A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

participle 351
‘language’ (the others being langage and langue). It refers to the concrete
utterances produced by individual speakers in actual situations, and is distinguished
from langue, which is the collective language system of a speech
community. An analogous term is performance.
paronymy (n.) A term sometimes used in semantic analysis to refer to the
relationship between words derived from the same root. It is especially applied
to a word formed from a word in another language with only a slight change:
French pont and Latin pons are paronyms, and the relationship between them is
one of paronymy.
parse (n./v.), parser (n.)
see parsing
parse tree see tree (1)
parsing (n.) (1) In traditional grammar, this term refers to the pedagogical
exercise of labelling the grammatical elements of single sentences, e.g. subject,
predicate, past tense, noun, verb; in the USA, also called diagramming.
linguistics, by contrast, is less concerned with labels, and more with the
criteria of analysis which lead to the identification of these elements, and with
the way in which speakers use these elements to relate sentences in the language
as a whole.
(2) Modern grammatical formalisms have begun to develop the properties
of several parsing mechanisms (parsers), and the notion of parsing has proved
to be central to work in computational linguistics, especially natural
language processing.
(3) The term parse identifies a central feature of the procedures of network
grammars, where it refers to the grammatical breakdown of a text (a ‘parse’)
in terms of syntactic, semantic and referential information, as presented in
the form of a parse tree.
(4) See chart parser.
part (n.)
In syntax, an abbreviation sometimes used for the category particle.
partial assimilation
partial conversion
see assimilation
see conversion
participant role (1) A term used in linguistics, especially in pragmatics, to
refer to the functions which can be ascribed to people taking part in a linguistic
interaction. Typical roles are speaker and addressee, but several other roles
can be recognized, such as the recipient (as opposed to the target) of a message,
or the message’s source (as opposed to its speaker).
(2) The term is also sometimes used in grammar, as an alternative to case, to
refer to the semantic functions attached to clause elements, such as agent,
recipient and affected. See semantic role.
participle (n.) (P, part, PART) A traditional grammatical term referring to
a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a laughing face.