Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Stru-Stx

STRUCTURAL BORROWING

  1. (Sociolinguistics; Historical Linguistics) Or, morphostructural borrowing. The borrowing of abstract morphological schemata. In the strict sense of this term, the borrowing is limited to structures completely unattested in the recipient language.
     Structural borrowing in word-formation is defined here as the increase or decrease in frequency of use of an abstract word-formation schema caused by language contact and includes the new availability of a virtually unknown schema (i.e. a change from a null to a non-null frequency, or structural borrowing sensu stricto).
     A wide variety of changes is attested. From a qualitative standpoint, they do not affect the different recipient languages to the same extent. A qualitative cline of structural borrowing can be posited—from minimal to slight, moderate and finally heavy change—depending on the relative degree to which the core of the word-formation system is affected.


     | Vincent Renner, 2018
  2. (Sociolinguistics; Historical Linguistics) Structural factors that facilitate borrowing (cf. Moravcsik 1978, Field 2002) include:


     | Yaron Matras, 2011
  3. (Sociolinguistics; Historical Linguistics) Lexical borrowing typically refers to the transfer of labels for naming concepts (Grant 2015), that is, open-class items such as nouns, adjectives, phrasal verbs, and idioms. Structural borrowing, on the other hand, typically refers to loans that affect the grammatical component of the receiving language, such as phonological, morphological and syntactic traits (Thomason and Kaufman 1988). As such, structural borrowing entails the transfer of forms and rules that contribute to the composition of morphemes and word forms into larger units, as well as loans affecting the sound system.
    Examples of Structural Borrowing
    Category Type Loan Norwegian English
    Direct Infl. Morph. plural -s temas topics
    Deriv. Morph. -isj / -ish støvel-isj boot-ish
    Indirect Syntactic
    Patterns         		indef. article være en bonde be a farmer
    wh-clause + INF hva å gjøre what to do
     | Anne Mette Sunde, 2018

STRUCTURAL CASE

  1. (Grammar) Case which is assigned in a certain structural configuration, depending on government (and adjacency) only (as opposed to inherent case).
     It has been proposed that a verb assigns structural Accusative case to its NP complement, and that Nominative case is assigned by the finite inflection INFL to the canonical subject position [NP, IP]. More recently, structural case is identified with case assignment to the specifier in a specific kind of AGRP. (Chomsky 1986, 1991) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
  2. (Grammar) In the Principles-and-Parameters (P&P) model of grammar, nominative and accusative case are assigned to NPs that occupy specific positions in the syntactic structure at the level of S-structure: nominative is assigned by Infl to NPs in the specifier of IP, and accusative is assigned by V to its complement/sister NP (Chomsky 1981/1993, 1986). This is why nominative and accusative are called structural cases: they are assigned to whichever NP sits in the relevant structural position, regardless of the theta role it is assigned at D-structure, and regardless of what category assigns that theta role.
     P&P also differentiates the notions of structural and inherent case: structural case is dissociated from theta role assignment, but inherent case is indeed equivalent to it and can only be assigned by a theta role assigner to its assignee. Inherent case then correlates with thematic assignment, and therefore, there can be no dissociation between theta role and inherent case. This distinction between Case Theory and Theta Theory on the one hand, and between structural and inherent case on the other, is maintained in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995/2014). What varies with respect to P&P are the structural positions where cases are checked: nominative and accusative case checking involve Spec-head relations with AgrS and AgrO respectively (Chomsky 1995/2014). | Itziar Laka, 2006

STRUCTURAL HEIGHT
(Examples) 
 ○ Japanese has a rich system of sentence-final particles related to illocutionary acts. However, they differ in structural heights and selectional requirements. | Zixi Liu and Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu, 2025
 ○ Hamlaoui and Szendrői (2015, 2017) propose that accounting for the cross-linguistic variability in mapping of ι onto syntactic constituents is possible if this mapping is not assumed to target a particular syntactic projection. Instead, they argue that ι corresponds to the highest projection that hosts overt verbal material ("the verb itself, the inflection, an auxiliary, or a question particle"), together with its specifier (HVP). That is, the size of ι is relative and does not rigidly correspond to any syntactic projection (e.g. CP, TP and/or vP), but is determined by the syntactic height of the verb. The proposal is based on the prosodic properties of the Hungarian narrow focus construction, English wh-questions / German V2 clauses, and Bàsàá [Bantu; Cameroon] zero-coded passives. | Lena Borise and David Erschler, 2022/2023
 ○ We focus on a powerful framing device that centrally influences listeners' interpretations. This is the modulation of meaning conveyed through the relative prominence of sentential constituents, established through height in the syntactic structure. | Barbara Landau and Lila R. Gleitman, 2015
 ○ Phrase structure trees have a hierarchical structure. In many subjects, most notably in taxonomy, such tree structures have been studied using ultrametrics. Here syntactical hierarchical phrase trees are subject to a similar analysis, which is much simpler as the branching structure is more readily discernible and switched. The ambiguity of which branching height to choose, is resolved by postulating that branching occurs at the lowest height available. | Mark D. Roberts, 2011

STRUCTURAL IDENTITY
(Syntax) Under what circumstances can bits of a syntactic structure be said to be the same as or different from other bits of a syntactic structure? The answer that we give is that occurrences of expressions are syntactically the same just in case they are reconstructions of each other. The grounds on which expressions are identical in the sense of reconstructions are twofold.

  1. There must be lexical identity—they are composed of the same lexical expressions.
  2. There must be structural identity—the constituent elements that dominate the lexical expressions must be syntactically organized in the same way.
 That is, occurrences of expressions are reconstructions just because they have the same formal structure. Thus, in the sentence Max saw Harry, and Oscar saw Harry, too the verb phrases are reconstructions—there are two occurrences of the verb phrase saw Harry—but the subject noun phrases, for instance, are not reconstructions, since they are not lexically identical. | Robert Fiengo and Robert C. May, 1994

STRUCTURAL INTERFERENCE
(Examples)
 ○ The presence or absence of imperfect learning by a group of people is a major predictor of the outcome of contact-induced change (Thomason and Kaufman 1988/2023, Thomason 2001). Here is a brief characterization of the contrasting expectations. When the agents of change are fluent speakers of the receiving language, the first and predominant interference features are lexical items belonging to the nonbasic vocabulary; later, under increasingly intense contact conditions, structural features and basic vocabulary may also be transferred from one language to the other. The only major type of exception to this prediction is found in communities where lexical borrowing is avoided for cultural reasons; in such communities, structural interference may occur with little or no lexical transfer. The prediction for the outcome of contact situations in which one group of speakers shifts to another language, and fails to learn it fully, stands in sharp contrast to a situation in which imperfect learning plays no role. | Sarah Thomason, 2020
 ○ I analyze the results of a translating test. The translating test contained Russian possessive noun phrases, and Udmurt speaking informants were asked to translate them into Udmurt (Uralic; Russian Federation). In the article, I study when and what kind of interference of the Russian language appears in translated examples of the informants, and I also analyze cases when the interference does not appear. The material demonstrates that in morphosyntactic structures expressing basic possessive relationships (e.g. when the possessor is a concrete animate notion and the possessee is a concrete entity, whole-part relationships) there is no structural interference of the Russian language. As soon as noun phrases express relationship between abstract, nonconcrete or inanimate nouns, the interference of the Russian language grows significantly. | Svetlana Edygarova, 2018
 ○ The third type of contact phenomenon is structural interference. While lexical phenomena tend to be interpreted with a synchronic bias, structural phenomena are more often seen in a diachronic light. That is, the focus is not so much on synchronic interference of the two grammatical systems in the mind of the speaker, but on change in the system. | A. Backus, 2010
 ○ An intense language contact situation is a necessary condition for extensive structural interference to occur, but it is not a sufficient condition. So the absence of typologically incompatible contact-induced innovations in Silva-Corvalán's (1994) data, while interesting, has no relevance to the general claim that such changes are possible.
 This point pertains to Aikhenvald's (2003) argument as well. No matter how similar two (or more) sociolinguistic contexts are, no historical linguist would predict that the languages in that context will inevitably undergo identical changes. They won't. This is how we get language families: even in the absence of structural interference from other languages, two separated subgroups of a single speech community will, after about 500-1000 years have passed, turn into separate languages. | Sarah G. Thomason, 2008
 ○ The model correctly predicts that lexical borrowing is far more important in the Germanic varieties spoken in Brussels and Strasbourg, as the language contact phenomena in the Germanic varieties are the result of a process of borrowing. Structural interference is more prominent in the French varieties, and this can be explained by assuming that structural interference is the result of a process of interference through shift. | Jeanine Treffers-Daller, 2001
 ○ The process of acquiring a second language is clearly substantively affected by the pre-existence of the competing L1 grammar, so one can say that structural interference is the linguistic motivation for imposition. | Gregory R. Guy, 1989

STRUCTURAL PRIMING

  1. (Psycholinguistics) Or, syntactic priming, or, structural repetition. The tendency for speakers to reuse recently experienced structures.
     Bock (1986) gave experimental participants pictures that can be described with either of the two kinds of dative structures (double objects, The woman handed the boy the paint brush, versus prepositional datives, The woman handed the paint brush to the boy). Participants described these pictures after saying an unrelated prime sentence that used either a double-object or prepositional dative structure.
     Priming was seen in the tendency for speakers to use the structure of the prime when describing the picture. Similar effects were seen for other structural alternations such as active transitive sentences (Lightning is striking the church) versus passives (The church is struck by lightning).
     The important aspect of this priming is that it appears to be the persistence of an abstract syntactically characterized structure (e.g., the frame: Noun_phrase Auxiliary_verb Main_verb Prepositional_phrase for a full passive), and not the lexical content of the utterance, its meaning, or its intonational properties (Bock and Loebell 1990). As such, structural priming provides evidence for a production process that uses structural abstractions during grammatical encoding. | Gary S. Dell and Cassandra L. Jacobs, 2016
  2. (Psycholinguistics) Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers make extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is structural priming, a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced (prime) sentence (Bock 1986). | Martin J. Pickering and Victor S. Ferreira, 2008
  3. (Psycholinguistics) The effect by which, in a dialogue, the current speaker tends to re-use the syntactic constructs of the previous speakers. Structural Priming (SP) has been used as a window into the nature of syntactic representations within and across languages. Because of its importance, it is crucial to understand the mechanisms behind it. Currently, two competing theories exist.

    1. According to the transient activation account, SP is driven by the re-activation of declarative memory structures that encode structures.
    2. According to the error-based implicit learning account, SP is driven by prediction errors while processing sentences.

     By integrating both transient activation and associative learning, Reitter et al.'s hybrid model (2011) assumes that SP is achieved by both mechanisms, and predicts a priming enhancement for rare or unusual constructions. Finally, a recently proposed account, the reinforcement learning account, claims that SP driven by the successful application of procedural knowledge will be reversed when the prime sentence includes grammatical errors. These theories make different assumptions about the representation of syntactic rules (declarative vs. procedural) and the nature of the mechanism that drives priming (frequency and repetition, attention, and feedback signals, respectively). | Yuxue C. Yang, Ann Marie Karmol, and Andrea Stocco, 2021
  4. (Psycholinguistics) Producers have a conspicuous tendency to reuse recently executed utterance plans, so that the likelihood that a speaker utters a passive sentence, for example, increases if that speaker has recently heard, read, or uttered another passive sentence (Weiner and Labov 1983/2008, Ferreira and Bock 2006). This tendency toward Plan Reuse (also called structural persistence or syntactic priming) persists over time and over other intervening utterances. The effect is argued to be not (or not only) the temporary activation of recent plans but rather a manifestation of long-term implicit learning of syntactic structure (cf. Branigan et al. 1999, Chang et al. 2006). On this view, language users are continually learning from their and others' language use; with every utterance, a syntactic plan becomes more likely to be used in the future. Thus, while the phenomenon is often described as one of short-term repetition, its learning basis links it to retrieval from long-term memory. | Maryellen C. MacDonald, 2013

STRUCTURAL TRANSLATION
See METAPHRASE.

STRUCTURE DEPENDENCE

  1. (Acquisition) Noam Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (1971) maintains that children invariantly apply structure-dependent hypotheses in the course of language acquisition, eschewing structure-independent hypotheses even when many of the available data are consistent with hypotheses of either type. Roughly, a structure-dependent operation is one which is based on the abstract—nothing marks their boundaries when we hear them—structural organization of word sequences. By contrast, structure-independent operations apply to sequences of words themselves, and include operations like NEXT and CLOSEST which are contingent on linear order. Chomsky accords structure-dependence the status of an "innate schematism applied by the mind to the data of experience".
     We should distinguish between two notions of structure-independence. A rule can be considered structure-independent if:

    1. It is an operation on strings of words, rather than on their structural representations; or
    2. It mentions only linear relations.

     | Stephen Crain and Mineharu Nakayama, 1987
  2. (Example)
     ○ An example of structure-dependent linguistic principles deals with question formation. This phenomenon was originally described by Chomsky (1971), who questioned the extent to which the primary linguistic data could lead children to form the correct generalizations relating declarative sentences and their yes/no question counterparts (see also Chomsky 1980 and discussion in Piattelli-Palmarini 1980/1983). Consider the declarative sentences in (1) and the corresponding yes/no questions in (2).

    1. a. The boy who is sitting on the rug is hungry.
      b. The boy is sitting on the rug that is being vacuumed by his mother.
    2. a. Is the boy who is sitting on the rug ____ hungry?
      b. Is the boy ____ sitting on the rug that is being vacuumed by his mother?

     | Andrea Gualmini and Stephen Crain, 2005

STRUCTURED EXCEPTIONALITY
(Example) 
 ○ Structured exceptionality in phonological theory

 | Bruce Hayes, 2025

STRUCTURED MEANING APPROACH
(Semantics) The Structured Meaning Approach to the meaning of questions goes back to Ajdukiewicz (1928), as noticed in Hiż (1978). It was developed by Hull 1975/(2011), Tichy (1978), Hausser and Zaefferer (1978), von Stechow and Zimmermann (1984/2009), von Stechow (1990) and Ginzburg (1992). Generalizing over a number of important differences between the theories that follow this approach, the basic idea is this:

  1.  Question meanings are functions that, when applied to the meaning of the answer, yield a proposition.
 For example, simple constituent questions are analyzed as illustrated in (2). The meaning of who read Die Kinder der Finsternis is a function that, when applied to the meaning of the answer, here Mary, gives a proposition, here the meaning of Mary read Die Kinder der Finsternis.

  1. A: Who read Die Kinder der Finsternis?
    B: Mary.
    Question applied to answer:
    λx [READ(KF)(x)]
    M
    λx [READ(KF)(x)](M) = READ(KF)(M)
 I assume some standard version of truth-theoretical interpretation. Atomic meanings are rendered by English words in SMALL CAPS, and I employ variables and lambda terms in the usual way. I understand a meaning representation like READ(KF)(M) as a proposition, the set of possible worlds in which Mary read Die Kinder der Finsternis. A more explicit representation would have:

  1.  λi [READ(i)(KF(i))(M(i))]
but to keep notation simple I will suppress the reference to possible worlds here. | Manfred Krifka, 2001

 

Page Created By Split April 11, 2026

 
 B a c k   T o   I n d e x