Laurie Bauer - WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here

THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 156
language would have a single meaning for every form, and a single form for
every meaning.
Panini’s Principle
Panini’s Principle or the Panini Principle are other names given to the
Elsewhere Condition.
Principle of least effort
The principle of least effort is based on work by Zipf, who states the principle
in its most general form as: ‘[A] person will strive to minimize the probable
average rate of his work-expenditure (over time)’ (Zipf 1949: 1; italics in original).
This has been interpreted in a number of ways in the study of language
(see for example, discussion of Zipf ’s Law, below). It is often held to imply that
speakers will simplify their pronunciation as much as possible, for example
through assimilation and the loss of consonants and vowels. However, speakers
are also listeners, and need to minimise the effort that it will take to understand
the spoken language as well as the effort it will take to produce it; these
two opposing forces need to be considered in understanding the principle.
Projection Principle
Chomsky (1981: 29) formulates this principle as follows: ‘Representations at
each syntactic level (i.e. LF, DS and SS) are projected from the lexicon, in that
they observe the subcategorization properties of lexical items.’
Repeated Morph Constraint
The Repeated Morph Constraint is also known as the Multiple Application
Constraint. Lieber (1981: 173) phrases this as: ‘No word formation process . . .
can apply iteratively to its own output.’ In other words, no word can contain a
sequence of identical affixes. There are known exceptions, but they tend to be
marginal.
Right-hand Head Rule
Williams (1981: 248) states the Right hand Head Rule as ‘In morphology, we
define the head of a morphologically complex word to be the righthand
member of that word.’ There are languages for which this does not seem to be
true across the board, and the statement has given rise to a large amount of discussion,
but has been extremely influential.