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positional mobility 375
and /h/, which do not occur in the same environments), but several languages,
such as many in South-East Asia, have been fruitfully analysed in these terms.
polyvalent (adj.)
see valency
pooh-pooh theory The name of one of the speculative theories about the origins
of language: it argues that speech arose through people making instinctive
sounds, caused by pain, anger or other emotions. The main evidence is the use
of interjections, but no language contains many of these. The term has no
standing in contemporary linguistics.
popular etymology
see etymology
portmanteau (adj./n.) A term used in morphological analysis referring to
cases where a single morph can be analysed into more than one morpheme, as
in French au, aux, etc. (= *à le, *à les, ‘to the’). The item is called a ‘portmanteau
morph’ (‘a portmanteau’), and sometimes, when it is equivalent to a word,
a ‘portmanteau word’.
Port Royal The name given to a group of seventeenth-century scholars, based
at the convent of Port Royal, south of Versailles, who, following the ideas of
Descartes, developed a view of language in which grammatical categories
and structures were seen as relatable to universal logical patterns of thought
(an influential work was the Grammaire générale et raisonnée of C. Lancelot,
A. Arnauld and others, published in 1660). The ideas of this school of thought
became widely known in the 1960s, when Noam Chomsky drew certain parallels
between them and his own conception of the relationship between language
and mind. See Chomskyan.
position (n.) (1) A term used in linguistics to refer to the functionally
contrastive places within a linguistic unit, e.g. phonemes within the syllable
or word, morphemes within the word, words within the sentence. It is common
to talk of elements occurring in initial, medial or final ‘positions’
within the higher-order unit. A positional variant refers to the formal variations
introduced into a linguistic unit (usually a phoneme or morpheme) because
of the conditioning influence of its linguistic context. See also argument.
(2) In phonetics, position refers to the arrangement of the vocal organs
during the articulation of a sound: the various articulators (lips, tongue,
etc.) are said to be in certain positions, according to their place and manner of
articulation.
positional faithfulness/markedness In optimality theory, an application of
the notions of faithfulness and markedness relative to a particular location
in a form. For example, in a given language plosives may be less marked than
nasals in onsets, while the reverse may be true in codas.
positional mobility A term often used in grammar to refer to a defining
property of the word, seen as a grammatical unit. The criterion states that
the constituent elements of complex words are not capable of rearrangement