A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

356 perception
perception (n.) The general sense of this term is found in psycholinguistics,
where it refers to the process of receiving and decoding spoken, written or
signed input. The underlying process is one of matching a set of cues to a stored
representation. In phonetics, the perceptual process requires that listeners take
into account not only the acoustic cues present in the speech signal, but also
their own knowledge of the sound patterns of their language, in order to
interpret what they hear. The term is usually contrasted with production.
Perceptual (= data-driven) processes are often contrasted with conceptual (=
knowledge-driven) processes.
percolation (n.) In grammar, a process whereby a feature associated with the
head of a construction comes to be associated with the construction as a
whole; also called trickling. It has come to be used chiefly in generative
morphology for the analysis of words in terms of heads. For example, in a
word like goodness, it is the -ness affix which gives noun status to the word as
a whole (not the other constituent, good, which is adjectival). The affix
therefore has to be seen as the head and assigned to the noun category. As
a consequence, this category has to percolate through to the word as a
whole (analogous to the way that a head noun in a phrase confers noun phrase
status on the whole phrase). Various feature percolation conventions have
been proposed.
perfect (adj./n.) (perf, PERF, PF) A term used in the grammatical description
of verb forms, referring to a contrast of a temporal or durative kind, and thus
sometimes handled under the heading of tense (e.g. ‘perfect’, ‘future perfect’,
‘pluperfect’) and sometimes under aspect (e.g. ‘perfective’, ‘non-perfective’). It
is illustrated in English by the contrast between I go and I have gone, or
between I have gone and I had gone (traditionally called the pluperfect, also
now past perfect). linguists prefer an aspectual analysis here, because of the
complex interaction of durational, completive and temporal features of meaning
involved; traditional grammars, however, refer simply to ‘perfect tense’, etc.,
and thus imply a meaning which is to some degree an oversimplification. ‘Perfect’,
in these contexts, refers to a past situation where the event is seen as
having some present relevance; in perfective aspect, by contrast, a situation is
seen as a whole, regardless of the time contrasts which may be a part of it.
Perfective then contrasts with imperfective or non-perfective, which draws attention
to the internal time-structuring of the situation. The terminological distinction
between ‘perfect’ and ‘perfective’ is often blurred, because grammarians writing
on English have often used the latter term to replace the former, presumably
because they wish to avoid its traditional associations. But this can lead to
confusion in the discussion of those languages (such as the Slavic languages)
where both notions are required. In such languages as Russian and Polish, for
example, a contrast between perfective and imperfective is fundamental to verb
classification, and is formally marked morphologically. For example, the
prefix προ- (‘pro-’) before the verb ‘read’ produces a ‘perfective verb’ where the
meaning is that the action (of reading) is completed; in the ‘imperfective verb’,
which lacks the prefix, there is no such implication.
perfect grid
see metrical grid