TONAL ACCENT
See PITCH ACCENT.

TONAL CENTER OF GRAVITY
(Phonetics) Abbreviated TCoG. A gestalt or global measure of F₀ event localization that succeeds in accounting both for the demonstrated contributions of F₀ TP-alignment, and for the strength of global F₀ contour shape as cues to intonational contrasts, while referring directly to neither of these things. The TCoG model lies at the heart of a research program whose goal, broadly expressed, is to develop a more robust and perceptually realistic model of tonal timing and scaling patterns than currently exists; one that captures key configurationist insights (i.e., the relevance of contour shape in tonal implementation), but nonetheless maintains the core advantages of a level-based Autosegmental-Metrical (Pierrehumbert 1980, Ladd 2008) phonology. | Jonathan Barnes, Nanette Veilleux, Alejna Brugos and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2012

TONE CHANGE

1. (Phonology) In standard Cantonese as spoken in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China, there is a very complex phenomenon known as bianyin in Chinese, or tone change. This involves an alternation between any of the six non-high tones and the high rising tone, and for a very limited number of morphemes, an alternation between any tone and the high level tone.
    For example, tone change is found in verb reduplication and adjective reduplication, as shown in (1).
    
   1. a. [haːŋ21 jat5 haːŋ21] [haːŋ35 haː21] 'to take a walk'
      b. [ŋaːu23 jat5 ŋaːu23] [ŋaːu35 ŋaː23] 'to bite once'
      c. [hUŋ21 jat hUŋ21]  [hUŋ35 hUŋ21]  'very red'
      d. [paːk2 jat5 paːk2]  [paːk35 paːk2]  'very white'
   
   
   • The Tone Notation
     •  [55], [5] = high level
     •  [35] = high rising
     •  [33], [3] = mid level
     •  [21] = low falling
     •  [23] = low rising
     •  [22], [2] = low level
   
    In these examples, the two alternate forms are two ways of saying the same thing. | Maurice Kuen-Shing Wong, 1982
2. (Phonology) Tone change must be distinguished from tone sandhi. Tone sandhi is a compulsory change that occurs when certain tones are juxtaposed. Tone change, however, is a morphologically conditioned alternation and is used as an inflectional or a derivational strategy (Chen 2000). Lien indicated that causative verbs in modern Southern Min are expressed with tonal alternation, and that tonal alternation may come from earlier affixes.
    Examples (Lien 1999):
    
   1.  長 tng5 'long' vs. tng2 'grow';
   2.  斷 tng7 'break' vs. tng2 'cause to break'
   
    Also, 毒 in Taiwanese Southern Min has two pronunciations (Taiwan Ministry of Education 2019):
    
   3. a. to̍ (entering tone) meaning 'poison' or 'poisonous'
      b. thāu (departing tone) meaning 'to kill with poison'
   
    The same usage can be found in Min, Yue, and Hakka (吳瑞文 2005). | Wikipedia, 2024

TONE CONTOUR
(Phonology) Or, contour tone. A tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoisan languages, Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America.

• When the pitch descends, the contour is called a falling tone.
• When it ascends, a rising tone.
• When it descends and then returns, a dipping or falling-rising tone.
• When it ascends and then returns, a peaking or rising-falling tone.

TONE CONTOUR SHAPE
(Phonology) There has been a long line of research on the variability of tone contour shapes as well as interfacing between other linguistic factors and prosody (Li 2009, Büring 2013). In linguistic research of Mandarin tones, most works have focused on the effect of local tonal context (e.g., neighboring tones and pitch range, such as Gauthier et al. 2007 and Xu 1997) and broader context (e.g., focus, topic, information structure, long term f₀ variations, such as Xu et al. 2004, Liu et al. 2006, Wang and Xu 2011). The data in these works usually consisted of a small number of tone observations obtained in speech production experiments in the lab. They have informed later works on improving the performance of supervised or unsupervised tone recognition (Levow 2005, Surendran 2007, etc.). | Shuo Zhang, 2019

TONE LANGUAGE
(Phonology) A language in which differences in meaning can be signaled by differences in pitch. E.g. Nupe (spoken in Nigeria):

• bá (high) 'be sour'
• ba (mid) 'cut'
• bà (low) 'count'

TONE SANDHI
(Phonology) From the Sanskrit word सधि sandhi 'joining'. A phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes (Yip 2002). It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a one-direction tone (Wang 1967). It is a type of sandhi, or fusional change.
 Tone sandhi occurs to some extent in nearly all tonal languages, manifesting itself in different ways (Gandour 1978).
 Tone sandhi is compulsory as long as the environmental conditions that trigger it are met. It is not to be confused with tone changes that are due to derivational or inflectional morphology. Such a change is not triggered by the phonological environment of the tone, and therefore is not an example of sandhi. Changes of morphemes in Mandarin into its neutral-tone are also not examples of tone sandhi. | Wikipedia, 2022

TONOGENESIS

1. (Phonology) The historical orgin of tone. A process in which a language that lacks tones gains them. E.g.:
   
   • Tones can originate from earlier consonantal contrasts.
   • A language may acquire tones through bilingualism if influential neighboring languages are tonal.
   • Tone may arise spontaneously, and surprisingly quickly.
   • Very often, tone arises as an effect of the loss or merger of consonants.
   
    | ?
2. (Phonology) The development of distinctive tone from earlier non-tonal contrasts. A well-understood case is that of Vietnamese (similar in its essentials to that of Chinese and many languages of the Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien language families), where the loss of final laryngeal consonants led to the creation of three tones, and the tones later multiplied as voicing oppositions on initial consonants waned.
    This is by no means the only attested diachronic scenario, however. There is tonogenetic potential in various series of phonemes:
    
   • Glottalized vs. plain consonants.
   • Unvoiced vs. voiced.
   • Aspirated vs. unaspirated.
   • Geminates vs. simple (and, more generally, tense vs. lax).
   • Even among vowels, whose intrinsic fundamental frequency can transphonologize to tone.
   
    But the way in which these common phonetic precursors to tone play out in a given language depends on phonological factors, as well as on other dimensions of a language's structure and on patterns of language contact, resulting in a great diversity of evolutionary paths in tone systems. In some language families (such as Niger-Congo and Khoe), recent tonal developments are increasingly well-understood, but working out the origin of the earliest tonal contrasts (which are likely to date back thousands of years earlier than tonogenesis among Sino-Tibetan languages, for instance) remains a mid- to long-term research goal for comparative-historical research. | Alexis Michaud and Bonny Sands, 2020

TOPIC

1. (Discourse) In discourse there are places where new semantic environments are established. These semantic boundaries, called Topics, are signaled in many different ways, often by the use of several types of signals at once.
    One signal is the use of discourse markers. In their lexicon, Louw and Nida (1996) create an entire domain specifically for discourse markers—familiarity with the lexical items within this domain is good to acquire for exegesis.
    A second signal to be aware of is the disruption of cohesion. Where there are disruptions in cohesion because of shifts in grammar (e.g., changes in tense form, changes in person/participants, etc.) or semantics (e.g., breaking of semantic chains), especially in conjunction with the use of discourse or deictic markers, the author is likely signaling the establishment of a new Topic in the discourse. Everything between Topic shifts is the Comment. | James D. Dvorak, 2008
2. (Discourse) "The participant most crucially involved in the action sequence" (Givón 1983). Givón has identified several characteristics of topics.
   1. Topical participants are mentioned more often than non-topical participants: "More important discourse topics appear more frequently in the register, i.e. they have a higher probability of persisting longer in the register" (Givón 1983).
   2. In many languages, "topical referents are most commonly given special grammatical marking, while non-topical ones are left unmarked" (Givón 1995). The distal demonstrative determiner is one such special marker in Old English.
   3. One way to identify topics is to measure topic persistence.
    | Richard Epstein, 2011

TOPIC ACCESSIBILITY SCALE

1. (Pragmatics) Lambrecht (1994) noted that it is likely that the more accessible the topic referent of an utterance is, the less processing effort to interpret that utterance is needed. This correlation is summarized as the Topic Accessibility Scale below. Chafe (1987) also states that it requires low cognitive effort to interpret a discourse-active referent.

   Topic Accessibility Scale
    

   Active	Most accessible
   Accessible
   Inactive
   Brand-new anchored
   Brand-new unanchored	Least accessible

    | Robert Van Valin and Randy J. LaPolla, 1997
2. (Pragmatics) Activation brings the conveying of information from knowledge to consciousness (Lambrecht 1994). Identifiability has to do with the access of knowledge, while activation has to do with consciousness. There are three activation states, namely inactive (unused but still in long term memory), semi-active (or accessible), and active (Lambrecht 1994). A referent that is active is the same as one that is "given", but Lambrecht avoids what he feels is an ambiguous term. So an unidentifiable referent has no activation state as yet, and when such a referent is identified, it is a brand-new item. Lambrecht distinguishes two types of brand-new items, following Prince (1981), namely an anchored brand-new item, which is linked to some other discourse entity, and an unanchored brand-new item, which does not have such a link. For example, a bus is unanchored, where a guy I work with is anchored. In summary then, Lambrecht distinguishes seven cognitive-pragmatic states of referents, namely:
    
   1.  unidentifiable/brand-new unanchored
   2.  unidentifiable/brand-new anchored
   3.  inactive/unused
   4.  textually accessible
   5.  situationally accessible
   6.  inferentially accessible
   7.  active/given
   
    The above list is simultaneously a topic accessibility scale. The active/given referents are the most accessible where the unanchored brand-new referents are the least accessible (Prince 1981). The unaccented pronominals are the preferred topic expressions, the most accessible, and the least marked in word-order in the unmarked topic-comment articulations (Prince 1981). | Sebastiaan Jonathan Floor, 2004

TOPIC PERSISTENCE
(Discourse) As Givón has demonstrated, one way to identify topics is to measure persistence, or the number of recurrences of a referent in the following text. The more highly topical a referent, the more frequently it should be mentioned again after it is first introduced in a section of the discourse. In several studies, Givón argues that a topic persistence measurement of less than two should be considered low; greater than two is considered high (Wright and Givón 1987, 1995). In other words, a referent that recurs more than twice in the ten clauses following its appearance in a passage should be considered highly persistent, which is an indication of high topicality. A referent that recurs only once or twice, or never again, is not highly persistent and thus, not a topic. | Richard Epstein, 2011

TOPICAL/FOCAL
(Information Structure) Givón states that discourse is made up of a combination of new and old information. We shall refer to the new information as focal, and the old information as presupposed or topical. Presupposed, topical information is "assumed by the speaker to be accessible to the hearer" either from the preceding text, or from a general knowledge of the world; focal information is "assumed by the speaker to be inaccessible to the hearer" (Givón 1992). Presupposed information serves as the "grounding point" or framework within which the focal information is processed (Givón 1992). By definition, the focal information is the most important part of the utterance, with the presupposed information grounding it to the context. | Steven E. Runge, 2012

TOPICALIZATION

1. (Syntax) Many languages have a way to mark the topic in a sentence.
   1.  This book, I really like.
   2. a. As for this book, I really like it.
      b. This book, I really like it.
    Example (1) is typically called the topic construction while (2) is referred to as left dislocation. In both cases some sort of topic phrase is placed at the head of the sentence. We will refer to both as topicalization. | Shigeru Miyagawa, 2017
2. (Syntax) A mechanism that establishes an expression as the sentence or clause topic; in English, by having it appear at the front of the sentence or clause (as opposed to in a canonical position further to the right). Topicalization often results in a discontinuity and is thus one of a number of established discontinuity types (the other three being wh-fronting, scrambling, and extraposition). Topicalization is also used as a constituency test; an expression that can be topicalized is deemed a constituent. The topicalization of arguments in English is rare, whereas circumstantial adjuncts are often topicalized. Most languages allow topicalization, and in some languages, topicalization occurs much more frequently than in English. | Wikipedia, 2016

TOPONYM
(General) A word that is the name of a place. Examples:

1. As with the glyph for jade, it is frequent in representations of a religious nature and in toponyms alike.
2. As this toponym is situated along the right side of the map, it would correspond to the east.
3. Toponyms ending in -thorpe, -by, -combe, -gill and -royd are associated with regions settled by different groups such as Celts, Vikings, Danes, and Saxons.

TP

1. (Syntax) Abbreviation for Tense Phrase. A phrase seen, in generative accounts, as headed by a unit characteristically realized by a tense inflection. | Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, 2007
2. (Syntax) Stowell's (1993) account of sequence of tense is based on a syntactic TP (tense phrase) with the following geometry:
    
   1. 
           TP
          ╱╲
         ╱   ╲
        ZP₀     T′
               ╱╲
             ╱   ╲
            T     VP
                ╱╲
               ╱   ╲
              ZP₁     VP
       
   
    The tense node T denotes, in my terms, a relation between local evaluation time and eventuality time; ZP₀ denotes the local evaluation time and ZP₁ corresponds to the eventuality argument of the verb. | Dorit Abusch, 1994
3. (Syntax) Looking at the relation of VPs and small clauses to matrix clauses tells us something about how language goes about adding information beyond predicate meeting arguments. At a minimum, tense (and aspect, and a significant portion of modality and other inflectional elements) is added in a larger clause that includes a VP or small clause as a complement. The current view seems to be to separate out a number of distinct syntactic units providing these, singling out tense as the salient unit. Not long ago, a single inflectional position was assumed to combine them all. But regardless, the picture is that within a matrix clause a predication structure falls under a structure proving tense information, at least. The picture is something like:
    
   1.  [ _TP tense plus ... [ _VP predicate and arguments ] ]
   
    We do not get a matrix clause, and do not get something we are able to assert, until we get up at least as high as TP, a tense phrase, according to current theories. Such a structure grammatically encodes the idea that additional temporal information beyond objects meeting properties is needed to describe the world. Syntax provides a separate syntactic position for adding it, such as the T head (the main syntactic component of the T phrase). | Michael Glanzberg, 2011

TP ELLIPSIS

1. (Syntax) Abbreviation for Tense Phrase Ellipsis. A type of predicate ellipsis. In VP Ellipsis, another kind of predicate ellipsis, the verb in T is phonologically realized; in TP Ellipsis, it is deleted.
   1. Portuguese
      a.
       

      Bach
      Bach

      é
      is

      difícil
      hard

      de
      to

      interpretar
      play,

      e
      and

      Mozart
      Mozart

      também
      also

       é .
       is .

      (TPE)
      
      b.
       

      Bach
      Bach

      é
      is

      difícil
      hard

      de
      to

      interpretar
      play

      e
      and

      Mozart
      Mozart

      também
      also

      é.
      is.

      (VPE)
      

        'Bach is hard to play, and Mozart (is) too.'
   
    | Anna Maria Martins, 2016
2. (Example) 
   1. Spanish
      Juan fue al cine y María también  fue 
      lit. 'Juan went to the cinema and Mary also  went '
    | Andrés Saab, 2010

TRACE
(Syntax) A phonetically null element said by Chomsky and his followers to occupy the position from which a syntactic element has been moved.

1. Mary_i I really love t_i.

TRACE THEORY

1. (Syntax) Theory about traces left by movement. This theory assumes that if an element X has been moved in the course of a derivation, it has left a trace in its original position.
    In (1) the NP John is moved while leaving a trace t, indicating its d-structure position.
   1.  John_i seems [ t_i to have left ]
   
    Since theta-marking occurs at d-structure, it is possible to determine the thematic role of the moved NP via its trace. The concept of a trace is crucial to the theory of movement and to bounding theory, because a trace can be treated as an empty category. (Chomsky 1973, 1981, 1986, Riemsdijk and Williams 1986) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Syntax)  The trace theory of movement rules was first outlined in Chomsky (1973) and has been developed in many subsequent works: Selkirk (1972), Wasow (1972), Vergnaud (1974), Fiengo (1974), and Chomsky (1975, 1976). The last three references characterize trace theory as a proposal that an NP, when moved, leaves behind a trace that it binds. Traces are then subject to two conditions: that either they be properly bound or they be obliterated. An NP properly binds a trace when it precedes and commands it. Hence any lowering or rightward movement rule will place an NP in a position such that it cannot properly bind its trace; therefore, that trace will have to be obliterated in some way.
    The earliest motivation for introducing the notion of a trace was the desire to employ the Specified Subject Condition (SSC) to block the application of Each Movement in structures like (1a). It was argued that a moved NP, Mary, left behind a trace, which served as a specified subject and thereby activated the SSC. Chomsky (1973) also appeals to traces for the interpretation of wh-structures.
   1. a. Mary seemed to each of the men [ t to like the others ]_S
      b. * Mary seemed to the men to like each other.
   
    But much of the subsequent appeal of the theory seems to lie in the claim that it yields exactly the right information to support semantic interpretation at the level of surface structure. In fact, the claim has been made (Dougherty 1975) that the real motivation for trace theory is the desire to do all semantic interpretation off surface structures. Thus we may distinguish between two views of trace theory:
   1. The pluralist view mirrors the historical development of the theory and says that traces
      1.  play a crucial role in the syntax and
      2.  turn out to yield exactly the right information at surface structure to support semantic interpretation.
   2. The exclusively semantic view says that the early syntactic evidence for trace theory is not crucial and that the theory is motivated only by the requirement of surface structure semantic interpretation.
   
    | David Lightfoot, 1976

TRADITIONAL TRANSMISSION
(Diachronic) One of the 13 design features of language developed by anthropologist Charles F. Hockett to distinguish the features of human language from that of animal communication. Critically, animal communication might display some of the 13 features but never all of them. It is typically considered as one of the crucial characteristics distinguishing human from animal communication and provides significant support for the argument that language is learned socially within a community and not inborn where the acquisition of information is via the avenue of genetic inheritance.
 In essence, the idea of traditional transmission details the process by which language is passed down from one generation to the next. In this manner, it is often also referred to as cultural transmission where it is a mechanism of iterated learning. Common processes would include imitation or teaching. The model purports that present learners acquire the cultural behavior, that is language in this instance, by observing similar behaviors in others who acquired the language the same way (Thompson and Smith 2015). This is an important distinction made in "The Origin of Speech" (1960), where Hockett defines traditional transmission: "the detailed conventions of any one language are transmitted extra-genetically by learning and teaching". While culture is not unique to the human species, the way it exhibits itself as language in human society is very distinctive (Whiten 2005), and one key trait of this uniqueness is the element of social groups. | Wikipedia, 2024

TRANSITIVITY-CHANGING OPERATIONS

1. (Grammar) 

   	Macrorole
   Operation	Actor	Undergoer
   Installation	actor-focused transitivization  • causative	undergoer-focused transitivization  • applicative  • extraversive
   Suppression	actor-focused detransitivization  • passive  • anticausative	undergoer-focused detransitivization  • antipassive  • introversive

    | Christian Lehmann and Elisabeth Verhoeven, 2006
2. (Examples)
   • (Syntax) Not only valency frames are subject to contact-induced change, but also valency- and transitivity-changing constructions. For example, Burridge (2006) proposes that the Pennsylvania German (Indo-European; United States) passive has been influenced by English in a number of ways, including the replacement of the agent-marking preposition (bei 'by' rather than the inherited preposition vun 'of'), and the positioning of the be-phrase outside of the discontinuous verb, as in (1):
     1. Pennsylvania German (Burridge 2006)
        De
        the

        Schtrump
        stocking

        waar
        was

        geschtoppt
        darned

        bei
        by

        der
        the

        Maem.
        mother

        'The stocking was darned by mother.'
     
      Arkhangelskiy and Usacheva (2017) show that Russian (Indo-European) verbs can be borrowed into Udmurt (Uralic; Russia) with detransitivizing morphology, i.e., the suffix -s'a, even though Udmurt has a comparable construction involving the suffix -isk. Russian loan verbs are usually integrated into the Beserman dialect of Udmurt via a light verb strategy (Wichmann and Wohlgemuth 2008, Wohlgemuth 2009). Interestingly, there is some variation within Udmurt as to whether the light verb itself bears detransitivizing morphology in such cases. Compare, for example, (2) and (3), which show the presence vs. the omission of the detransitivizer.
     2. Udmurt (Arkhangelskiy and Usacheva 2017)
        fotografirovat's'a
        take.pictures:REFL:RUS

        kar-iśk-i-z=no
        do-DETR-PST-3SG=ADD

        korka
        house:ILL

        pir̮-i-z
        enter-PST-3SG

        '[The guy] took picture of himself and went into the house.'
     3. Udmurt (Arkhangelskiy and Usacheva 2017)
        fotografirovat's'a
        take.pictures:REFL:RUS

        kar-o
        do-PRS.3PL

        'They are taking pictures of themselves.'
     
      There are additional examples. Epps (2006) reports that Hup (Puinave-Nadahup; Colombia, Brazil) has a passive construction that is structurally similar to the East Tucanoan languages with which Hup has been in contact, but which is not found in other Nadahup languages. Zúñiga (2015) suggests that the extension of the reflexive construction to anticausative in Mapudungun (Mapudungu; Chile, Argentina) may be due to the influence of Spanish. In Lithuanian Romani (Indo-European), originally monovalent verbs (4) may optionally occur with a detransitivizing ("reflexive") marker (5), thereby copying the Slavic structure exemplified by Russian in (6).
     4. Lithuanian Romani (Tenser 2005)
        tume
        2PL

        san
        laugh.2PL

        'You laugh.'
     5. Lithuanian Romani (Tenser 2005)
        tume
        2PL

        san
        laugh.2PL

        pe
        RFLX

        'You laugh.'
     6. Russian (Tenser 2005)
        vy
        2PL

        smejote
        laugh.2PL

        sj
        RFLX

        'You laugh.'
     
      | Eitan Grossman and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, 2019
   • This paper also demonstrates that valency-changing operators in Huasteca Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan; Mexico) can be used without changing the valency of the base verb, thus indicating that these markers are in fact transitivity-changing operators, not always valency-changing operators since they always affect the relation between participants/arguments (transitivity), but not always the number of participants/arguments (valency). The same can be said for the noun incorporation process that is usually associated with detransitivization and valency-decreasing operations but can also be in Huasteca Nahuatl a valency-rearranging device without valency reduction. | Manuel Peregrina Llanes, Albert Álvarez González, and Zarina Estrada-Fernández, 2017
   • The use of pre-radical i- with passive verbs in Georgian (Kartvelian; Georgia) signals, in addition to a change in transitivity, that subject is the sole undergoer / patient of the action. By contrast, e- in passive verbs refers to the presence of a beneficiary encoded as indirect object. A different transitivity-changing operation is the causative, which indicates the addition of another agent and subsequent demotion of the original agent to indirect objecthood. | Olga I. Gurevich, 2006

TRANSLANGUAGING

1. (Sociolinguistics) Refers to speakers' dynamic and creative use of resources across the borders of named languages. It is premised on the view that multilingual individuals have an innate ability to draw flexibly upon a repertoire of linguistic features (phonetic, morphological, semantic, orthographic, and so forth) that originate in more than one named language, as well as what has been termed extra-linguistic or non-linguistic meaning-making resources, including bodily and sensory resources. Translanguaging is performative, and this includes everyday performances in mundane situations; it exudes creativity and criticality, generating positive disturbance to social interaction. | Tong King Lee and Li Wei, 2020
2. (Sociolinguistics) A theoretical lens that offers a different view of bilingualism and multilingualism. The theory posits that rather than possessing two or more autonomous language systems, as has been traditionally thought, bilinguals, multilinguals, and indeed, all users of language, select and deploy particular features from a unitary linguistic repertoire to make meaning and to negotiate particular communicative contexts. | Sarah Vogel and Ofelia García, 2017
3. (Pedagogy) An approach that affirms and leverages students' diverse and dynamic language practices in teaching and learning. | Sarah Vogel and Ofelia García, 2017

TRANSLOCATIVE
See VENITIVE.

TRANSPARENCY

1. (Grammar) A one-to-one relation between meaning and form. All structures violating transparency are called non-transparent or opaque. "One meaning" and "one form" are of course both highly problematic concepts.
    The notion of transparency has been discussed and studied before in theoretical linguistics, creole studies and language acquisition.
    In Functional Discourse Grammar terms, transparency obtains when one unit at one of the upper two levels of linguistic organization (IL, RL) corresponds to one unit at one of the lower two levels of linguistic organization (ML, PL). | Sterre Leufkens, 2015
2. (Grammar) A striking fact about languages is that it is exceptional for them to display a systematic one-to-one relation between meaning and form, i.e. languages are never completely transparent. Rather, to different degrees they allow ambiguity, discontinuity, and fusion, to mention just a few of the properties that make languages less transparent.
    The lack of transparency in the majority of languages is all the more surprising when one takes into account that there is evidence that the transparent features that they exhibit are the first to be mastered by young children acquiring their mother tongue. In contrast, children struggle with non-transparent features of language for far longer, and there is a phase in their development in which they systematically adapt these features so as to force them into a transparent pattern (Slobin 1977, Slobin 1980, Clark 1993, MacWhinney 2005). | Kees Hengeveld and Sterre Leufkens, 2018
3. (Grammar) We consider an alternative categorization of idioms. More precisely, we cross-classify idioms according to two dimensions: figuration and transparency. Figuration reflects the degree to which the idiom can be assigned a literal meaning. Transparency (or opacity) relates to how easy it is to recover the motivation for an idiom's use, or, in other words, to explain the relationship between its literal meaning and its idiomatic one. Idioms are figurative if their literal meaning can conjure up a vivid picture in the speaker's mind.
    Within the figurative idioms we distinguish between two types. In transparent figurative idioms the relationship between the literal picture and the idiomatic meaning is perceived to be motivated. English examples include saw logs ('snore') and the cat's out of the bag ('previously hidden facts were revealed'). Conversely, opaque figurative idioms portray a picture whose relationship to the idiomatic meaning is not perceptible. English examples include shoot the breeze ('chat') and chew the fat ('talk socially, gossip').
    Idioms which are not figurative do not have a comprehensible literal meaning, and as such are necessarily opaque. Among these idioms we find what are referred to as cranberry idioms (Moon 1998, Trawinski et al. 2008), which, similarly to cranberry morphemes, have parts which have no meanings (e.g., run amok 'behave in an unrestrained manner' and take umbrage 'take offense'). These idioms may have been figurative and transparent once, but synchronically they contain a word whose meaning is not accessible to contemporary speakers. | Livnat Herzig Sheinfux, Tali Arad Greshler, Nurit Melnik, and Shuly Wintner, 2019
   See Also FIGURATION.

TREE

1. (Syntax) A two-dimensional diagram used in generative grammar as a convenient means of displaying the internal hierarchical structure of sentences as generated by a set of rules. The root of the tree diagram is at the top, consisting of the initial symbol S. From this topmost point or node, branches descend corresponding to the categories specified by the rules (e.g. NP, VP). The internal relationships of parts of the tree are described using "family tree" terminology: if two categories both derive from a single node, they are said to be sisters, and daughters of the mother node from which they derive. | David Crystal, 2008
2. (Syntax) A tree, qua P-marker, is a representation of an equivalence class of derivations at level P, a history of applications of rules at that level.
   • "must contain all information as to the structure of T on level L"
   • All information pertaining to categories of phrases.
   • Everything that is characteristic of the categorial properties of sentences must be recoverable from the representation.
   
    Important: The tree is fully and completely interpreted.
   • Representational with respect to its informational content.
   • No sense in which the tree is in need of any further interpretation.
   
    | Robert May, 2023

TREEBANK

1. (Corpus) A syntactically processed corpus that contains annotations of natural language data at various linguistic levels (word, phrase, clause and sentence levels). A treebank provides mainly the morphosyntactic and syntactic structure of the utterances within the corpus and consists of a bank of linguistic trees, thereby its name. | Bernard J. Jansen, Amanda Spink, and Isak Taksa, 2009
2. (Corpus) A collection of POS-tagged sentences that are bracketed to align with constituency. | Maeve Carmody and Ryan M. Kasak, 2023

TRIPLE-AGREEMENT LANGUAGE

1. (Typology; Grammar) A language in which the verb agrees with all arguments present in a clause (Rosen 1990). | Fabian Heck and Mark Richards, 2007
2. (Typology; Grammar) As argued by Rosen (1990), Southern Tiwa (Tanoan; New Mexico) is a triple-agreement language, in which the verbal prefix can register agreement with up to three arguments in a clause. Thus verbs may agree with as many as three arguments: the ergative (NP_erg), absolutive (NP_abs) and dative (NP_dat). This agreement, which is expressed in the form of a verbal prefix, registers person, number and, in the case of third-person arguments, class as well; see (1), (2), and (3), from Rosen (1990).
    
   1. a.
       

      Te-mı̃-ban
      1SG-go-PAST

      (eskwela-ʼay)
      school-to

        'I went (to school)'
      b.
       

      A-mı̃-ban
      2SG-go-PAST

      (eskwela-ʼay)
      school-to

        'You went (to school)'
   2. a.
       

      Ka-musa-wia-ban
      1SG:A:2SG-cat-give-PAST

        'I gave the cat to you'
      b.
       

      Kam-musa-wia-ban
      1SG:B:2SG-cat-give-PAST

        'I gave the cats to you'
   3. a.
       

      ʼUide
      child-A

      tam-musa-wia-ban
      1SG:B:A-cat-give-PAST

        'I gave the cats to the child'
      b.
       

      ʼUide
      child-A

      tow-keuap-wia-ban
      1SG:C:A-shoe-give-PAST

        'I gave the shoes to the child'
   
    Example (1) exhibits person and number-agreement for the single, absolutive argument of an intransitive. Examples (2) and (3) display triple-agreement with all three arguments of a ditransitive, with the absolutive argument registering variation in inflectional class according to number in (2) and animacy in (3). | Fabian Heck and Marc Richards, 2010

TRIVALENT SEMANTICS
(Semantics) I'll define a trivalent language, L, and describe how we can assign values analogous to probabilities to it. The language, L formed in the usual way, with an extra operator ‖ :

• A, B ... are atomic sentences.
• If α and β are sentences so are α ∧ β, α ∨ β, α ‖ β and ¬ α.

α ‖ β is undefined for every member of W where β is not T (i.e. where β is false or undefined) and otherwise has the same truth-value as α.

A	B	A ‖ B
T	T	T
F	T	F
T	F	U
F	F	U
T/F	U	U
U	T/F	U

TRUNCATED CLAUSE
(Syntax) Clauses that lack some otherwise expected layers have been described in the literature as truncated (see Rizzi 1993 and subsequent work on root infinitives and language acquisition). While in everyday usage truncation may suggest the removal of some existing material, this is not the sense in which it has been used in the linguistic literature: truncated clauses are typically ones that lack some layers because those layers were never built up in the first place. | Tamás Halm, 2021

TRUNCATED CLEFT
(Syntax) Or, hidden cleft, or, reduced cleft. 

1. a. It's Beverly.
   b. That was his father.
   c. It could have been me.
   d. That might be Adrian.

2. a. It's Beverly that makes the best pies.
   b. That was his father that went to Hamburg.
   c. It could have been me that drove the car.
   d. That might be Adrian that's knocking on the door.

TRUNCATION
(Syntax) Proposals according to which constituents are reduced, truncated, pruned, etc., constitute a significant subliterature in syntactic theory. Some phenomena for which a truncation analysis has been proposed include: Equi-NP deletion (Ross 1967), clitic climbing (Ross 1967, Rivero 1970, Marusic 2005), ECM/S′-deletion (Chomsky 1981), embedded subject extraction (Gazdar 1981), long passive in German (Wurmbrand 2000), various stages of L1 or L2 acquisition (Lebeaux 2000, Vainikka 1993/1994, Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1996), root vs. embedded clause contrasts (Hooper and Thompson 1973, Haegeman 2012, Shlonsky and Soare 2011, Miyagawa 2017, de Cuba 2014), Malagasy headlines (Paul 2017), Malagasy perception verb complements (Pearson 2017), etc. | Daniel Finer and Hasran Basri, 2020

TRUTH-COMPATIBLE INFERENCE

1. (Pragmatics) A knowledge-based inference which bridges the gap between:
   1. The speaker-intended representation: e.g., upper-bounded majority, and
   2. The relevant state of affairs (e.g., 'all').
    How? By mobilizing a (reasonable) assumption (TCI) that "A whole is compatible with its proper subsets". But, the discoursal compatibility of some meaning (e.g., a circumbounded majority for most) with a subsuming state of affairs (e.g., 'all') is not guaranteed. Truth-compatible inferences are merely potentially mobilized. | Mira Ariel, 2023
2. (Pragmatics) TCIs are inferences that are legitimate in that the speaker is quite likely to endorse them given the content of the utterance, or else, should the assumption be true in reality, it will be seen as compatible with what the speaker said. The speaker is then not seen as having precluded it (nor as having uttered a false proposition). Here is the example I first cited in Ariel (2004) as a basis for the proposed TCI concept:
   1. a. REBECCA: (H) U=m,
       ... do you guys have the cash to pay for it right now?
       ... When you- to get out? (Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English)
      b. TCI: The addressees may be too poor to afford the parking fee.
   
    | Mira Ariel, 2016

TRUTH CONDITION
(Semantics; Pragmatics) The condition under which a sentence is true. For example, It is snowing in Nebraska is true precisely when it is snowing in Nebraska. Truth conditions of a sentence do not necessarily reflect current reality. They are merely the conditions under which the statement would be true (Birner 2012).
 More formally, a truth condition makes for the truth of a sentence in an inductive definition of truth. Understood this way, truth conditions are theoretical entities.
 To illustrate with an example: Suppose that, in a particular truth theory (Field 1972) which is a theory of truth where truth is somehow made acceptable despite semantic terms as close as possible, the word Nixon refers to Richard M. Nixon, and is alive is associated with the set of currently living things. Then one way of representing the truth condition of Nixon is alive is as the ordered pair in (1).

1.  <Nixon, {x: x is alive}>

TYPE

1. (Semantics) A notion developed in mathematical logic and used as part of the conceptual apparatus underlying formal semantics (notably, in lambda calculus). A type-theoretic approach offers a mathematical perspective for the categorial syntax of natural language, using the notion of a hierarchy of types as a framework for semantic structure (as in Montague grammar).
    Basic (or primitive) types, e.g. 'entity', 'truth value', 'state', are distinguished from derived or complex types, e.g. functional types: an example is (a, b), i.e. all functions taking arguments in the a domain apply to values in the b domain. | David Crystal, 2008
2. (Lexical) A term used as part of a measure of lexical density. The type/token ratio is the ratio of the total number of different words (types) to the total number of words (tokens) in a sample of text.
    Types are used in several models of lexical representation (notably, typed feature structures) to refer to a superordinate category. The types are organized as a lattice framework, with the most general type represented at the top and inconsistency indicated at the bottom. Similarities in lattices specify compatibility between types. Subtypes inherit all the properties of all their supertypes: for example, in a typed feature structure hierarchy, the subtype sausages under the type food ('sausages are a type of food') means that sausages has all the properties specified by the type constraints on food, with some further properties of its own. | David Crystal, 2008

Page Last Modified November 23, 2024

 

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