Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Stray-Strt

STRAY ERASURE

  1. (Phonology) A consonant or a skeletal position which cannot be syllabified is dropped at the end of the derivation by virtue of a universal convention called Stray Erasure. | Kim Sun-Hee, 1995
  2. (Phonology) As has often been discussed in the syllable structure literature, when conditions on syllable structure are violated, a repair strategy can be invoked to yield a well-formed syllable. One proposal is stray erasure, which is erasure of material not satisfying the syllable template. | Keren D. Rice, 1988
  3. (Example)
     ○ By requiring that each segment be syllabically licensed (modulo extraprosodicity), Prosodic Licensing ensures that a phonological string is exhaustively syllabified. We can understand the mechanism of Stray Erasure (extensively motivated in earlier nonlinear work, e.g. McCarthy 1979/1985/2018, Steriade 1982, Cairns and Feinstein 1982, Harris 1983) as eliminating unlicensed material from the phonological string so that Prosodic Licensing is satisfied. | Junko Itô, 1988/2018

STRESS ACCENT
See PITCH ACCENT.

STRICT DOMINANCE HIERARCHY

  1. (Optimality Theory) OT relies on a conceptually simple but surprisingly rich notion of constraint interaction, where the satisfaction of one constraint can be designated to take absolute priority over the satisfaction of another. The means that grammar uses to resolve conflicts is to rank constraints in a strict dominance hierarchy. Each constraint has absolute priority over all the constraints lower in the hierarchy (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004). | Farnaz Ebadi, Mohammad Reza Oroji, Sakineh Ja'fari, and Mehri Talkhabi, 2025
  2. (Optimality Theory)  In OT, Universal Grammar is conceived as a set of unordered conflicting constraints on well-formedness, and learning a language-specific grammar comes down to resolving these conflicts by ranking the constraints in a strict dominance hierarchy. | Dicky Gilbers and Klarien van der Linde, 1995
  3. (Optimality Theory) OT (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004) is thoroughly in the business of making sense of systematic interactions among conflicting conditions. At the heart of OT is the premise that the grammar of a language is defined by a particular ranking of a universal set of violable constraints in a strict dominance hierarchy; a conflict between any two constraints over the selection of a given input-output pairing is resolved in favor of the higher-ranked of the two. | Eric Bakovic, 2000

STRICT INTERPRETATION
(Semantics) A wide range of expressions can be given more or less strict interpretations, for example, flat and empty. Sometimes we use them in loose ways: when we say the fridge is empty, we don't mean it is an absolute vacuum. Sometimes we use these expressions intending to defer to the strict usage of relevant experts: when we say that an event is probable, we aim to invoke the concept as defined by experts on probability theory, even if we ourselves don't know exactly what that is.
 When we borrow an expression from a strict science, we may employ harmless-for-our-purposes simplifications that make our utterances, strictly speaking, false. We often use language this way: when describing my rheumatoid pain I may say that I have arthritis in my thigh, and it will be clear enough what I mean. But I aim to mean by arthritis what my doctor means, so if she informs me that it refers only to afflictions of the joints, I will adjust my usage. When we aim to use an expression as the experts do, but our everyday purposes aren't demanding, we often get by with uses that don't quite meet the strict standards. Call these cases of speaking strictly-enough. | Renée Jorgensen Bolinger and Alexander Sandgren, 2020

STRIDENT

  1. (Phonology) This widely accepted feature, originally proposed by Jakobson (1939), was defined as follows by Jakobson, Fant and Halle (1952):
    Strident phonemes are primarily characterized by a noise which is due to turbulence at the point of articulation. This strong turbulence, in its turn, is a consequence of a more complex impediment which distinguishes the strident from the corresponding mellow consonants: the labiodentals from the bilabials, the hissing and hushing sibilants from the nonsibilant dentals and palatals respectively, and the uvulars from the velars proper.
     This definition covers stops as well as fricatives. It thus distinguishes not only sibilant fricatives from corresponding nonsibilant fricatives, as in English sigh [s] vs. thigh [θ], but also sibilant affricates from corresponding nonsibilant stops, as in German reizen [ts] 'to tease' vs. reiten [t] 'to ride'. The feature [strident] has been maintained in one form or another in most subsequent work. | Hyunsoon Kim, George N. Clements, and Martine Toda, 2015
  2. (Phonetics) We employ the feature [strident] to capture the contrast between two sets of fricatives:

    1.  Non-sibilant (coronal) fricatives (i.e. / θ ð /) vs. sibilant (coronal) fricatives (e.g. / s z /) and
    2.  Palatals (e.g. / ç ʝ /) from postalveolars (e.g. / ʃ ʒ /).

     The use of the feature [strident] for these fricatives is illustrated in the table below. Note that all sounds traditionally described as "sibilants" are [+strident] (including all sibilant affricates). We follow earlier writers who see [strident] as being only distinctive for coronal sounds (e.g. Lahiri and Evers 1991, Shaw 1991, Hall 1997).
      ɸ
    β     		f
    v     		θ
    ð     		s
    z     		ʃ
    ʒ     		ç
    ʝ     		x
    ɣ     		χ
    ʁ
    [sonorant] − − − − − − − −
    [continuant] + + + + + + + +
    [CORONAL]     ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓    
    [strident]     − + + −    
    [LABIAL] ✓ ✓            
    [DORSAL]             ✓ ✓
     On this view labials, velars and uvulars are not specified for [strident] at all. | Tracy A. Hall and Marzena Żygis, 2010

STRING-VACUOUS MOVEMENT

  1. (Syntax) We tend to assume that most instances of wh-words will undergo this movement, even if it doesn't really look like it, as in this example:

    1. a. John kissed a frog.
      b. Who kissed a frog?

     We tend to assume, for simplicity's sake, that it really looks like this, with a trace:

    1. Who i t i kissed a frog?

     When there's movement, but the sentence doesn't appear to have any movement going on, it is called string-vacuous movement. The string of pronounced words hasn't seemed to change, but we still assume movement of some variety occurred, which may often be further teased out in different constructions. | r/linguistics, 2014
  2. (Examples)
     ○ The article also addresses the question how it is possible for the top copy of an A-chain to be active for LF interpretation even though the chain involves string-vacuous movement, following Abe and Hornstein's (2012) mechanism of chain production. | Jun Abe, 2016
     ○ Our main claim can be schematically be summarized as in (1), where the Japanese V-te complex moves string-vacuously out of the complement clause in a cross-clausal fashion, and in (2), where the V-te stays inside the adjunct clause.

    1.  Taro [Complement te-clause Ziro pizza t ] [cook-te] + get-PAST
    2.  Taro [Adjunct te-clause Ziro pizza [cook-te] ] money get-PAST

     | Shintaro Hayashi and Tomohiro Fujii, 2015
     ○ The question raised in this chapter is why string-vacuous movement is insensitive to locality effects. It argues that, although such movement creates a normal chain, it is the bottom copy that is pronounced due to the fact that overt movement must have a PF effect. Since such locality effects, as caused by the Right Roof Constraint and island conditions, apply only to "overt" movement, it follows that string-vacuous movement does not show locality effects. | Jun Abe and Norbert Hornstein, 2012
     ○ Sentences like (1a)-(1c) have been widely analyzed as involving an ellipsis site ( [VP e] ) that is located within its antecedent at surface form (Bouton 1970, Sag 1976, May 1985, Haïk 1987, Larson 1987, Fiengo and May [1994] ):

    1. a. John [VP saw everyone that you did [VP e] ].
      b. Eunice would [VP agree to anything I would [VP e] ].
      c. Could Max [VP do something you couldn't [VP e] ]?

     Such antecedent-contained deletions have been taken to provide evidence for a rule of Quantifier Raising, which "disentangles" the elided phrase and its antecedent at a level of Logical Form, thus allowing the relation between them to be stated in a noncircular way.
     Baltin (1987) has proposed an alternative account of examples like (1a)-(1c) in which antecedent-contained deletions do not exist as such at surface form; rather, the empty category uniformly occurs within a clause that has undergone string-vacuous movement. | Richard K. Larson and Robert May, 1990

STRONG DEFINITE

  1. (Grammar) Florian Schwarz's paper "Weak vs. strong definite articles: Meaning and form across languages" (2019) revisits the contrast between two types of definite descriptions in the light of new data drawn from a number of different languages (Hausa [Afro-Asiatic; Nigeria], Lakhota [Siouan-Catawba; USA, Canada], Mauritian Creole [French-based; Mauritius], Haitian Creole [French-based; Haiti], among others). According to his previous findings (2009), some languages differentiate overtly between definite descriptions referring to entities that are unique—relative to some domain—and definites that refer to entities that have been previously mentioned in discourse. Unique definites are called weak, while familiar (anaphoric) definites are considered strong. There is an interesting pattern found across languages that show this distinction: weak definites may be overtly marked or not marked at all, but in any case, their marker is morphophonologically less robust than the strong marker. | Ana Aguilar-Guevara, Julia Pozas Loyo, and Violeta Vázquez-Rojas Maldonado, 2019
  2. (Semantics) There is a tradition in the literature to define definiteness either in terms of uniqueness (Russell 1905, Strawson 1950, Frege 1892) or in terms of anaphoricity (familiarity) (Christophersen 1939, Kamp 1981, Heim 1982). Nevertheless, a detailed study of German articles by Schwarz (2009) demonstrates that both familiarity and uniqueness are necessary tools to capture definite uses. Specifically, Schwarz provides empirical evidence showing that there are two semantically distinct definites in German: a strong article definite licensed by familiarity and a weak definite licensed by uniqueness. The distinction between the two articles is visible not only in anaphoric and uniqueness-based contexts, but also in bridging contexts where a part-whole relation is licensed by the weak definite article, and the product-producer context is compatible with the strong definite article. The dichotomy of strong and weak definites has been supported by a number of other studies from different languages including: Akan (Niger-Congo; Ghana; Arkoh and Matthewson 2013), ASL (Irani 2019), Austro-Bavarian (Germanic; Austria; Simonenko 2014), and Icelandic (Indo-European; Iceland; Ingason 2016). | Milena Šereikaitė, 2019
  3. (Example) 
     ○ When a definite article in Yokot'an (Mayan; Tabasco state, Mexico) is known to have developed diachronically from a demonstrative, uniqueness and familiarity can both be seen as an outcome of a specialized use of deixis. Uniqueness within a situation would then develop from spatial exophoric uses of a demonstrative while familiarity would develop from anaphoric uses (there is some discussion about whether one use is more fundamental, see Lyons 1999). Some languages even develop two different articles, each specialized in one of the uses, an article for expressing uniqueness-based definiteness (which would correspond to a weak article in Schwarz 2013) and another for expressing familiarity-based definiteness (corresponding to a strong article in Schwarz 2013). | Maurice Pico, 2019
     ○ 
    German
    Form Article Type Gloss
    zum weak P_theweak
    zu dem strong P_thestrong

     | Florian Schwarz, 2019

STRONG FAMILIARITY

  1. (Semantics) A major approach to analyzing definite descriptions, usually associated with the label of familiarity, was introduced into the modern discussion by Heim (1982, building on Christophersen 1939). It is based on the idea that they serve to pick out referents that are in some sense familiar to the discourse participants. While the literature is not always clear on what it takes for an individual to count as familiar, Roberts (2003) distinguishes two kinds of familiarity. The broader notion of weak familiarity, which arguably corresponds (for the most part) to Heim's (1982) understanding of the term, allows for a number of ways in which something can be familiar, e.g., by being perceptually accessible to the discourse participants, via contextual existence entailment, or by being "globally familiar in the general culture" (Roberts 2003). In much of the literature following Heim (1982), however, the focus was on what Roberts (2003) calls strong familiarity, which essentially requires a definite to be anaphoric to a preceding linguistic expression. The example in (1) illustrates such a case.

    1. a. John bought a book and a magazine.
      b. The book was expensive.

     The definite the book in (1b) is clearly intended to pick out the very same book that was introduced with the indefinite a book in (1a). | Florian Schwarz, 2009
  2. (Semantics) Heim's novelty/familiarity constraint sheds some light on anaphoric accessibility.
    Definition (Heimian Strong Familiarity)
     Let i be the index of a definite NP d. Then the DR [discourse referent] i is strongly familiar in a discourse context c iff
    1.  The DR i is among the active DRs in c, and
    2.  If d has descriptive content, then c entails that i has the relevant descriptive content.
     Roberts' generalization of Heimian familiarity gets rid of the requirement that a anaphoric antecedent be among the active DRs.
    Definition (Weak Familiarity)
     Let i be the index of a definite NP d. Then the DR i is weakly familiar in a discourse context c iff c entails the existence of an entity bearing the descriptive content of d.
     | Scott Martin, 2011

 

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