Questions tagged [terminology]
Words, phrases, and acronyms specific to the study of linguistics.
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questions
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1answer
27 views
What is phonological mechanism?
Does it mean phonological rule? Or can we say phonological mechanism refers to the phonological rules in our mind?
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1answer
82 views
What are the differences between “controlled natural language” and “toy grammar”?
I am working on NLP and also Linguistics field. I created my own toy grammar, but while browsing the literature, I came across the concept of controlled natural language. Are these two the same or ...
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0answers
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Name That Phenomenon: I worry that once I STOP doing an action “just to be safe,” the thing I'm being safe from will occur
I've always had feelings like these before. I've seen sad movies when I was younger, but the thing that got me the most was the kid (who lost their parents) said, "The last thing I ever said to them ...
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1answer
61 views
Slang, colloquial use, informal speech, etc [closed]
Background
The question is motivated by this post in the Russian forum, where the answers repeatedly refer to verb пересечёмся as "young people's slang" or "teenage slang". (пересечёмся = "we'll cross ...
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2answers
58 views
What are consonants without secondary articulation called?
How can we concisely describe a consonant that is non-velarized, non-palatalized, non-glottalized, ....?
Is there an adjective for "no secondary articulation"?
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4answers
211 views
Is linguistics a superset of programming language theory?
If not, why is it?
What delineates the difference between the study of language and the study of programming languages?
Programming languages define syntax and semantics of code. Does this mean ...
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2answers
71 views
Technical term for similarity between two words?
I am learning Spanish at the moment, and I want to tag my vocabulary in the programm that im using to first learn words that are closely related to English
(For example, "Contract" -> "Contrato", "...
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1answer
74 views
Question about the concept of free morpheme
Studying Understanding Morphology, by Haspelmath, couldn't find a reference to the concept of "free morpheme".
Is that concept standard among linguists? What would be a better alternative, in any ...
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0answers
57 views
What grammar term corresponds to N' in X-bar theory?
The core idea of X-bar theory is that it has what is called 'bar-level projection' or 'intermediate projection', which is normally represented by X'. And X represents any of the categories N, V, Adj, ...
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1answer
69 views
Lexeme vs. Lemma
A lexeme to me has always been a fairly abstract entity and a lemma a concrete form that is often used to represent an lexeme.
It is surprising to me, then, that the process in NLP is almost always ...
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0answers
45 views
What is the difference between the term “actor” and “agent”?
I've worked quite a lot on agency so far. Today i've read the paper "Two routes to actorhood: lexicalized potencx to act and identification of the actor role" (Franzel et al. 2015) and i'm wondering ...
4
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1answer
862 views
The term “proto” in “proto-language”
I noticed that both Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Indo-European have the title of "proto", although the Proto-Sinaitic has actual scripts which were found and studied, i.e. it is a fact that it existed, ...
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2answers
122 views
How should this type of variation in the root be treated?
It's a bit of a silly question that popped out in my mind as a (quasi-)linguist with a great experience with portuguese (it is also my mother tongue). How should one treat the following alternation in ...
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2answers
81 views
Is there a term for cardinal numerals that don't express quantity?
In phrases like page twenty-five, year nineteen ninety-nine, Half Life Two or article seven three zero zero one, the number is in cardinal form, but it doesn't refer to the amount of the head noun. It ...
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7answers
16k views
Is there a linguistics term meaning “it's grammatically correct, but nobody says that”?
This happens a lot when learning a foreign language: You learn some grammar structure, and insert some nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., in the appropriate places, only to find out that no-one would ...
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1answer
45 views
Completely schematic construction?
I'm trying to understand what is a completely schematic construction in cognitive grammar.
I found an example: VP --> V NP
So, is that a construction that can be easily described by a general rule ...
3
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3answers
191 views
Are the nasal portions of prenasalized consonants syllabic?
Prenasalized consonants occur in a number of natural languages. https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Prenasalized_consonant
When I hear someone pronounce a word that begins with a prenasalized consonant, ...
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2answers
911 views
Are words classified (PoS) according to their use in a sentence, or does classification precede usage?
This is a rather broad question, so I'd like to limit this to verbs, at least in this explication of the question.
Verbs take many forms and roles in sentences. Present participles can take the role ...
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1answer
119 views
Term for conversation where each person speaks a different language, while understanding each other
I would like to know if there is a technical (or common) term for the type of bilingual (or multilingual) conversation described in the title. For example, one person could be speaking French, while ...
4
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2answers
199 views
What is the proper term for a verb that can be used transitively with the patient as object or intransitively with the patient as subject
For example:
I am cooking the chicken
The chicken is cooking in the oven
Cp:
I am building a sandcastle
x The sandcastle is building on the beach
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3answers
193 views
Is there any case where a relative adverb could also be described as a relative pronoun?
1/03/20: Edited to provide examples as suggested by jlawler.
It's a pretty straight forward question.
Here are the definitions from SIL:
Relative Pronoun
Definition: A relative pronoun is a ...
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2answers
121 views
Is there a name for the form “فعلان” (faʿlan)?
I've noticed the form فعلان (faʿlan) seems to imply emphasis, like in رحمان (raḥmân) which seems to means "All-Merciful". This form seems to exist in other Semitic languages like Hebrew (maybe רַבָּן, ...
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3answers
552 views
What is a “Phonetic Language”?
Once I've spoke with a friend of mine and I've asked him why in the french language there are so many discrepancies (or incongruities, inconformities...) between the written and the spoken words and ...
2
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2answers
648 views
Is DNA a language?
DNA is commonly referred to as a language. For example, I can see that DNA is made up of nucleotides (ATGC) that form meaningful units (genes, chromosomes, etc). DNA gets transmitted to future ...
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0answers
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Is there any terminology that refers to both lexis and grammar?
I wonder if there is any terminology that refers to a level of language consisting of lexis and grammar.
It would be nice to know it. Thanks for your attention.
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1answer
555 views
What is the meaning of the Latin names of grammatical cases (in general, not in Latin)?
I cannot find any source explaining the Latin names of grammatical cases. I am especially curious in the names of the less common cases, like in Finnish:
nominative
genitive
accusative
partitive
...
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1answer
110 views
Is there a term for syntactically and semantically linked modifying phrases?
What I'm talking about is when a string of prepositional phrases take the object of the previous one as their antecedent, and where the entire string is linked back to the original antecedent, a noun ...
21
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1answer
2k views
What is the name for a placename that contains what the thing is in a different language?
For example Mount Maunganui. In Māori maunganui means "large mountain" and thus when literally translated into English it means "Mount Large Mountain". Another example would be the river Avon. In ...
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1answer
100 views
Linguistic term “Word final” in Spanish
The SIL Fieldworks Language Explorer program allows you to specify multiple phonological environments for different allomorphs of a lexical item. Each environment is given a title and a description.
...
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2answers
111 views
Context-Free grammars and Language
As someone trained in neither, how could you explain the analogies between context free grammars / languages and certain programming languages in computer science? Have I misunderstood whether there ...
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1answer
102 views
What's the difference between a light noun and a nominalizer?
I've been studying Japanese, and sometimes I see some words, like の and こと, get classified as "nominalizers," and other times as "light nouns." Plus, I've read somewhere that light nouns sometimes ...
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1answer
59 views
“Indifferent” reference of specific indefinites?
There is a class of indefinites sometimes called "specific indefinites" that refer to one individual. For example:
A man walked into a bar followed by two others. He ordered a drink.
With this ...
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0answers
117 views
What is a similect?
I'm looking for attested examples of similects in action. The term is relatively new for me. Could someone point me in the right direction?
Etymology
Coined by Anna Mauranen in a 2012 paper, from ...
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0answers
23 views
What is 'Category Affiliation' in sociolinguistics?
I came across this term in a paper talking about the first wave and second wave studies. Anyone know what it means?
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2answers
122 views
Is there a word like father-tongue?
If a Telugu speaking woman married an English man and the children speak the two languages equally well and that is possible in the global context.
What will be the mother-...
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1answer
377 views
ELI5 — phone v. phoneme v. allophone
Please ELI5? I read the websites beneath but I still feel befuddled. Are there simple real-life analogies?
Can someone explain to me the difference between a phone, phoneme, and allophone? (reposted ...
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0answers
37 views
does a general term exist for antecedents or postcedents?
· endophora is a general term that refers to either anaphora or cataphora
? does a general term exist that refers to either antecedents or postcedents
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1answer
430 views
What are External and Internal language?
I would like to know about External and Internal language.
Suppose I was talking about a person who was not either good or great. I was praising him in my speech as he was my superior though I felt ...
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0answers
29 views
Terminology/resources for descriptions like “…the other one…”
Suppose, e.g., that there are two brothers, Bob and Bill, that must do two things but it doesn't much matter which brother does which task. I am interested in constructions like the following:
One ...
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3answers
145 views
Is the `n` in Russian 3rd person pronouns “epenthetic”?
The 3rd person pronouns of Russian – ego him/it.ACC, eё her.ACC, ix them.ACC – gain an initial n when they are governed by most prepositions: nego/neё/nix. There are, of course, historical reasons for ...
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0answers
45 views
Zeugma with particles?
If a zeugma is based on two particles rather than two objects, is it still called a zeugma? Example:
Her violent husband knocked her both down and up.
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0answers
45 views
Word for synonyms with different degree
How call words expressing same thing but varying degree?
hot - warm - cold - frozen
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0answers
65 views
Agentive vs Intentional vs Volitional
What are the differences between these three terms?
Agentivity
Intentionality
Volitionality
If they have different definitions, could you provide examples where their values do not match? (For ...
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0answers
128 views
What's the difference between lexeme and lexical item?
While studying An Introduction to English Morphology by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, came across this fragment.
Section 2.1 pointed out that we tend to think of words as possessing two ...
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0answers
82 views
What's the name for using a letter to represent its name's sound?
It's often whimsical to substitute a single letter for a group of letters phonetically identical to the letter's name.
Such as rewriting "barbecue" as "bar-b-q", or the entirety of William Steig's ...
3
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1answer
64 views
What is the classification of semantics into literal and figurative meanings called?
I read a Wikipedia article a while ago about semantics. It explained that each meaning of a word fits into one of five categories. For example, the word head has a literal meaning as a piece of ...
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2answers
215 views
Loanwords with different meanings from original language?
First, let me say this questions is asking only about fairly recent loanwords (as in, the word (or something similar to it) exists in both languages). I'm not asking about very old loanwords that may ...
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1answer
24 views
Single term for words that maintain dialogue cohesion
I'm trying to find a single term for words that help maintain cohesion in a dialogue, such as:
A : How was the Lion King remake?
B : It was good.
A : And the Aladdin remake?
B : It ...
1
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1answer
91 views
relationship between writing systems, scripts, and font. Terminology clarification required
I want a clarification on terminology. A language is written in a particular script . but there are various styles for writing a script. For e.g. arabic is written in arabic script, and it can be ...
2
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2answers
92 views
Is sonority phonological or phonetic?
I've seen several mentions of "sonority" in different works, most of which define it as something like "how loud a particular sound is in relation to other speech sounds".
This seems like something ...
