Grammar, Reference & Linguistic Structure

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Abstractions about grammatical organization, reference, meaning, morphology, discourse, and word order. They connect formal and functional grammars with denotation, person and alignment, parsing, propositions, context-sensitive reference, and theories of linguistic universals.

30 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Agreement (linguistics) — A grammatical dependency in which one expression’s form covaries with person, number, gender, case or another feature of a related controller.
• Case grammar — A linguistic analysis in which a predicate selects a case frame of semantic roles that its participants fill beneath their surface syntactic realization.
• Construction grammar — A family of linguistic theories treating learned pairings of form and meaning or function as the basic units of grammar at every level of complexity.
• Demonstrative — A deictic expression such as this or that that identifies a referent relative to a contextual center or discourse location.
• Denotation — The entity, value, extension, truth condition, or semantic object that an expression is assigned under an interpretation, distinguished from associated connotations and many pragmatic effects.
• Direct reference theory — A semantic theory on which the contribution of a name or indexical to propositional content is its referent rather than a descriptive sense.
• Discourse grammar — A grammatical framework that models sentence grammar and discourse-organizing expressions as interacting but distinct domains of linguistic organization.
• Discourse representation theory — A dynamic formal-semantics framework that builds discourse representation structures to track referents, conditions and anaphoric accessibility across sentences.
• Disjunct (linguistics) — A clause-peripheral adjunct that comments on the proposition, its evidential status or the speaker’s manner or attitude rather than modifying its described event.
• Endophora — Text-internal reference in which an expression obtains its interpretation from another element of the surrounding discourse.
• Ergative–absolutive alignment — A morphosyntactic alignment grouping an intransitive subject with a transitive object and treating the transitive agent differently.
• Functional discourse grammar — A top-down functional theory of language production that derives utterances from communicative intentions through interpersonal, representational, morphosyntactic and phonological levels.
• Grammatical person — A grammatical category indexing participants by their relation to the speech event, commonly speaker, addressee and others.
• Induction of regular languages — The learning problem of inferring a finite automaton, regular grammar, or regular expression from labeled or otherwise informative example strings under a declared identification criterion.
• Integrational theory of language — The general theory within integrational linguistics that treats language as historically and socially integrated communicative activity while sharply separating language theory from theories of linguistic description.
• Meaning–text theory — A formal linguistic framework modeling language as a multilevel correspondence between semantic representations and surface text through intermediate syntactic and morphological structures.
• Minimalist program — A generative-linguistic research program seeking the simplest computational account of language compatible with interface conditions.
• Morpheme — The smallest linguistic unit that participates in a systematic form–meaning or form–grammatical-function relation within a language.
• Morphological parsing — Analysis of a word into morphemes together with their lexical identities, grammatical features, and combinatorial structure.
• Polypersonal agreement — A grammatical system in which a verb indexes features of more than one argument, such as subject, direct object, indirect object, or beneficiary.
• Predicate transfer — A semantic operation that lets a predicate apply to an associated individual by shifting the predicate across a salient relation, as when a driver says 'I am parked outside' about their car.
• Proposition — An abstract content expressed by a declarative utterance, capable of being believed, denied or evaluated as true or false independently of the particular sentence expressing it.
• Quotative — A grammatical marker that introduces represented speech, thought, or stance while preserving the quoted utterance’s deictic form.
• Resultative — A grammatical construction or predicate expressing a state reached by an entity as the result of an event.
• Semantic holism — The view that the meaning of a linguistic expression depends on its relations to a substantially larger language or belief system.
• Synchronous context-free grammar — A paired grammar whose productions simultaneously rewrite linked nonterminals in two strings or trees, encoding structural correspondences and reorderings.
• Telicity — The aspectual property by which an event description presents an inherent endpoint whose attainment completes the event.
• Traditional grammar — A language-description framework inherited from classical Greek and Latin grammar that organizes words into parts of speech, inflectional paradigms and prescriptive syntactic rules.
• Universal grammar — The linguistic hypothesis that human language acquisition is constrained by an innate species-typical component defining possible grammars.
• Word order — The linear arrangement of syntactic constituents through which languages encode or constrain grammatical relations, information structure and discourse effects.