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Actant is a term that was introduced into narratology and semiotics in 1966 by Algirdas Julien Greimas as a synonym

In theater, the actor is the key element in the complex network of signs that constitutes theatrical performance. It is

Adjectival derivation is the derivation of an adjective from a verb, a noun, or an adjective. Fábregas and Marín (...

Agreement is defined as the systematic covariance of one element with another, as illustrated in (1) by gender and number agreement on the determiner and the adjective and in (2) by person-number agreement on the verb....

encompasses messages expressed in manners other than plain speaking. The term is derived from the Greek allos (other) and agoreuein

I hope in this article to indicate how American linguists in the middle of the 20th century thought about the nature of morphemes and words, and the relationships found among words and sentences in a language....

Linguists use the term analogy in a wide variety of senses. This article focuses on its use in the Neogrammarian tradition that dates back to the last quarter of the ...

The study of argument structure intersects with nearly every domain of morphology. In the first place, the morphological shapes of verbs will have a direct bearing on the number and nature of arguments they take: morphological alternations can mark increases and decreases in valency and changes to the nature (e.g., thematic roles) of the arguments taken....

Ever since Greenberg’s postulation of a Nilo-Saharan family in 1963, scholars have disagreed on the subgrouping or the inclusion or exclusion of specific language families. This applies, for example, to the Kadu languages spoken along the southern range of the Nuba Mountains, Sudan, which had been classified as Kordofanian, that is, as members of the Niger-Kordofanian phylum by ...

A collection of sacred texts usually regarded as a unified whole and published as a book consisting of a number of books. For Christians these are in two groups, an Old Testament (OT), whose original texts are ...

is the characteristic feature of systems that are based on pairs of oppositions. The Latin bini, from the same

Brexit (Britain + exit), Trustafarians (trust fund + rastafarians), affluenza (affluent + influenza), and other blends were listed among top words of the first 15 years of the ...

The English term blocking was launched by Aronoff (1976), where it was defined as “the non-occurrence of one form due to the simple existence of another” (p. 43). In the context of Aronoff’s book, the concept of blocking explained the complementary distribution of abstract nouns such as those of the second and third columns under (1):...

Bracketing paradoxes are defined as constructions for which two incompatible structural analyses are required in order to simultaneously explain both the morphosyntactic or semantic properties of a word on the one hand (MS), and its morpho phonological or phonological characteristics on the other (PF). Such constructions, first discussed in detail contemporaneously in ...

The name for punctuation marks of various kinds that mark off (more strongly than pairs of commas) certain matter as distinct, parenthetical, or interpolated. Material set between brackets is not grammatically essential to a sentence, which would be complete without it. Kinds of brackets include: ...

The category of case belongs to the stock of traditional grammatical categories; morphological case is familiar from languages which informed linguistic theory (like Ancient Greek, illustrated in ...

French mathematician René Thom's natural, realist philosophy is governed by the two central principles of structural stability and morphogenesis. The

This section introduces verbal alternations with a special focus on different types of causativity alternations.

Verbs are generally associated with a particular argument structure (a.k.a. syntactic frames, coding frames, valency, arity). The argument structure of a verb includes information about (i) the number of participants (i.e., arguments) typically associated with the verb, and (ii) the semantic (i.e., thematic) roles commonly played by each participant. A one-place (i.e., monadic, intransitive) predicate like ...

What should be considered classical generative morphology is not immediately obvious. Therefore, this article starts with a delimitation of the topic (...

Clitics can be defined as prosodically defective function words and are often characterized as items that fall between independent words and affixes. As function words, they belong to closed classes, like determiners, pronouns, prepositions (or postpositions), complementizers, certain kinds of particles, auxiliaries, and modals, or certain kinds of adverbs, like negative ones. Open class words, which have lexical meaning (content words), like nouns, verbs, or adjectives, are never clitics. Clitics resemble affixes in the sense that they cannot stand on their own; they are bound forms. As such, clitics can never be the answer to a question, as (2) illustrates. In (1) it is shown that the English pronoun ...