A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

168 empiricism
empiricism (n.) An application in linguistics of the general sense of this term
in philosophy to refer to a view of language, and especially of language acquisition,
in which sense experience is seen as the ultimate source of learning. It is
opposed to rationalism, which asserts that knowledge about language can derive
from sources other than sense experience. In empiricism, language acquisition
is seen as a process of generalization from experience; in rationalism, it results
from maturation of a language faculty (‘organ’) governed by various innate
principles. See also behaviourism, emergentism, mentalism.
empty (adj.) (1) A term used in some grammatical descriptions to refer to a
meaningless element introduced into a structure to ensure its grammaticality.
There is an empty use of it, for example, in such sentences as it’s raining, and
existential there is sometimes regarded in this way (e.g. there are mice in the
larder). Such elements have also been called prop words, or dummy elements.
In generative grammar, empty elements (empty nodes) are displayed in phrasemarkers
as deltas filled by dummies or empty categories. Empty categories
include pro, PRO, and trace (in government-binding theory) and the slash
categories of generalized phrase-structure grammar.
(2) The term is also sometimes used in the grammatical classification of
words to refer to one of two postulated major word-classes in language, the
other being full. Empty words are said to be words which have no lexical
meaning, and whose function is solely to express grammatical relationships,
e.g. to, the, in, of. The distinction has been criticized, on the grounds that there
are degrees of meaning in most grammatical words, few (if any) being really
devoid of content. The term is still used, however – though not as widely as
some other terms (such as grammatical word, function word).
(3) A term used in morphology, in the phrase empty morph, to refer to a
formal feature in a word which cannot be allocated to any morpheme. A
well-discussed example in English is the word children, where a possible analysis
is into root child and plural suffix -en (cf. oxen); the residual /r/ left by this
analysis is then seen as an empty morph without which the word would not be
exhaustively analysed at the morphemic level.
empty category principle (EPG) A principle of the government (sub-)theory
of government-binding theory. It requires a trace to be properly governed,
i.e. to be governed either by a lexical category or by a category with the
same index (its antecedent).
enclisis, enclitic (n.)
see clitic
encode (v.)
see code
endangered language A term used in linguistics for a language which is at
risk of becoming extinct within the foreseeable future. As a result of increased
survey information during the 1980s and 1990s, it is now thought that over half
of the world’s languages are moribund – not being effectively passed on to
the next generation. Language endangerment is followed by language death
unless the trend can be reversed through a language revitalization programme.
A current preoccupation is the recording of these languages before
they disappear (language documentation).