Linguistics’
Most Common Initialism:
A Celebration
of PLP
by SGAEs PL&P
(SpecGram
Acronymic Editors
Penelope, Lysander,
and Patricia)
The results of the recent Worldwide Survey of Linguistics (WSL) threw up a whole range of humdrum results. So much so that some of those tasked with processing the results actually threw up. Mercifully, it also threw up some interesting results. Perhaps most significantly, we have learned that not only are budgerigars the most popular pets for those who identify as professional linguists, but 57.3% of all linguists feel they would be happier as bin collectors or barristers, up from only 49.92% last year.
Most surprising of all, responses to the question, “What’s your favorite acronym or initialism in linguistics?” showed that RRG, GG, BT, NAC~ANC, CCxG, and WSL itself were all down by between 84% and 94%, with the initialism PLP surging forward from 541th place last year to take the top spot. Clearly the most common use of PLP (“pesky little particle”), while present in over 83% of all linguistics papers, cannot on its own explain the rise of this initialism.
SpecGram set to work to offer a meaningful explanation, and after extensive interviews with over 1,000 (±997) linguists, we have uncovered the shocking range of linguistics-relevant meanings carried by the initialism PLP. So, Please Listen People—Pay Lots [of] Perceptive [attention] and Prick [up] [your] Lugholes, Please—as we reveal here a small sample of the myriad of linguistic terms to which this initialism can apply.
Pesky Little Particle—“We would have gotten away with our analysis, if it hadn’t been for you pesky little particles!”
Pesky Language Processing—The peskiness of a language, of course, being calculated based on how pesky it is for linguistic theories. PLP is a booming field that is particularly useful for determining which languages to conduct research on.
Praeteritic Linguistic Purity—A technique for apophasistically maintaining one’s alleged innocence in matters of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, etc. For example:
He is reported to have exclaimed, “Saperlipopette! What we are avoiding is pseudo-cleft constructions, swearing, French, and in-bloody-fixation!”, and thus he is expelled from the Linguistics Purity Club.
Phonesthemic Linguists’ Party—A glowing, glistening soirée, full of sleek, slick badinage, and thumping, bumping tunage. A rave for word nerds.
Parameterized Language Planning—A mobilization model used by the Γραμματο-Χαοτικον to facilitate and benchmark planned long-term language change.
Post-Linguistics Processing—This is the processing of language that an individual’s brain must engage in in order to salvage the original meaningful form of an utterance that has been altered beyond recognition by a theoretical framework. Alternatively, it is the process of answering the question “What on God’s green earth possessed me to major in linguistics?” after graduating from a linguistics program.
Portu-Lusitanian Portuguese—The real Portuguese, not the Brazilian kind with its palatalization and funny vowels and verb substitutions and, ugh, don’t even get me started.
Pish, Lexical Phonology—Derogatory term for the kind of person who stresses saxophonist on the first syllable.
Phonological Licensing of Prepositions/Postpositions—A rare but not unknown phonological-syntactic phenomenon in which a language only allows adpositions in particular phonological contexts. For example, In Xhwaru, a language isolate of north south-central Zambia, we have (1):
(1)
Gragan-oof
women-DUAL
dwibble-tlab
desert-PTCL
nak
forage_in
“The two women are foraging [underdetermined locative] the desert”
Here the specifics of the location must be inferred from context: expressing overtly whether the women are in the desert, near the desert, or next to the desert is ungrammatical. However, with the post-nominal addition of the adjective smookooj (“sandy”), the lexeme internal repetition of [u] (orthographically ⟨oo⟩) within the emergent PP licenses an overt postposition:
(2)
Gragan-oof
women-DUAL
dwibble-tlab
desert-PTCL
smookooj
sandy
phrarphellutancheebickal
in
nak
forage
“The two women are foraging in the desert”
Prioritising Lexico-Phraseology and Practising Lexical Paradigms for Pedagogical Language Purposes (PLP&PLP4PLP)—A late 19th-century approach in the European language learning pedagogical tradition for richly inflected languages. In PLP&PLP4PLP, the learner is asked to focus exclusively on vocabulary items as opposed to the more challenging “grammatical stuff” (i.e. the 46 pages of nominal, adjectival, and noun pre-modifier grammatical paradigms across a plurality of genders, numbers, and cases). This focus is nevertheless enriched by employing systematic aspects of lexis such as antonymy, polysemy, collocation, and colligation in the learning journey to create lexical paradigms. This approach allows the learner to participate in conversations with peers on the topic of paradigms without actually ever having learnt the case endings, and also means that language teachers who know nothing about grammar can use the term paradigm, as well as other impressive metalanguage.
The full list of uses to which PLP can and has been put is available for free upon request. (Plus 39⅑ écus for shipping & handling; allow 6 to 8 lustra for delivery.)
