A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

138 dependent
relation holds between features on different tiers (‘feature dependency’ or
‘dependent tier ordering’).
dependent (adj.) (1) A general term used in grammatical analysis as part of
the classification of clause types: opposed to main, and synonymous with
subordinate.
(2) See dependency grammar.
deponent verb A term from traditional Latin grammar, used for verbs which
are passive in most of their forms, but active in meaning. Examples include
loquor ‘speak’ and hortor ‘I exhort’. They are called ‘deponent’ because they
have ‘put away’ (de + pono) some of their parts – in other words, the inflections
associated with the active voice.
depth (n.)
see deep structure
depth hypothesis A hypothesis proposed by the American linguist Victor Yngve
(b. 1920) in the early 1960s as an explanation of the psychological differences
between the two categories of linguistic construction: left-branching (e.g.
the man’s hat) and right-branching (e.g. the hat of the man). He argued that
left-branching structures add more to the psychological complexity (or structural
‘depth’) of a sentence, because the processing of such structures takes up
more space in short-term memory than does the processing of right-branching
structures. The hypothesis has been criticized on various grounds, particular
reference being made to other important types of construction which complicate
the issue, such as self-embedding. The term should be distinguished from
the general sense of ‘depth’ in psycholinguistics, where it is used in relation
to the effect of different levels of processing on the retention of linguistic
information.
de re
see de dicto/de re
derivation (n.) (1) A term used in morphology to refer to one of the two
main categories or processes of word-formation (derivational morphology),
the other being inflection(al); also sometimes called derivatology. These terms
also apply to the two types of affix involved in word-formation. Basically, the
result of a derivational process is a new word (e.g. nation ⇒ national), whereas
the result of an inflectional (or non-derivational) process is a different form of
the same word (e.g. nations, nationals). The distinction is not totally clear-cut,
however (e.g. how best to analyse -ly in English). Derivational affixes change the
grammatical class of morphemes to which they are attached (as in suffixation,
e.g. -tion is a noun-forming derivational suffix); they also usually occur closer
to the root morpheme than do inflections, e.g. nation-al-ize + -ing/-s/-d. Often
they have independently stateable lexical meanings (e.g. mini-, sub-), though
these are not always easy to identify (e.g. -er). The combination of root and
derivational affixes is usually referred to as the stem of the word, i.e. the
element to which inflections are attached; several modes of classification are
available in the literature on this subject.
(2) In generative grammar, derivation refers to the set of formally identifiable
stages used in generating a sentence from an initial symbol to a terminal