access (n.)

A term derived from psychology, and used in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS to refer to the extent to which a speaker can retrieve a linguistic unit from memory. Problems of access are evident in ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ and TONGUE-SLIP phenomena, as well as in the varying times it takes someone to react to STRUCTURES involving different degrees of COMPLEXITY. It is especially encountered in studies of LEXICAL ACCESS.

accessibility hierarchy In RELATIONAL GRAMMAR, a term used to refer to a postulated LINEAR series of dependencies between NOMINAL entities, which controls the applicability of SYNTACTIC RULES. In the hierarchy, each entity in the series more freely undergoes syntactic rules than the items to the right. For example, the nominal operating as a SUBJECT is said to be ‘more accessible’ than that operating as DIRECT OBJECT; the direct object is more accessible than the INDIRECT object; and so on. The notion has been applied to several grammatical areas (e.g. RELATIVE CLAUSE formation, the use of REFLEXIVES, and QUANTIFIERS), but the full application of this principle remains to be explored.