A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

156 donkey sentence
and N are directly dominated by NP, the first NP is directly dominated by
‘Sentence’, and the second by the VP. It is by the use of this notion that
distinctions such as subject and object can be made in this model, viz. the
Subject is that NP directly dominated by Sentence, the Object is that NP directly
dominated by VP. A further notion is that of ‘exhaustive’ dominance: a node A
exhaustively dominates a string of words if and only if it dominates those words
and no other words. A node A is also said to exhaustively dominate a node B if
it immediately dominates B and no other node. The ‘vertical’ dimension of
dominance should be distinguished from the ‘horizontal’ notion of precedence.
Immediate-dominance rules are one of the components of a generalized phrasestructure
grammar.
Sentence
NP
VP
D
N
V
NP
D
N
the
king
saw
the
cat
(2) Dominance is also important in several models of phonology: for example,
in later metrical phonology foot dominance is a parameter which
determines the side of the foot where the head is located: in ‘left-dominant’
feet, all left nodes are dominant and right nodes recessive; in ‘right-dominant’
feet all right nodes are dominant and left nodes recessive.
(3) In the phonological analysis of sign language, dominance is used to characterize
handedness (deriving from its general use in psychology and neurology):
a signer is linguistically either left-hand or right-hand dominant, depending on
which hand typically executes one-handed signs.
donkey sentence A type of problematic sentence, typically illustrated by Every
man who owns a donkey beats it, in which the pronoun must be construed as
dependent upon the noun phrase a donkey, without allowing that phrase to
have wider scope than the universal quantification expressed by every. Such
sentences have been given detailed study in discourse representation theory.
dorsal (adj.) A term sometimes used in the phonetic classification of speech
sounds, referring to a sound made with the back, or dorsum, of the tongue in
contact with the roof of the mouth, as in velar (sc. dorso-velar) or palatal (sc.
dorso-palatal) sounds. Some authors include other parts of the tongue under this
heading. The term has developed a special status in phonological theory,
especially in various non-linear models. For example, in articulator-based
feature theory, it refers to a single-valued node involving the tongue body as