A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

392 prop
relative pronouns, e.g. who/whom/that; and resumptive or shadow pronouns,
e.g. him in John, I like him. A logophoric pronoun (or logophor) refers to a
person whose speech or thought is represented in discourse. The grammatical
statement of pronominal distribution in a language is usually quite complex. It
is often discussed with reference to the more general notions of pro-form
and deixis. See also lazy pronoun.
prop (adj.) A term used in some grammatical descriptions to refer to a
meaningless element introduced into a structure to ensure its grammaticality,
e.g. the it in it’s a lovely day. Such words are also referred to as empty, because
they lack any semantically independent meaning. substitute words, which
refer back to a previously occurring element of structure, are also often called
prop words, e.g. one or do in he’s found one, he does, etc.
proper (adj.) A term used primarily in the grammatical classification of nouns,
opposed traditionally to a set of terms including common, abstract, etc., but
in linguistic analysis usually contrasting with ‘common’ alone. The alternative
term, proper name, reflects its traditional semantic definition: the name of
an individual person, place, etc. Modern grammars aim to provide a formal
treatment of these distinctions: proper nouns, for example, cannot be used with
determiners in the way common nouns can, cf. the/a boy with *the/a London,
etc. In government-binding theory, proper government is government by a
lexical category. See also government phonology.
proportional (adj.) A type of opposition recognized in Prague School
phonology, distinguished from isolated. The opposition between /f/ and /v/
in English is proportional, because there are other oppositions in the language
which work in parallel, e.g. /s/ and /z/, /à/ and /è/; on the other hand, the
opposition between, say, /v/ and /l/ is isolated – there are no other segments that
are contrasted in this particular way, i.e. voiced labio-dental fricative
v. voiced lateral.
proposition (n.) A term derived from philosophy, where its status is controversial,
and often used in linguistics as part of a grammatical or semantic
analysis. It is normally understood to refer to the sense of a declarative
sentence, with all ambiguity, vagueness and deixis resolved, so that a definite
truth value may be assigned. An atomic proposition is one which does
not have other propositions as parts; it is usually analysed as consisting of a
single predicate with an appropriate number of arguments. In possibleworlds
semantics, a proposition is regarded as a set of possible worlds (or
world–time pairs). The propositional calculus is a system for representing propositions
(or sentences, or statements) in formal notation, with a set of
semantic or deductive rules used for proving examples of logical consequence,
logical truth, etc. Propositional logic deals only with those aspects
of logic which do not require an analysis of the internal structure of atomic
propositions, and standardly includes an analysis of the truth functional
connectives. It is weaker than the more complex predicate calculus. In linguistics,
the interest is primarily in the way in which different linguistic forms
can be shown to express the same proposition (e.g. The cat ate the meat, The