Word.ws English Dictionary

left periphery

left periphery noun: the part of a syntactic tree above the inflectional phrase(s) (expressing tense, aspect, and/or mood), where topic, focus, illocutionary force, etc. are expressed.

left periphery: the part of a syntactic tree above the inflectional phrase(s) (expressing tense, aspect, and/or...
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Noun

left periphery (plural left peripheries)

  1. The part of a syntactic tree above the inflectional phrase(s) (expressing tense, aspect, and/or mood), where topic, focus, illocutionary force, etc. are expressed.
    • Four kinds of elements typically occurring in the left periphery will be taken into account: interrogative and relative pronouns, topics and focalized elements.1997, Luigi Rizzi, “The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery”, in Liliane Haegeman, editor, Elements of Grammar: Handbook in Generative Syntax, Dordrecht: Springer, →ISBN, page 281
    • The polar-question particle sheds useful light on the syntax of the BH [Biblical Hebrew] left periphery. [...] With an overt Force head and the obligatory movement of the finite verb to the Topic head, the structure of the left periphery becomes more visible.2017, Elizabeth Cowper, Vincent DeCaen, “Biblical Hebrew: A formal perspective on the left periphery”, in Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics, volume 38, page 14

Forms of left periphery

pluralleft peripheries

Questions about left periphery

What does left periphery mean?
Left periphery means the part of a syntactic tree above the inflectional phrase(s) (expressing tense, aspect, and/or mood), where topic, focus, illocutionary force, etc. are expressed.
What part of speech is left periphery?
Left periphery is a noun.
What is the plural of left periphery?
The plural of left periphery is left peripheries.

Words near left periphery in the dictionary

  1. left out
  2. left outer join
  3. left outer joins
  4. left over
  5. left peripheries
  6. left periphery
  7. left recursion
  8. left shift
  9. left shifted
  10. left shifting
  11. left shifts

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: left periphery (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “left periphery.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/left_periphery. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.