domination (n.)

A term in GENERATIVE LINGUISTICS for one type of vertical relationship between NODES in a TREE diagram (‘X dominates Y’). If no nodes intervene between X and Y, one says that X ‘directly’ or ‘immediately’ dominates Y. For example, in the diagram of the sentence The king saw the cat the D and N are directly dominated by NP, the first NP is directly dominated by ‘Sentence’, and the second by the VP. It is by the use of this notion that distinctions such as SUBJECT and OBJECT can be made in this model, viz. the Subject is that NP directly dominated by Sentence, the Object is that NP directly dominated by VP. A further notion is that of ‘exhaustive’ dominance: a node A exhaustively dominates a string of words if and only if it dominates those words and no other words. A node A is also said to exhaustively dominate a node B if it immediately dominates B and no other node. The ‘vertical’ dimension of dominance should be distinguished from the ‘horizontal’ notion of PRECEDENCE. Immediate-dominance rules are one of the components of a GENERALIZED PHRASE-STRUCTURE GRAMMAR.

Dominance is also important in several models of PHONOLOGY: for example, in later METRICAL PHONOLOGY foot dominance is a PARAMETER which determines the side of the FOOT where the HEAD is located: in ‘left-dominant’ feet, all left nodes are dominant and right nodes RECESSIVE; in ‘right-dominant’ feet all right nodes are dominant and left nodes recessive.

In the phonological analysis of SIGN language, dominance is used to characterize handedness (deriving from its general use in psychology and neurology): a signer is linguistically either left-hand or right-hand dominant, depending on which hand typically executes one-handed signs.