Tags
Browse by tag
Tags fall into three facets: the meaning at issue, the machinery that carries it, and the process behind it.
Domain
The area of meaning at issue.
- Existence 4 An assertion that something is present in the world or in some setting.
- Location 2 Where something is, relative to a place or to another thing.
- Possession 5 A relation between a possessor and a possessed thing, covering ownership, kinship and body parts.
- Alienability 1 Whether a possession can change hands — body parts and kin against acquired belongings.
- Negation 4 Denial that something holds, together with the elements that mark it.
- Indefiniteness 1 Reference to an entity the hearer is not expected to pick out.
- Quantification 2 How much or how many: every, some, none, both.
- Comparison 1 Setting one thing against another for degree: taller than, as tall as, the tallest.
- Perception 2 Seeing, hearing, and the other senses.
- Obligation 1 Being bound to act — orders, compliance, duty.
- Tense and aspect 1 When an event happened, and how it is laid out in time — finished, going on, still bearing on now.
- Modality 1 Possibility, necessity, or attempt, short of asserting that the event came off.
- Device operation 1 Making a machine start or stop working.
- Grammatical relations 2 Subject, object, and the other roles a clause assigns its participants.
- Benefaction 1 An action done for someone’s sake, or at their expense.
- Spatial relation 1 Relations like in, on, under, behind.
Structure
The formal machinery a language uses to carry it.
- Word order 2 The sequence of subject, object, verb and their dependents.
- Adposition 3 Prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions marking the role of a noun phrase.
- Case marking 1 An affix or clitic on a noun phrase signalling its relation to a head or a clause.
- Syncretism 4 One form doing duty across several grammatical functions.
- Nominal classification 1 Nouns sorted into classes the grammar reacts to: classifiers, genders, noun classes.
- Colexification 3 One lexeme covering meanings that other languages keep apart.
- Expletive subject 1 A contentless element holding the subject slot: English there, French il.
- Suppletion 2 Cells of one paradigm filled by unrelated stems, as in Turkish var and yok.
- Negative concord 2 Several negative-marked elements in a clause expressing a single negation.
- Oblique marking 3 A participant marked by a case or adposition rather than as subject or object.
- Topic marking 1 An element flagged as what the sentence is about.
- Multiverb construction 2 Two or more verbs in one clause describing a single event: converbs, serial verbs, auxiliary chains.
- Valency change 1 Marking on the verb that adds a participant, or shifts which one the clause is built around.
- Auxiliary verb 2 A verb carrying tense, aspect or modality for a main verb.
Mechanism
The process that produced the form or drives its change.
- Metaphor 2 One domain lending its vocabulary to another: fire for electric light.
- Metonymy 3 A shift along contiguity, where a part, cause or outcome names the whole.
- Grammaticalization 9 A lexical item hardening into a grammatical marker.
- Reanalysis 4 The same string parsed with a new structure by later speakers.
- Semantic bleaching 3 Loss of specific content as a form spreads to more contexts.
- Renewal cycle 2 A weakened form gets reinforced, the reinforcement takes over, and the sequence starts again.
- Lexicalization 3 A phrase or paradigm cell frozen into a single stored word.