ellipsis at different stages of a given derivation. I furthermore propose that there is a distinction between phrases and heads: whereas phrases are elided in narrow syntax, heads are elided at PF. The two types are elided under different locality conditions as well.
     Phrasal ellipsis applies entirely in the syntax. Any syntactic object that is marked as elliptical in the syntax is excluded from undergoing VI. There are at least two views on VI: on the additive approach, phonological information is added to abstract morphemes following the principles that govern insertion (such as the Subset Principle); on the replacive view, VI consists of substitution of the free variable Q.
     I propose that we adopt the replacive view on VI. On this conception, ellipsis can then be seen as Q-deletion in the syntax triggered by the mere presence of an [E]-feature in the relevant domain. Deleting a Q-feature automatically blocks the substitution operation that is at the core of the replacive approach to vocabulary insertion. The result of Q-deletion for the complement of a given [E]-feature-bearing head is illustrated in (1), for the VP ellipsis example Laura likes ellipsis and Jason does, too. Angled brackets indicate successful applications of Q-deletion.

    1.       VoiceP
            ╱╲    E-site
           ╱   ╲ ↙
        [Voice, E]    VP
                  ╱╲
                ╱   ╲
            [V, like, <Q>]   DP
                  ╱╲
                 ╱______╲
                [D, ellipsis, <Q>]
     | Andrés Saab, 2022
  2. (Example) We adopt the Q-deletion approach to ellipsis (Saab 2022), which we call Distributed Ellipsis, in combination with Aelbrecht's (2010) licensing mechanism via Agree between the licensor and the head bearing the [E] feature (cf. Merchant 2001, who however models ellipsis as PF deletion and [E] as imposing the mutual entailment condition at LF, neither of which are adopted by Saab 2022). In this implementation, Vocabulary Insertion replaces Q-variables on syntactic terminals in PF (Halle 1991, Embick 2015), and ellipsis is a syntactic operation that deletes Q-variables, thus bleeding lexical insertion in the PF cycle. | Gesoel Mendes, et al., 2025

Q-FEATURE

  1. (Morphology) A feature that has its origin in the (Split) Degree Hypothesis (Bresnan 1973, Corver 1997). Corver introduced Q as part of the extended functional projection of adjectives, where it served as the host for such adjectival modifiers as much, more, less, enough. Unlike Corver, I argue that the elements which he argues are merged in Q consist of a Q-feature, i.e. Q is part of their internal structure.
     Q is a necessary feature to express scalar quantity. | Karen De Clercq, 2017
  2. (Morphology) Caha (2017) presents evidence suggesting that the Czech regular comparative suffix -ějš- in fact consists of two parts, i.e. that it is to be segmented as -ěj-š-. ... 

    1.             C2
            /\
           /  \
         C1    C2
         /\     |
        /  \    |
       A   C2   |
       |    |   |
    bujar  ěj   š
     Before we proceed, we want to modify the structure in (1) somewhat. We take the head A to have internal structure itself, being composed of a gradability feature Q, and something which for concreteness we represent as √ (De Clercq and Vanden Wyngaerd 2018). We shall in fact argue below that is not the bottom of the functional sequence, but needs to be further decomposed. The adjectival roots of the bujar 'merry' type therefore do not merely realize the terminal node A, but a phrasal node QP, which is composed of Q and √. Nanosyntax in fact assumes that there is never insertion under a terminal node, but that all insertion is insertion at the phrasal level, and that lexical items contain syntactic trees (Starke 2014). The full tree of bujařejší 'merrier', which moreover fully reflects its derivational history, therefore looks as in (2). 

    1.                 C2P
                / \
               /   \
              /     \
            C1P     C2P
            / \      |
           /   \     |
          QP   C1P   C2
          /\    |    š
         /  \   |
        Q    √  C1
         bujar  ěj
     | Karen De Clercq and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, 2018

QU'EST-CE QUE QUESTION

  1. (Grammar) In French, a constituent interrogative about a subject complement or an object:

    1.  Qu'est-ce que c'est?
       'What is this?'
    2.  Qu'est-ce que tu fais?
      'What are you doing?'

     In English, there is a standard interrogative form (subject-auxiliary inversion) with no other option. In French, there is also a standard form (est-ce que + subject + verb), but it's optional; this form results from constraints on que and quoi:

    1.  Qu'est-ce ?
       * Quoi est-ce?
       'What is this?'
    2.  Que fais-tu?
       * Quoi fais-tu?
       'What are you doing?'
    3.  * C'est que?
       C'est quoi?
       'It is what?'
    4.  * Tu fais que?
       Tu fais quoi?
       'You are doing what?'

     Quoi appears in post-verbal position. Que is a weak interrogative that cannot appear in postverbal position; in contemporary French, que tends to cooccur with the interrogative particle est-ce que in fronted position (qu'est-ce que). This allows maintaining SV order, standard word order in French (Druetta 2018).
     Syntactically, qu'est-ce que can be used in non-argumental questions meaning 'how come' (Dekhissi 2016):

    1.  
       
      Qu'est-ce que
      what
      t'as
      you have
      été
      been
      te mêler
      interfering
      de
      with
      ça?!
      this
       'Why the hell did you interfere?'

     | Agnès Celle, 2020
  2. (Grammar) The most common type of question found in spoken French is the type in (1).

    1.  
       
      Qu'est-ce
      what-is-it
      que
      that
      tu
      you
      veux?
      want
       'What do you want?'

     These periphrastic questions consist of any Wh-phrase immediately followed by the string est-ce que, thought by some grammarians to involve an unanalyzable chunk. An alternative view treats the string as complex, involving inversion of the main clause subject ce and the verb. | Bernadette Plunkett, 2000
  3. (Grammar) In French, a non-argumental use of qu'est-ce que is available, in addition to an argumental one. Qu'est-ce que questions range from an information-seeking function to an expressive function. Like cossa in Pagotto (Eastern Italian), qu'est-ce que is always fronted, but its use is not limited to non-canonical questions. | Agnès Celle, 2023
  4. (Grammar) Expressivity can be conveyed in what the hell-questions in English and mais qu'est-ce que-questions in French; expressivity intersects with the speech act of questioning. In both languages, what and qu' only refer to inanimate entities. | Agnès Celle, Anne Jugnet, and Laure Lansari, 2021

QUANTIFICATION

  1. (Logic) Quantifier expressions are marks of generality. They come in many syntactic categories in English, but determiners like all, each, some, many, most, and few provide some of the most common examples of quantification. We may conceive of determiners like every and some as binary quantifiers of the form
    Q ( A, B )
    which may operate on two predicates, A and B, in order to form a sentence.
     Binary quantifiers of this sort played an important role in what is perhaps the first formal study of quantification developed by Aristotle in the Prior Analytics.
     Modern quantificational logic has chosen to focus on formal counterparts of the unary quantifiers everything and something, which may be written ∀x and ∃x, respectively. They are unary quantifiers because they require a single argument in order to form a sentence of the form
    ∀x A (the counterpart of everything)
    ∃x A (the counterpart of something)
     Frege (and Russell) devised an ingenious procedure for regimenting binary quantifiers like every and some in terms of unary quantifiers like everything and something: they formalized sentences of the form
    ⌜ Some A is B ⌝ as ∃x (Ax ∧ Bx)
    ⌜ Every A is B ⌝ as ∀x (Ax → Bx)
     | Gabriel Uzquiano, 2022
  2. (Semantics) According to Wise (2004), quantification is a limitation imposed on the variables of a proposition by the quantifiers some, all, or no. It refers to an operator that binds a variable ranging over a domain of discourse. The following example from Arabic illustrates this:

    1. Kul
      Every
      bint
      girl
      karim
      Karim
      gal
      said.3SM
      ? in-ha / -ha
      that-Cl / -Cl
      hi
      she
      raH
      will
      tinJaH
      success.3SF
      'Every girl, Karim said that she will pass' (Aoun et al., 2001)

     | Shivan Shlaymoon Toma, 2016

QUANTIFICATIONAL NULL ARGUMENT
(Semantics) As originally observed by Shinohara (2004) and developed later by Takahashi (2008), null arguments in Japanese allow a wider range of interpretations than indefinite pronouns. Consider the examples in (1) below:

  1. Japanese
    a.
     
    Masa-wa
    Masa-TOP
    [san-ko-no
    3-CL-GEN
    booru]-o
    ball-ACC
    ket-ta.
    kick-PAST
      'Masa kicked three balls.'
    b.
     
    Ken-mo
    Ken-also
    [e]
     –
    ket-ta.
    kick-PAST
      Lit. 'Ken also kicked [e].'
 In (1b) the direct object, which is anteceded by the quantificational expression san-ko-no booru 'three balls,' is not pronounced. It has been observed that (1b) allows various interpretations.
  1. It can mean that Ken also kicked all three balls that Masa kicked. Following Takahashi (2008), I call this an E-type reading, because the null object under this interpretation functions just like what is called an E-type pronoun in the literature (cf. Evans 1980).
  2. An indefinite reading, in which Ken also kicked balls (irrespective of the number of the balls that he kicked) (cf. Hoji 1998).
  3. The quantificational reading, where Ken also kicked three balls (and the set of the balls that Ken kicked is different from the set of balls that Masa kicked).
 The difference between the indefinite reading and the quantificational reading becomes clearer in a negative context.

  1. Japanese
    a.
     
    Masa-wa
    Masa-TOP
    [san-ko-no
    3-CL-GEN
    booru]-o
    ball-ACC
    ket-ta.
    kick-PAST
      'Masa kicked three balls.'
    b.
     
    Demo,
    but
    Ken-wa
    Ken-also
    [e]
     –
    kera-na-katta.
    kick-NEG-PAST
      Lit. 'But, Ken did not kick [e].'
 The sentence in (5b) can be true in the situation where Ken only kicked two balls that are different from the balls that Masa kicked. On the other hand, the indefinite reading makes (5b) false: if the null object in (5b) is interpreted as an indefinite NP 'a ball,' the sentence means that 'but, Ken did not kick any ball,' which is not consistent with the given situation. | Koichi Ohtaki, 2014

QUANTIFICATIONAL NULL OBJECT
(Grammar) I will focus on null objects of the kind found in cases like (1b), which may be called quantificational null objects.

  1. Japanese
    a.
     
    Hanako-ga
    Hanako-NOM
    taitei-no
    most-GEN
    sensei-o
    teacher-ACC
    sonkeisiteiru.
    respect
      'Hanako respects most teachers.'
    b.
     
    Taroo-mo
    Taroo-also
    e
    –
    sonkeisiteiru.
    respect
       Lit. Taroo respects too.'
 This is somewhat parallel to the following case of VP-ellipsis:

  1.  English
     Mary respects most teachers.
     And John does, too.
 The second clause in (2) means that John respects most teachers, and for the purpose of interpretation, the understood quantificational object behaves independently of its antecedent in the first clause: namely, the set of the teachers John respects can differ from the set of the teachers Mary respects.
 Although I limit myself to null objects here, null subjects seem to behave similarly. | Daiko Takahashi, 2008

QUANTIFIER

  1. (Grammar; Logic) A type of determiner, such as all, some, many, few, a lot, and no, but not numerals, that indicates quantity.
     Quantification is also used in logic, where it is a formula constructor that produces new formulas from old ones. Natural languages' determiners have been argued to correspond to logical quantifiers at the semantic level.
     The study of quantification in natural languages is much more difficult than the corresponding problem for formal languages. This comes in part from the fact that the grammatical structure of natural language sentences may conceal the logical structure. | Wikipedia, 2016
  2. (Grammar) The seven types of determiners in English are articles, possessives, distributives, interrogatives, numerals, and quantifiers:
    All, any, both, many, much, some, several, few, a few, the few, fewer, less, little, a little, the little, a large number of, a great deal of, a lot of, lots of, no, none, not any.
     | ALLEN Career Institute, ?
  3. (Logic) An operation that tells us which elements in the universe are being applied to the open sentence in question. There are two main quantifiers. The universal quantifier uses the symbol ∀ and is translated as 'for all'. If our universe of discourse is all natural numbers,
    (∀x) (2x is even)
    'For all natural numbers x, 2x is even.'
     The existential quantifier is represented by the symbol ∃, which is translated as 'there exists.' An example would be
    (∃x)(2x is 10)
    'There exists a natural number x such that 2x = 10.'
     | Anita Dunn, 2022
  4. (Grammar) Quantifier expressions are marks of generality. They come in many syntactic categories in English, but determiners like all, each, some, many, most, and few provide some of the most common examples of quantification. In English, they combine with singular or plural nouns, sometimes qualified by adjectives or relative clauses, to form explicitly restricted quantifier phrases such as some apples, every material object, or most planets. These quantifier phrases may in turn combine with predicates in order to form sentences such as in (1).

    1. a. Some apples are delicious.
      b. Every material object is extended.
      c. Most planets are visible to the naked eye.

     | Gabriel Uzquiano, 2022

QUANTIFIER DOMAIN
(Logic) Elements that a quantifier quantifies over. | Alan Hezao Ke et al., 2016

QUANTIFIER FLOAT

  1. (Syntax) Or, Q-float. A phenomenon in which a quantifier is separated from the nominal it associates with (The cookies will all have been eaten up by then!). The phenomenon has received two major analyses:


     | Eman Al Khalaf, 2019
  2. (Examples) From Rochman 2005:

    1. a. The carpets have been cleaned.
      b. The carpets have been all cleaned.
      c. The carpets have all been cleaned.
      d. The carpets all have been cleaned.
    2. a. All the children might have seen the movie.
      b. The children might have all seen the movie.
      c. The children might all have seen the movie.
      d. The children all might have seen the movie.

     | Tomohiro Yanagi, 2023

QUANTITATIVE METATHESIS

  1. (Phonology) Historically this change, an apparent metathesis of vowel length in Ancient Greek, has been considered to be true metathesis by classicists, but recent scholarship has cast suspicion on this notion, not least because metathesis of vowel length is not a known change in any other language. | Anita Brown, 2017
  2. (Phonology) One rather unusual set of Attic changes, also attested in some Ionic forms, had the combined effect of exchanging vowel length in sequences of two consecutive vowels of which ⟨η⟩ ([ɛː]) was the first member. These changes collectively are known as quantitative metathesis. One change shortened [ɛː] to [e] before {æː, aː, ɔː}, as in πολεως 'city (GEN.SG)' from πολης. Another change affected [ɛː] before {o, a}, again creating [e] as the first member but also lengthening the second member to ⟨ω⟩ (i.e., [ɔː]) in the case of [o] or ⟨ᾱ⟩ in the case of [a] (Buck 1965), as in βασιλεᾱ 'king (ACC.SG)' from βασιληα. | Bridget D. Samuels, 2017
  3. (Example) But I disagree with what is being said here about the Ionic form *-ηο. Such a form, as I am about to argue, could exist and in fact did exist in earlier phases of Homeric diction. That is, it existed until the formulaic system of this diction reached a point in its evolution when the sequence of vowels ηο was automatically converted to εω in a phonological process commonly known as quantitative metathesis. | Gregory Nagy, 2010

QUASIMODAL

  1. (Grammar) A word or phrase, such as better, need to, able to, or supposed to, that has features similar to those of modals but is not a true modal. Quasimodals express possibility, necessity or ability, like modals. However, they cannot take contracted negation (n't) or undergo subject-auxiliary inversion. | Yale Grammatical Diversity Project
  2. (Grammar) In his now well-known treatment of the modal auxiliaries in the history of English, Lightfoot (1979) considers "perhaps the most remarkable change of all" to be the development of the quasimodals be going to, have to, and be able to, which are semantically equivalent to shall/will, must, and can, and "differ only syntactically in that they have all the usual properties of other verbs". | Laurel J. Brinton, 1991
  3. (Grammar) The principal means by which modality—which embraces such notions as possibility, necessity, ability, obligation, and permission—is expressed in English is the class of modal auxiliaries (often referred to simply as "modals"), but increasingly commonly by quasi-modals (periphrastic expressions of the type have to and BE going to, also referred to as semi-modals). Salient characteristics of the quasi-modals are their semantic similarity to the modals and idiomaticity; for example, the modal meaning of BE going to, as in (1), extends the literal motional meaning associated with going, as in (2) (see further Westney 1995, Krug 2000, Collins 2009).

    1.  I'm going to leave the discussion here (GloWbE, NZ)
    2.  Oh no, I'm going to Paris this year (GloWbE, AU)

     | Peter Collins, 2023
  4. (Logic) A first-order sentence is quasi-modal if its class of models is closed under the modal validity preserving constructions of disjoint unions, inner substructures and bounded epimorphic images. | Robert Goldblatt, 2001

QUESTION UNDER DISCUSSION (QUD)

  1. (Pragmatics) The (often implicit) question that participants in the discourse are trying to answer. For example, the QUD can be what you did over the weekend, answering by We went for a walk, which can be followed by and then had a nice cup of tea, which can be seen as answering an implicit QUD 'and what happened then?'. QUD can be seen as a framework to understand how sentences in a discourse relate to each other. | Jenneke van der Wal and Stavros Skopeteas, 2019
  2. (Pragmatics; Information Structure) An analytic tool for characterizing how a sentence fits in its context. The idea is that each sentence in discourse addresses a (often implicit) QUD either by answering it, or by bringing up another question that can help answer that QUD. The linguistic form and the interpretation of a sentence, in turn, may depend on the QUD it addresses.
     The first proponents of the QUD approach (von Stutterheim and Klein 1989, van Kuppevelt 1995) thought of it as a general approach to the analysis of discourse structure where structural relations between sentences in a coherent discourse are understood in terms of relations between questions they address. For instance, according to von Stutterheim and Klein (1989) a typical structure of a narrative is given by a sequence of questions:

    1.  What happened at t1?
    2.  What happened at t2?
    3.  What happened at t3?
    4.  Etc.

    where t1 precedes t2, and t2 precedes t3. The sequence is subordinated to the overarching quaestio of the whole text:

    1.  What happened at ti?

     The concept of QUD proved useful in the analysis of a wide range of linguistic phenomena that in the general spirit of von Stutterheim and Klein and van Kuppevelt fall under the notion of local, i.e. sentence-level effects of the QUD. This includes first and foremost the information structure of the sentence, the accentuation pattern induced by the partition of the sentence into focus and background and the interpretation of focus-sensitive operators. The influential proposal of Roberts (1996 [2012]), which provided both a general QUD-based approach to pragmatics and an account of focus, inspired much further theoretical work on information structure including Büring (2003) on contrastive topics and Beaver and Clark (2008) on focus particles. The intuition behind it is the same as that behind the well-known question-answer test used to detect the focus structure of a sentence. | Anton Benz and Katja Jasinskaja, 2017

QUOTATIVE EVIDENTIAL

  1. (Grammar) An evidential that signals that someone else is the source of the statement made.

    1. Shipibo (Panoan; Peru and Brazil)
      cai-ronqui
      going-QUOTATIVE
      reocoocainyantanque
      he.turned.over
      'Reportedly, while he was going (in his boat), he turned over.'

     (Chung and Timberlake 1985, Nida 1949, Palmer 1986 [2001], Dahl 1985) | SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms, 2003
  2. (Grammar) Abbreviated QEV. In Laal (isolate, Chad), mí is a specialized quotative evidential, not just an indirect-reported-speech embedded clause marker and not just a reported evidential (hearsay). From Aikhenvald (2004):


     In Laal, the author is always known, even when not explicitly mentioned; hence, mí is quotative. | Florian Lionnet, 2015

 

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