Glossary

idiomaticity

A state of affairs in which the relation between the lexicogrammatical form of an expression and its meaning or use is not fully explained by principles of semantic composition (building on the meanings of the constituents and the semantic import of the constructions by which they are structured) or by pragmatic reasoning. Stated the other way around, those aspects of the meaning of a linguistic expression which must be learned by specific linguistic convention.

motivation

The extent to which the meaning of a linguistic expression is explained or made intelligible, or perhaps simply made memorable, by reference to the meanings of its parts.

pre-emption

The situation in which a productive formation is blocked (i.e., produces an ungrammatical expression) because there is a specific irregular form which serves the same grammatical or semantic purpose. English doesn't tolerate "mans" as the plural of "man" because it is pre-empted by "men"; English doesn't tolerate "today morning" (in spite of "yesterday morning" and "tomorrow morning") because of "this morning".

valence

The combinability potential of a complement-taking word, or predicate, expressed in terms of whatever is necessary to say about the morpho-syntactic form of the complements, or the grammatical or semantic relations they hold to the predicating word. The adjective "afraid" can be said to "take" a subject which expresses an experiencer, and a complement which expresses the content of the experience, this expressed either with a finite clause ("I'm afraid he'll lose the election") or a prepositional phrase headed by "of" ("I'm afraid of earthquakes"). The representation of the valence of this adjective is expressed as a set whose members are feature structures specifying the values of three attributes: grammatical function, "theta" role, and morphosyntactic form. The former two are themselves values of an attribute "rel", for "relation"; the last is a feature structure whose attribute is "syn", for "syntax". The "syn" value might be complex, as when the complement of a predicate is required to be a that-clause with "subjunctive" mood.