Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 R-Rec

R-EXPRESSION

  1. (Binding Theory) Full NPs, e.g., the actress, that are typically referentially independent, and descriptively richer than reflexives, reciprocals, or pronouns. (Chomsky 1981) | Routledge Handbook of Syntax, 2014
  2. (Syntax) If the head of a phrase has lexical features (or certain grammatical features, such as wh) this phrase is an R-expression. Thus the merry linguist, the idiot, everyone, which man, etc., are all R-expressions. R-expressions cannot be bound. | Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2006
  3. (Grammar) A referential expression, such as John or the dog: one that, unlike pronouns and anaphora, independently refers to, i.e., picks out, an entity in the world. | Wiktionary, 2016

RADICAL ARGUMENT ELLIPSIS
(Syntax) Often leaves verbs the only element in an utterance. | Penny Brown, 1998

RADICALLY TRUNCATED CLAUSE
(Syntax) A minimal VP that lacks vP and all the higher projections in:

  1. Hungarian
     
    [VP
     
    sör
    internal arg. [V'
    beer
    meg
    PRT
    PRT
    isz
    V ] ]
    drink
    'I/you/etc. drink/drank the beer.'
 RTCs are produced in informal speech situations and under time pressure.
  1. Hungarian
    [Namármost
    well
    amikor
    when
    én
    I
    alud-t-am
    slept-PST-1SG
    ott,
    there
    úgy
    so
    kezd-t-em,
    start-PST-1SG
    hogy]
    that
    szemét
    rubbish
    le-visz,
    PRT-carry
    szoba
    room
    rendbe-rak,
    PRT-put
    fürdőszoba
    bathroom
    el-pakol ...
    PRT-pack
    'So when I was sleeping there, the way I started was I took out the rubbish, I cleared the room, I cleared the bathroom.'
 The derivation is terminated prematurely at the VP level, and the bare VP (lacking any of the higher functional projections) is sent to spellout (PF) and semantic interpretation (LF). Why? To maximize the efficiency of the exchange of information: if all the information that is encoded above VP is recoverable by the hearer from the context, it might make sense not to waste time and effort building the above-VP level.
 There is a price: various grammaticality conditions are breached: the Theta Criterion, spellout by phase, semantic interpretability at LF, and the principle that the numeration needs to be exhausted. RTCs are limited to informal contexts and have a degraded acceptability (4.2 on a 1-to-7 Likert scale). | Tamás Halm, 2022

RAGGED MIDDLE
(Syntax) For Halliday (1961), "[t]he middle ranks of the grammar are often the most complex, presumably since they face both ways; so that a grammar which starts unidirectionally from the two ends will find it difficult to avoid leaving the middle ragged". | Lise Fontaine, 2023

RAISING

  1. (Syntax) A process by which a NP or other element is moved from a subordinate clause into the structure of the larger clause that includes it. | Guy Deutscher, 2000
  2. (Syntax) Raising constructions involve the movement of an argument from an embedded or subordinate clause to a matrix or main clause; in other words, a raising predicate/verb appears with a syntactic argument that is not its semantic argument, but is rather the semantic argument of an embedded predicate. For example, in they seem to be trying, the predicand of trying is the subject of seem. Although English has raising constructions, not all languages do.
     The term "raising" has its origins in the transformational analysis of such constructions; the constituent in question is seen as being raised from its initial deep structure position, as the subject of the embedded predicate, to its surface structure position in the matrix predicate/verb. Raising predicates/verbs are related to control predicates, although there are important differences between the two predicate/verb types. | Wikipedia, 2021
  3. (Phonetics/Phonology) A sound change in which a vowel or consonant becomes higher or raised, meaning that the tongue becomes more elevated or positioned closer to the roof of the mouth than before. The opposite effect is known as lowering. Raising or lowering may be triggered by a nearby sound, when it is a form of assimilation, or it may occur on its own. | Wikipedia, 2021

RAISING TO OBJECT EMBEDDED PASSIVE
(Syntax) E.g., Suki wanted him to be kissed by Louise [where him is considered to be the subject of the embedded passive clause, after which him is raised to a object position in the matrix clause.] | ?

RATIONALE CLAUSE

  1. (Grammar) Abbreviated RatC. Used to express someone's rationale or the intention with which an event was brought about. In German, they are expressed in either finite (introduced by damit) or non-finite form (introduced by um). If the matrix clause describes an event that cannot be brought about by intentional action (or by natural design), the Rationale Clause is heavily degraded. A felicitous interpretation of (2) would require Susi to have rigged the lottery in her favor. On the basis of facts like these, Rationale Clauses are often mentioned as tracking the RESP(onsibility)-relation in the sense of Farkas (1988).
    1. Susi
      Susi
      hat
      has
      sich
      herself
      einen
      a
      Glücksbringer
      luck.bringer
      gekauft,
      bought
      um
      UM
      in
      in.the
      Lotto
      lottery
      zu
      to
      gewinnen.
      win.
      'Susi bought herself a talisman in order to win the lottery.'
    2. # Susi
      Susi
      hat
      has
      im
      in.the
      Lotto
      lottery
      gewonnen,
      won
      um
      UM
      ihre
      her
      Schulden
      debt
      zurückzahlen
      pay.back
      zu
      to
      können.
      be.able
      'Susi won the lottery to be able to pay back her debt.'
     | Felix Frühauf, 2023
  2. (Grammar) Or, "in order to" clause, or, result clause. Easily confused with the purpose clause (PC) is the "rationale clause" (RatC). RatC can be distinguished from PC by the fact that RatC permit only subject gaps, whose antecedent is (usually) the matrix subject, rather than its object. Note the ambiguity of the following:
    1. Amy Loui took Mildredj to the zoo ei/j to feed the lions.
    On the PC reading, Mildred is feeding the lions; on the RatC reading Amy Lou is feeding the lions (possibly using Mildred as lion food). A RatC reading may always be paraphrased with in order, as in (2), to rule out the PC reading:
    1. Amy Loui took Mildredj to the zoo in order ei/*j to feed the lions.
     In contrast with PC, the controller of a RatC gap need not be any argument of the main verb, but can be the matrix predicate as a whole:
    1. Mildred was thrown in the lion cage to keep her from tallking.
     Further, the RatC subject gap is optional:
    1. Elroy killed Oscar in order for Sylvia to escape.
     Finally, RatC are daughters of S, and not VP, and may therefore be preposed alone (6) or otherwise isolated from the VP (7):
    1. Helga carries a hat pin to protect herself.
    2. To protect herself, Helga carries a hat pin.
    3. What Helga does to protect herself is carry a hat pin.
     | Alison K. Huettner, Marie M. Vaughan, and David D. McDonald, 1987
See Also PURPOSE CLAUSE.

RECENCY ILLUSION
The belief that things you have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts. Again and again—retro not, double is, speaker-oriented hopefully, split infinitives, etc.—the phenomena turn out to have been around, with some frequency, for very much longer than you think. It's not just Kids These Days.
 Professional linguists can be as subject to the Recency Illusion as anyone else. Charles Hockett wrote in 1958 (A Course in Modern Linguistics) about "the recent colloquial pattern I'm going home and eat", what Laura Staum has been investigating under the name (due to me) the GoToGo construction. Here's an example I overheard in a Palo Alto restaurant on 8/6/05:

  1. I'm goin' out there and sleep in the tent.
 But Hockett's belief that the construction was recent in 1958 is just wrong; David Denison, at Manchester, has collected examples from roughly 30 years before that. | Arnold Zwicky, 2005

RECONSTRUCTION
(Generative Syntax) An operation proposed in Chomsky (1977) in the derivation of LF from S-structure, which returns material pied-piped by wh-movement to the extraction site so as to derive an operator-variable chain headed by the wh-operator itself.
 By reconstruction, the LF (2) is derived from the SS (1):

  1. which book about Mary does he like t
  2. which x, does he like [ x book about Mary ]
 As a result, interpretation of the LF is relatively straightforward. Syntactic evidence for reconstruction comes from the behavior of pied-piped material with respect to binding theory. In (3)
  1. which book about himself does John like t
the anaphor himself can apparently be bound by the NP John, which does not, however, c-command it at SS. This can be explained if the constituent containing the anaphor is returned to its pre-movement position prior to the operation of binding condition A. Other analyses of such reconstruction phenomena can involve an extended notion of c-command, a reordering of the model of grammar (van Riemsdijk and Williams 1981), or a view of movement as copying and deletion (Chomsky 1992). (Chomsky 1977, 1993; van Riemsdijk and Williams 1986; Williams 1994) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001

RECOVERABILITY
(Semantics)

  1. John ate Øobject
    recoverable object: belongs to the category of Edibles (grammatical sentence)
  2. *John made Øobject
    non-recoverable object: basically anything can be made! (ungrammatical sentence).
  3. John beheaded the prisoner ØInstrument
    recoverable Instrument: a heavy-bladed tool, possibly a sword (Require-Instrument verb)
  4. John killed the prisoner ØInstrument
    non-recoverable Instrument: a weapon? poison? bare hands? (Allow-Instrument verb)
 (Koenig, Mauner, and Bienvenue 2002, 2003; Koenig, Mauner, Bienvenue, and Conklin 2007) | Giulia Cappelli and Alessandro Lenci, 2020

 

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