A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

76 Chomsky hierarchy
and psychologists. A collection of essays since 1992 is New Horizons in the the
Study of Language and Mind (2000). In the 2000s, Chomsky has argued that
his whole generative grammar project is an exercise in biolinguistics: a good
summary is in On Nature and Language (2002).
Chomsky has also been actively involved in politics and has written widely on
US power and involvement (or lack of involvement) in many major conflicts
around the world, as well as on issues of propaganda, world trade and globalization,
e.g. American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), The Fateful Triangle
(1983), Turning the Tide (1985), Profits over People (1998), and 9–11 (2001).
His political activism increased after 11 September 2001.
Chomsky hierarchy A label applied to the series of increasingly powerful classes
of formal languages which can be generated by formal grammars (as first
demonstrated by Noam Chomsky, using notions partly derived from automata
theory). Type 3 grammars are finite-state grammars (also called ‘right-linear
grammars’); Type 2 grammars are context-free grammars; Type 1 grammars
are context-sensitive grammars; and Type 0 grammars are unrestricted rewrite
grammars. See Chomskyan.
chroneme (n.) An abstract unit, used by some phonologists as a means of
describing phonologically contrastive differences in the length of speech
sounds. Both vowels and consonants may display phonemic contrasts in
length: long and short vowels are found in German, long and short consonants
in Estonian. The vowel-length differences in English, such as in bit and beat,
also involve differences in quality, and the term chroneme is thus not applicable.
Those who use this terminology would refer to the etic unit of duration as
a chrone.
chunk (n., v.)
see chunking
chunking (n.) In psycholinguistics, the breaking up of an utterance into
units (chunks) so that it can be more efficiently processed. For example, the
use of prosody to chunk a sequence of digits enables the digits to be remembered
more easily (cf. /3, 7, 4, 1, 9, 8, 5, 7, 6, 2/ v. /3, 7, 4, 1, 9 / 8, 5, 7, 6,
2/). The notion has come to be particularly used in relation to the storage and
production of syntactic constructions, especially in relation to the emergentist
approach in first-language acquisition. Chunking is also used as a teaching
technique in speech pathology and foreign language teaching.
circonstant (n.) In valency grammar, a non-essential dependent unit, not
determined by the valency of the verb; opposed to actant. Examples would
include modifiers and most uses of adverbials.
circumfix (n.)
see affix
circumscription (n.) In prosodic morphology, a term used to characterize
a core principle of the approach: ‘prosodic circumscription’ asserts that the
domain to which morphological operations apply is defined by prosodic criteria
(as well as by the traditionally recognized morphological criteria). In affixation,