A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

view that an element governed by one relationship will not be governed by
another; in terms of a theory of barriers, nodes become barriers for an
element if they immediately dominate the nearest governor of that element.
Relativized minimality is the view that what counts as a governor is related to
what is being governed: an element will minimally govern its trace if there is no
other typical potential governor that is closer to the trace.
minimal link condition see movement (1)
MIT 307
minimal pair One of the discovery procedures used in phonology to
determine which sounds belong to the same class, or phoneme. Two words
which differ in meaning when only one sound is changed are referred to as a
‘minimal pair’, e.g. pin v. bin, cot v. cut, and linguists or native-speakers who
make these judgements are said to be carrying out a minimal pair test. A group
of words differentiated by each having only one sound different from all others,
e.g. big, pig, rig . . . is sometimes called a minimal set.
minimal set
see minimal pair
minor (adj.) (1) A term used by some linguists in the classification of
sentence types to refer to a sentence (a minor sentence) with limited productivity
(e.g. Please, Sorry) or one which lacks some of the constituents of the
language’s major (or favourite) sentence type (e.g. vocatives, elliptical
constructions).
(2) For minor articulation in feature geometry, see major (2).
minority language A language used in a country by a group which is significantly
smaller in number than the rest of the population; also called a linguistic
minority or language minority. Those who speak the language may be nationals
of the country, but they have distinguishing ethnic, religious or cultural features
which they wish to safeguard. Most countries have several minority languages
within their borders.
misderivation (n.) A term used by some psycholinguists to refer to a type of
tongue-slip where the wrong affix is attached to a word, as in kingness for
kingship.
mismatch (n.) see overlapping (2)
misrelated participle
see dangling participle
mistake (n.) see error (2)
MIT The abbreviation for Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used in linguistics
as a label characterizing generative linguistic theory and method.
The ‘MIT school’ is so called because of the influence of the work of Noam
Chomsky, Morris Halle and their associates at MIT since the late 1950s. See
Chomskyan.