A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

conditioned 99
money at all’) use the negative form ningún following no, rather than the
positive form algún (‘some’).
concrete (adj.)
see abstract
condition (n.) A term used in linguistics to refer to any factors which,
it might be argued, need to be taken into account in evaluating a theory, a
grammar, or an individual analysis, e.g. such conditions as external adequacy,
generality, simplicity. More specifically, it refers to any criterion which must
be met before a particular analysis may be carried out. In systemic grammar,
for example, the entry conditions specify the structural criteria which must
be satisfied in order for a particular grammatical system to become operative.
In transformational grammar, the structural description which provides
the input to a transformational rule specifies the conditions which must
be met before the rule can operate. Later, in this theory, the term was used
to refer to the factors which constrain the application of transformations, in
such contexts as movement rules. For example, one condition states that a
moved constituent can only be substituted for an empty category; another,
that a moved constituent leaves behind a co-indexed trace of itself. The
‘island condition’ asserts that subjects and adjuncts, but not complements,
are islands; i.e., constituents can be extracted out of complement phrases,
but not out of subject/adjunct phrases. Since the late 1970s, conditions on
transformations have largely been replaced by conditions on various levels
of representation, e.g. binding theory (a set of conditions on surface
structures and/or logical form) replaced several conditions on rules of
grammar proposed during the 1970s. See also entry (2), felicity conditions,
nominative.
conditional (adj./n.) (cond) A term used in grammatical description to
refer to clauses whose semantic role is the expression of hypotheses or conditions.
In English, these are introduced by if, unless, and a few other conjunctions
(e.g. if John asks, tell him . . . ). The traditional grammatical notion of
‘conditional tense’ (using would, should) is usually interpreted in terms of
aspectual or modal verb forms in analyses of English, though this is morphologically
expressed in many languages (e.g. French). Sometimes the term
is used to refer to the entire two-part construction, consisting of protasis and
apodosis (see apodosis). See also material conditional.
conditioned (adj.) A term used in linguistics to refer to the form a linguistic
unit takes when this is partly or wholly determined by the linguistic context in
which it occurs. For example, in English phonology, the alveolar /t/ phoneme
predictably becomes dental when followed by /θ/, as in eighth, i.e. [>] is
a conditioned variant of /t/; in morphophonology, the indefinite article
a becomes an when followed by a vowel. The concept of allo- is the most
succinct way of referring to phonological and grammatical ‘conditioning’, and
other terms are sometimes used for the same phenomenon, e.g. ‘contextual/
positional/combinatory/automatic’ variants. The term conditioning is also sometimes
used with reference to the influence of the social/cultural situation on the
choice of linguistic forms (‘environmental conditioning’).