Introduction to Linguistics: Glossary

Glossary

Affix: An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed.

Allomorph: An allomorph is a linguistic term for a variant form of a morpheme. The concept
occurs when a unit of meaning can vary in sound (phonologically) without changing meaning. It is used in linguistics to explain the comprehension of variations in sound for a specific morpheme.

Allophone: In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. A phone is a sound that has a definite shape as a sound wave, while a phoneme is a basic group of sounds that can distinguish words (i.e. changing one phoneme in a word can produce another word); speakers of a particular language perceive a phoneme as a single distinctive sound in that language. Thus an allophone is a phone considered as a member of one phoneme.

We may distinguish complementary allophones, which are distributed regularly within the idiolect of the same speaker according to phonetic environment, from free variants, which are a matter of personal habit or regional accent.

In the case of complementary allophones, each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context and many times there is some sort of phonological process. Not all phonemes have significantly different allophones, but there are always minor differences in articulation from one piece of speech to the next.

Ambiguity: is the property of words, terms, and concepts (within a particular context) as being undefined, undefinable, or without an obvious definition and thus having an unclear meaning. A word, phrase, sentence, or other communication is called “ambiguous” if it can be interpreted in more than one way. Ambiguity is distinct from vagueness, which arises when the boundaries of meaning are indistinct. Ambiguity is in contrast with definition, and typically refers to an unclear choice between standard definitions, as given by a dictionary, or else understood as common knowledge.

Annotation: is extra information associated with a particular point in a document or other
piece of information. Most commonly this is used for example in draft documents, where anotherreader has written notes about the quality of a document at a certain point, "in the
margin". Annotations about bibliographical sources, labelled annotated bibliographies, give
descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paperor argument. Creating these blurbs, usually a few sentences long, establishes a summary for and expresses the relevance of each source prior to writing. In computing, the programmer often adds annotations to source code in the form of comments. These do not affect the working of the program but give explanations (for their programmers, or potential readers of the code principally, but also as a reminder for the author), hints or plans for improvement, etc.
Further annotations can also be added by a compiler or programmer in the form of metadata, which is then made available in later stages of building or executing a program. For example a compiler may use metadata to make decisions about what warnings to issue, or a linker can use metadata to connect multiple object files into a single executable. Differences in computer languages have given rise to a variety of words for programmer-added metadata, including annotation (Java), attribute (C#), pragma (C), and metadata (HTML).
Antonym: from the Greek anti ("opposite") and onoma ("name") are word pairs that are opposite in meaning, such as hot and cold, obese and skinny, and up and down. Words may have different antonyms, depending on the meaning. Both long and tall are antonyms of short. Antonyms are of four types:
-Gradable antonyms are two ends of the spectrum (slow and fast) but can have variations.
-Complementary antonyms are pairs that express absolute opposites, like mortal and immortal.
-Relational antonyms are pairs in which one describes a relationship between two objects and the other describes the same relationship when the two objects are reversed, such as parent and child, teacher and student, or buy and sell.
-Auto-antonyms are the same words that can mean the opposite of themselves under different contexts or having separate definitions:
-enjoin (to prohibit, issue injunction; to order, command)
-fast (moving quickly; fixed firmly in place)
-cleave(to split; to adhere)
-sanction(punishment, prohibition; permission)
-stay (remain in a specific place, postpone; guide direction, movement)
Although the word antonym was only coined by philosophers in the 19th century, such relationships are a fundamental part of a language, in contrast to synonyms, which are a result of history and drawing of fine distinctions, or homonyms, which are mostly etymological accidents or coincidences.
Languages often have ways of creating antonyms as an easy extension of lexicon. An example is the English prefixes in- and un-. Unreal is the antonym of real and indocile is of docile.
Some planned languages abundantly use such devices to reduce vocabulary multiplication. Esperanto has mal- (compare bona = "good" and malbona = "bad"), Damin has kuri- (tjitjuu "small", kuritjitjuu "large") and Newspeak has un- (as in ungood, "bad").

Arc: In Euclidean geometry, an arc is a closed segment of a differentiable curve in the two-dimensional plane; for example, a circular arc is a segment of a circle. If the arc segment occupies a great circle (or great ellipse), it is considered a great-arc segment.

Bahuvrihi or exocentric compounds: An exocentric compound is a compound whose exact meaning does not refer to the signified. A read- head for instance does not really have a red head. This is not a hyponym at all.

Blog: A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

The term "blog" is derived from" Web log." "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. (Mentioned in class on 2006-10-17)

Blogroll: A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs. When present, blogrolls are often found on the front page sidebar of most weblogs. Various weblog authors have different criteria for including other weblogs on their blogrolls. These range from matters of common interest to frequency of updates and posts to country/geographical/communal relations to link exchange policies. Some blogrolls also simply consist of the list of weblogs an author reads himself, and some news aggregators allow their users to export that list directly to a weblog. With the advent of syndicated newsfeeds, even blogrolls can be, and are being, syndicated. OPML is one of the popular ways to syndicate a blogroll in case a weblog author wants others to be able to access the weblogs in his/her blogroll. There are two possible derivations of the term. US bloggers tend to prefer the theory that the term is derived from logrolling, wherein members of a community liberally "cross-quote" each other's works. To UK bloggers 'blogroll' sounds like 'bog roll' — a slang term for toilet tissue — leading to speculation that the name derived from the long, list-like nature (and dubious quality) of some inter-blog link lists. More prosaically, roll is to be construed as meaning "list" as in “roll of honour” or “roll call”, being derived from the French word rôle as in rôle d'équipage (muster roll) or rôle d'imposition (tax roll).

Circular definition: Definitions can be circular or recursive. The definition refers to itself and defines thus an infinite number of things (f.ex.: a thing is an object and an object is a thing)

Co-hyponym: A co-hyponym defines both, synonyms and antonyms of a term.

Compounding: A compound is a word (lexeme) that consists of more than one free morpheme. An endocentric compound consists of a head, i.e. the categorical part that contains the basic meaning of the whole compound, and modifiers, which restrict this meaning. For example, the English compound doghouse, where house is the head and dog is the modifier, is understood as a house intended for a dog. Obviously, an endocentric compound tends to be of the same part of speech (word class) as its head.
Exocentric compounds do not have a head, and their meaning often cannot be transparently guessed from its constituent parts. For example, the English compound white-collar is neither a kind of collar nor a white thing. In an exocentric compound, the word class is determined lexically, disregarding the class of the constituents. For example, a must-have is not a verb but a noun.
In the Sanskrit tradition, the type of exocentric compound exemplified by white-collar is called a bahuvrihi compound. The meaning of this type of compound can be glossed as "(one) whose B is A", where B is the second element of the compound and A the first. Thus a white-collar person is one whose collar is white (as a metaphor for socio-economic status). Other English examples include barefoot and Blackbeard.
Composition should not be confused with derivation, where bound morphemes are added to free ones.
A special kind of composition is incorporation, of which noun incorporation into a verbal root (as in English backstabbing, breastfeed, etc.) is most prevalent.

Concordance: A concordance is an alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts. Because of the time and difficulty and expense involved in creating a concordance in the pre-computer era, only works of special importance, such as the Bible, Qur’an or the works of Shakespeare, had concordances prepared for them. Even with the use of computers, producing a concordance (whether on paper or in a computer) may require much manual work, because they often include additional material, including commentary on, or definitions of, the indexed words, and topical cross-indexing that is not yet possible with computer-generated and computerized concordances.

However, when the text of a work is on a computer, a search function can carry out the basic task of a concordance, and is in some respects even more versatile than one on paper. A bilingual concordance is a concordance based on aligned parallel text. A topical concordance is a list of subjects that a book (usually The Bible) covers, with the immediate context of the coverage of those subjects. Unlike a traditional concordance, the indexed word does not have to appear in the verse. The most well known topical concordance is Nave’s Topical Bible.

Connotation: In semiotics, connotation arises when the denotative relationship between a signifier and its signified is inadequate to serve the needs of the community. A second level of meanings is termed connotative. These meanings are not objective representations of the thing, but new usages produced by the language group.
Denotation: In semiotics, denotation is the surface or literal meaning encoded to a signifier, and the definition most likely to appear in a dictionary.

Corpus: (plural corpora) or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts (now usually electronically stored and processed). They are used to do statistical analysis, checking occurrences or validating linguistic rules on specific universe. A corpus may contain texts in a single language (monolingual corpus) or text data in multiple languages (multilingual corpus). Multilingual corpora that have been specially formatted for side-by-side comparison are called aligned parallel corpora. In order to make the corpora more useful for doing linguistic research, they are often subjected to a process known as annotation. An example of annotating a corpus is part-of-speech-tagging, or POS-tagging, in which information about each word's part of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.) is added to the corpus in the form of tags. Another example is indicating the lemma (base) form of each word. When the language of the corpus is not a working language of the researchers who use it, interlinear glossing is used to make the annotation bilingual. Corpora are the main knowledge base in corpus linguistics. The analysis and processing of various types of corpora are also the subject of much work in computational linguistics, speech recognition and machine translation, where they are often used to create hidden Markov models for POS-tagging and other purposes. Text corpora are also used in the study of historical documents, for example in attempts to decipher ancient scripts, or in Biblical scholarship.

Cross-reference: (noun) is an instance within a document of referring to information elsewhere (either within the same work or in a separate work). To cross-reference or to cross-refer (verb) is to make such connections. The term "cross-reference" is often abbreviated as x-ref, xref, or, in computer science, XR. Cross-referencing is usually employed to either verify claims made by an author or to link to another piece of work that is of related interest.

Database: The term or expression database originated within the computer industry. Although its meaning has been broadened by popular use, even to include non-electronic databases, this article takes a more technical perspective towards the topic. A possible definition is that a database is a collection of records or information which is stored in a computer in a systematic (i.e. structured) way, so that a computer program can consult it to answer questions. The items retrieved in answer to queries become information that can be used to make decisions. The computer program used to manage and query a database is known as a database management system (DBMS). The properties and design of database systems are included in the study of information science.

The central concept of a database is that of a collection of records, or pieces of knowledge. Typically, for a given database, there is a structural description of the type of facts held in that database: this description is known as a schema. The schema describes the objects that are represented in the database, and the relationships among them. There are a number of different ways of organizing a schema, that is, of modeling the database structure: these are known as database models (or data models). The model in most common use today is the relational model, which in layman's terms represents all information in the form of multiple related tables each consisting of rows and columns (the true definition uses mathematical terminology). This model represents relationships by the use of values common to more than one table. Other models such as the hierarchical model and the network model use a more explicit representation of relationships. The term database refers to the collection of related records, and the software should be referred to as the database management system or DBMS. When the context is unambiguous, however, many database administrators and programmers use the term database to cover both meanings. Many professionals would consider a collection of data to constitute a database only if it has certain properties: for example, if the data is managed to ensure its integrity and quality, if it allows shared access by a community of users, if it has a schema, or if it supports a query language. However, there is no agreed definition of these properties. Database management systems are usually categorized according to the data model that they support: relational, object-relational, network, and so on. The data model will tend to determine the query languages that are available to access the database. A great deal of the internal engineering of a DBMS, however, is independent of the data model, and is concerned with managing factors such as performance, concurrency, integrity, and recovery from hardware failures. In these areas there are large differences between products.

DATCAT: A data category .

Decoding: is the reverse of encoding, which is the process of transforming information from one format into another.

Definition by nearest kind and specific differences: A standard dictionary definition (definiens) illustrates the genus proximum and the differentia specifica of the definiendum.

Derivation: A derivation in linguistics is the process of changing the meaning and/or lexical class of a lexeme by adding a morpheme.

Determinns or modifier: The modifier is the first part of a compund.

Dialogue: is a reciprocal conversation between two or more persons. The etymological origins of the word [(in Greek διά(diá,through) + λόγος(logos,word,speech) concepts like flowing-through meaning)] do not necessarily convey the way in which people have come to use the word, with some confusion between the prefix διά-(diá-,through) and the prefix δι-(di-, two) leading to the assumption that a dialogue is neccessarily beween only two parties.

Dictionary: dictionary is a list of words with their definitions, a list of characters with their glyphs, or a list of words with corresponding words in other languages. In a few languages, words can appear in many different forms, but only the lemma form appears as the main word or headword in most dictionaries. Many dictionaries also provide pronunciation information; grammatical information; word derivations, histories, or etymologies; illustrations; usage guidance; and examples in phrases or sentences. Dictionaries are most commonly found in the form of a book. Some dictionaries are also found in electronic portable handheld devices.

Definition: A definition is a form of words which states the meaning of a term. This may either be the meaning which it bears in general use (a descriptive definition), or that which the speaker intends to impose upon it for the purpose of his or her discourse (a stipulative definition). The term to be defined is known as the definiendum (Latin: that which is to be defined). The form of words which defines it is known as the definiens (Latin: that which is doing the defining).

Dvandva or bicentric compounds: The whole item of this kind of compound is a hyponym of each of the components. Walkie-talkie is both, a hyponym of “walk” and “talk”.

Early Modern English: refers to the stage of the English language used from about the end of the Middle English period (the latter half of the 1400s) to 1650. Thus, the first edition of the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare both belong to the late phase of Early Modern English, although the King James Bible intentionally keeps some archaisms that were not common even when it was published. Current readers of English are generally able to understand Early Modern English, though occasionally with difficulties arising from grammar changes, changes in the meanings of some words, and spelling differences. The standardization of English spelling falls within the Early Modern English period, and is influenced by conventions predating the Great Vowel Shift, explaining much of the non-phonetic spelling of contemporary Modern English.

Ellipse: In mathematics, an ellipse (from the Greek for absence) is the locus of points on a plane where the sum of the distances from any point on the curve to two fixed points is constant. The two fixed points are called foci (plural of focus). (…) An ellipse centred at the origin can be viewed as the image of the unit circle (…)

Ellipsis: Έλλειψις (plural: ellipses ελλείψεις, Greek for "omission") in linguistics refers to any omitted part of speech that is understood; i.e. the omission is intentional. Analogously, in printing and writing, the term refers to the row of three dots (...) or asterisks (* * *) indicating such an intentional omission. This punctuation mark is also called a suspension point, points of ellipsis, periods of ellipsis, or colloquially, dot-dot-dot. An ellipsis is sometimes used to indicate a pause in speech, an unfinished thought or, at the end of a sentence, a trailing off into silence (aposiopesis). Ellipses are often used in this manner for internet chat, email, and forum posts.

Encoding: is the process of transforming information from one format into another. The opposite operation is called decoding. Character encoding or character set (sometimes referred to as code page) consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given set with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, octets or electrical pulses, in order to facilitate the storage of text in computers and the transmission of text through telecommunication networks. Common examples include Morse code, which encodes letters of the Latin alphabet as series of long and short depressions of a telegraph key; and ASCII, which encodes letters, numerals, and other symbols, both as integers and as 7- bit binary versions of those integers, generally extended with an extra zero-bit to facilitate storage in 8-bit bytes (octets). A semantics encoding is a "translation" between formal languages. For programmers, the most familiar form of encoding is the compilation of a programming language into machine code or byte-code. Conversion between document formats are also forms of encoding. Compilation of TeX or LaTeX documents to PostScript are also commonly encountered encoding processes. Some high-level preprocessors such as Objective Caml’s, Camlp4 or Apple Computer’s WorldScript also involve encoding of a programming language into another. Text encoding uses a markup language to tag the structure and other features of a text to facilitate processing by computers.A markup language combines text and extra information about the text. The extra information, for example about the text's structure or presentation, is expressed using markup, which is intermingled with the primary text. The best-known markup language in modern use is HTML (HyperText Markup Language), one of the foundations of the World Wide Web. Originally markup was used in the publishing industry in the communication of printed work between authors, editors, and printers.

Encyclopedia: An encyclopedia, encyclopaedia or (traditionally) encyclopædia, is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.

Etymology: is the study of the origins of words. Through old texts and comparison with other languages, etymologists reconstruct the history of words — when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed.
In languages with a long written history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of old texts. However, etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information (such as writing) to be known. By analysing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots have been found which can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family.
Even though etymological research originally grew from the philological tradition, nowadays much etymological research is done in language families where little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian.
The word etymology itself comes from the Greek τυμον (étymon, true meaning, from 'etymos' true) and λόγος (lógos, word). The term was originally applied to the search of supposedly "original" or "true" meanings of words, on principles that are rejected as unscientific by modern linguistics. Pinder employed creative etymologies to flatter his patrons. Plutarch employed etymologies insecurely based on fancied resemblances in sounds. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae was an encyclopaedic tracing of "first things" that remained uncritically in use in Europe until the fifteenth century. Etymologicum genuinum is a grammatical encyclopaedia edited at Constantinople in the ninth century, one of several similar Byzantine works. The fourteenth-century Legenda Aurea begins each vita of a saint with a fanciful excursus in the form of an etymology.

Explantation:An explanation is a statement which points to causes, context, and consequences of some object, process, state of affairs, etc., together with rules or laws that link these to the object. Some of these elements of the explanation may be implicit. Explanations can only be given by those with understanding of the object which is explained. In scientific research, explanation is one of three purposes of research (other two being exploration and description). Explanation is the discovery and reporting of relationships among different aspects of studied phenomenon.

Extension: In general semantics, extension is a process that, as in this mathematical example, starts with unique individuals, and gives them unique names, e.g., I, II, III, etc., or 1, 2, 3, etc. The next step if needed generalises or passes beyond extension to infinite-valued higher-order abstractions like 'numbers', and so on. The passing from lower-order abstractions (presented extensionally) to higher orders, e.g., from '1, 2, 3, etc.,' to 'numbers,' is said to follow the 'natural order of evaluation,' so that when one talks about order, extension is implied, and when one talks about extension, order is implied. An example of reversed order is when a particular higher-order abstraction such as race, e.g., 'white', 'black' etc., is projected onto the individuals comprising it. The individuals (each uniquely different by extension, no matter what is being discussed) comprise the 'race' (which exists only on higher-orders), not the other way around. This usage derives from extension (semantics).

Final Devoicing: Final obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as German, Dutch, Polish, and Russian, among others. In these languages, voiced obstruents in the syllable coda or at the end of a word become voiceless.

Font: In online documents the user can choose different fonts for his text documents, there is “Times New Roman”, “Arial”, etc.

Generalisation: is a foundational element of logic and human reasoning. It is the essential basis of all valid deductive inference. The concept of generalisation has broad application in many related disciplines, sometimes having a specialised context-specific meaning.
For any two related concepts, A and B; A is considered a generalisation of concept B if and only if:
every instance of concept B is also an instance of concept A; and
there are instances of concept A which are not instances of concept B.
For instance, animal is a generalisation of bird because every bird is an animal, and there are animals which are not birds (dogs, for instance)

Gloss: A gloss (from Koine Greek γλώσσα glossa, meaning 'tongue') is a note made in the margins or between the lines of a book, in which the meaning of the text in its original language is explained, sometimes in another language. As such, glosses can vary in thoroughness and complexity, from simple marginal notations of words one reader found difficult or obscure, to entire interlinear translations of the original text and cross references to similar passages. A collection of glosses is a glossary (though glossary also means simply a collection of specialized terms with their meanings). A collection of medieval legal glosses, made by so called glossators, commenting legal texts, is called an apparatus. The compilation of glosses into glossaries was the beginning of lexicography, and the glossaries so compiled were in fact the first dictionaries.

Glossary: A glossary is a list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms. Traditionally, a glossary appears at the end a book and includes terms within that book which are either newly introduced or at least uncommon.A bilingual glossary is a list of terms in one language which are defined in a second language or glossed by synonyms (or at least near-synonyms) in another language. In a more general sense, a glossary contains explanations of concepts relevant to a certain field of study or action. In this sense, the term is contemporaneously related to ontology.

Glyphs: The term for the abstract entity represented by a glyph is character: a typographical character may be a grapheme (an element of a writing system), but also a numeral, a punctuation mark, or a pictorial or decorative symbol (such as dingbats, or Unicode's "Miscellaneous Symbols").
Two or more glyphs representing the same grapheme, either interchangeably or context-dependent, are called allographs.
Homograph: is a word that has the same spelling as another word, but a different meaning. Example: The spelling to cleave may denote to adhere to or to divide or split.
Homonym: A homonym is a word that has the same pronunciation and spelling as another word, but a different meaning. Example: The word stalk, meaning either part of a plant or to follow (someone) around.
Homophone: is a word that has the same pronunciation as another word, but whose meaning and/or spelling are different, . Example: All of to, too, and two, or there, their, and they’re.

Grapheme: In typography, a grapheme is the atomic unit in written language. Graphemes include letters, Chinese characters, Japanese characters, numerals, punctuation marks, and other glyphs. In a phonological orthography, a grapheme corresponds to one phoneme. In spelling systems that are non-phonemic — such as the spellings used most widely for written English — multiple graphemes may represent a single phoneme. These are called digraphs (two graphemes for a single phoneme) and trigraphs (three graphemes). For example, the word ship contains four graphemes (s, h, i, and p) but only three phonemes, because sh is a digraph. Different glyphs can represent the same grapheme, meaning they are allographs. For example, the minuscule letter a can be seen in two variants, with a hook at the top, and without. Not all glyphs are graphemes in the phonological sense; for example the logogram ampersand (&) represents the Latin word et (English word and), which contains two phonemes.

Hierarchy: (in Greek: often used in Geographic studies Ἱεραρχία, it is derived from ἱερός-hieros, sacred, and ἄρχω-arkho, rule) is a system of ranking and organizing things or people, where each element of the system (except for the top element) is subordinate to a single other element. A hierarchy can link entities either directly or indirectly, and either vertically or horizontally. The only direct links in a hierarchy, insofar as they are hierarchical, are to one's immediate superior or to one of one's subordinates, although a system that is largely hierarchical can also incorporate other organizational patterns. Indirect hierarchical links can extend "vertically" upwards or downwards via multiple links in the same direction. All parts of the hierarchy which are not vertically linked to one another can nevertheless be "horizontally" linked by travelling up the hierarchy to find a common direct or indirect superior, and then down again. This is akin to two co-workers, neither of whom is the other's boss, but both of whose chains of command will eventually meet.

Homograph: is a word that is spelled the same as another but is pronounced differently.A homograph is a word that has the same spelling as another word, but a different meaning. Example: The spelling to cleave may denote to adhere to or to divide or split. Occasionally, one can also encounter homographs that are not homonyms (i.e. the spelling is the same, but the pronunciation is different for each meaning). Such words include "bow" (front part of a ship) which in Received Pronunciation has a slightly more open and less rounded vowel than "bow" (bow tie, bow and arrow). Another example is Berkeley (the name of the university is pronounced differently than the name of the bishop).

Homonym: is a word that has the same pronuciation and spelling as another word, but a different meaning. Example: The word stalk, meaning either part of a plant or to follow (someone) around. A closely related notion is that of polysemy, which describes a single word with two distinct but related meanings. Example: The word "mouth", meaning the oriface on ones' face or the opening of a cave.

Homophone: is a word which is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning, for example: carat, caret, and carrot. Homophones may be spelled differently, but the term also applies to different words that sound the same and are also spelled identically, such as "rose" (flower) and "rose" (past tense of "rise"). However the more precise term for the latter class of words is homonym. The term may also be used to apply to units shorter than words, such as letters or group of letters which are pronounced the same as another letter or group of letters.

Hyperlink: A hyperlink (often referred to as simply a link), is a reference or navigation element in a document to another section of the same document, another document, or a specified section of another document, that automatically brings the referred information to the user when the navigation element is selected by the user. As such it is similar to a citation in literature, but with the distinction of automatic instant access. Combined with a data network and suitable access protocol, a computer can be instructed to fetch the resource referenced. Hyperlinks are part of the foundation of the World Wide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee, but are not limited to HTML or the web. Hyperlinks may be used in almost any electronic media.

Hypermedia:is a term created by Ted Nelson, and used in his 1965 article Complex information processing:: a file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate . It is used as a logical extension of the term hypertext, in which graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information. This contrasts with the broader term multimedia, which may be used to describe non-interactive linear presentations as well as hypermedia. Hypermedia should not be confused with hypergraphics or super-writing which is not a related subject. The World Wide Web is a classic example of hypermedia, whereas a non-interactive cinema presentation is an example of standard multimedia due to the absence of hyperlinks. The first hypermedia system was the Aspen Movie Map. Most modern hypermedia is delivered via electronic pages from a variety of systems. Audio hypermedia is emerging with voice command devices and voice browsing.

Hypernym: A word is a hypernym (in Greek υπερνύμιον, literally meaning 'extra name') if its meaning encompasses the meaning of another word of which it is a hypernym; a word that is more generic or broad than another given word. To achieve the meaning without a loanword, consider German Oberbegriff, lit. "Overconcept" thus "superterm". Therefore, another term for a hypernym is a superordinate. (In classic Aristotelian logic, you have the unfashionable yet still correct "genera" for "hypernym" and "species" for "hyponym".)
For example, vehicle denotes all the things that are separately denoted by the words train, chariot, dogsled, airplane, and automobile and is therefore a hypernym of each of those words.
A hypernym is the opposite of a hyponym. For example, plant is hypernymic to flower whereas tulip is hyponymic to flower.
Hypernymy is the semantic relation in which one word is the hypernym of another. Hypernymy, the relation words stand in when their extensions stand in the relation of class to subclass, should not be confused with holonymy which is the relation words stand in when the things that they denote stand in the relation of whole to part. A similar warning applies to hyponymy and meronymy.

Hypertext: In computing, hypertext is a user interface paradigm for displaying documents which, according to an early definition (Nelson 1970), "branch or perform on request." Hypertext is a way of organizing material that attempts to overcome the inherent limitations of traditional text and in particular its linearity. The prefix hyper- (Modern Greek term for over or beyond) signifies the overcoming of such constraints. The most frequently discussed form of hypertext document contains automated cross-references to other documents called hyperlinks. Selecting a hyperlink causes the computer to load and display the linked document. A document can be static (prepared and stored in advance) or dynamically generated (in response to user input). Therefore, a well-constructed hypertext system can encompass, incorporate or supersede many other user interface paradigms like menus and command lines, and can be used to access both static collections of cross-referenced documents and interactive applications. The documents and applications can be local or can come from anywhere with the assistance of a computer network like the Internet. The most famous implementation of hypertext is the World Wide Web. The term "hypertext" is often used where the term hypermedia would be more appropriate.

Hyponym: In linguistics, a hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic range is included within that of another word. For example, scarlet, vermilion, carmine, and crimson are all hyponyms of red (their hypernym).

Idiom: is an expression (i.e. term or phrase) whose meaning cannot be deduced from the literal definition and the arrangement of its parts, but refers instead to a figurative meaning that is known only through conventional use. In linguistics, idioms are widely assumed to be figures of speech that contradict the principle of compositionality, however some debate has recently arisen on this subject. In the English expression to kick the bucket, a listener knowing only the meaning of kick and bucket would be unable to deduce the expression's actual meaning, which is to die. Although it can refer literally to the act of striking a bucket with a foot, native speakers rarely use it that way. Idioms hence tend to confuse those not already familiar with them; students of a new language must learn its idiomatic expressions the way they learn its other vocabulary. In fact many natural languages words have idiomatic origins, but have been sufficiently assimilated so that their figurative senses have been lost.

Inflection: In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification or marking of a word (or more precisely lexeme) to reflect grammatical (that is, relational) information, such as gender, tense, number or person. The concept of a "word" independent of the different inflections is called a lexeme, and the form of a word that is considered to have no or minimal inflection is called a lemma. An organised list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme is called an inflectional paradigm.

Intension: (or " connotation") refers to the meaning or characteristics encompassed by a given word, often expressed by a definition.
Intension is often discussed with regard to extension. Intension refers to the set of all possible things a word could describe. By contrast, extension (or denotation) refers to the set of all actual things the word describes. For example, the intension of 'car' is all possible cars (including mile-high cars made of chocolate). But the extension of 'car' is all actual cars (past, present and future), which will amount to millions or billions of cars, but probably doesn't include any mile-high cars made of chocolate.
Intension is an essential part of meaning. The meaning of a word is the bond between the idea or thing the word refers to and the word itself. Useful here is Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure‘s concept of the signified -- the concept or idea that a sign evokes. We can contrast the signified with the signifier -- the "sound image" or string of letters on a page that one recognises as a sign -- and with the referent, the actual thing or set of things a sign refers to. Intension is analogous to the signified; extension, to the referent. The intension thus links the signifier to the sign's extension. Without intension of some sort, words can have no meaning.
Intension and intensionality (the state of having intension) should not be confused with intention and intentionality, which are pronounced the same and occasionally arise in the same philosophical context. Where this happens, the letter 's' or 't' is sometimes italicised to emphasize the distinction.

Internet: The Internet is the worldwide, publicly accessible network of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internat Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.

Intonation: In linguistics, intonation is the variation of pitch when speaking. Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody. Many languages use pitch syntactically, for instance to convey surprise and irony or to change a statement to a question. Such languages are called intonation languages. English and French are well-known examples. Some languages use pitch to distinguish words; these are known as tonal languages. Thai and Hausa are examples. An intermediate position is occupied by languages with tonal word accent, for instance Norwegian or Japanese. Rising intonation means the pitch of the voice increases over time; falling intonation means that the pitch decreases with time. A dipping intonation falls and then rises, whereas a peaking intonation rises and then falls. The classic example of intonation is the question-statement distinction. For example, northeastern American English, like very many languages (Hirst & DiCristo, eds. 1998), has a rising intonation for echo or declarative questions (He found it on the street?), and a falling intonation for wh- questions (Where did he find it?) and statements (He found it on the street.). Yes or no questions (Did he find it on the street?) often have a rising end, but not always. The Chickasaw language has the opposite pattern, rising for statements and falling with questions.

Introspection: is contemplation on one's self, as opposed to extrospection, the observation of things external to one's self. Introspection may be used synonymously with self-reflection and used in a similar way. Introspection is like the activity described by Plato when he asked, "...why should we not calmly and patiently review our own thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us really are?" (Theaetetus, 155) Cognitive psychology accepts the use of the scientific method, but rejects introspection as a valid method of investigation. It should be noted that Herbert Simon and Allen Newell identified the 'thinking-aloud' protocol, in which investigators view a subject engaged in introspection, and who speaks his thoughts aloud, thus allowing study of his introspection. Introspection was once an acceptable means of gaining insight into psychological phenomena. Introspection was used by German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt in the experimental psychology laboratory he had founded in Leipzig in 1879. Wundt believed that by using introspection in his experiments he would gather information into how the subject's minds were working, thus he wanted to examine the mind into its basic elements. Wundt did not invent this way of looking into an individual's mind through their experiences; rather, it can date to Socrates. Wundt's distinctive contribution was to take this method into the experimental arena and thus into the newly formed field of psychology.

IPA: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists. It is intended to provide a standardized, accurate and unique way of representing the sounds of any spoken language, and is used, often on a day-to-day basis, by linguists, speech pathologies and therapists, foreign language teachers, lexicographers, and translators. In its unextended form (as of 2005) it has approximately 107 base symbols and 55 modifiers.

The symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet are divided into three categories: Letters (which indicate “basic” sounds), diacritics (which further specify those sounds), and suprasegmentals (which indicate such qualities as speed, tone, and stress). These categories are then divided into smaller sections: letters are divided into vowels and consonants, and diacritics and suprasegmentals are divided according to whether they indicate articulation, phonation, tone, intonation, or stress. From time to time, symbols are added, removed, and modified by the International Phonetic Association.

Lemma: In linguistics, and particularly in morphology, a lemma or citation form is the canonical form of a lexeme. Lexeme refers to the set of all the forms that have the same meaning, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Czech.

Lexeme: A lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of words that are different forms of the same word. For example, English run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme. A related concept is the lemma (or citation form), which is a particular form of a lexeme that is chosen by convention to represent a canonical form of a lexeme. Lemmas are used in dictionaries as the headwords, and other forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they are unusual in some way. A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a particular meaning (semantic value), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding inflectional paradigm; that is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different forms. For example, the lexeme for run has a present third person singular form runs, a present non-third-singular form run, a past form ran, and a present participle running. The use of the forms of a lexeme is governed by rules of grammar; in the case of English verbs such as run, these include subject-verb agreement and compound tense rules, which determine which form of a verb can be used in a given sentence. A lexicon consists of lexemes. In many formal theories of language, lexemes have subcategorized frames to account for the number and types of complements they occur within sentences and other syntactic structures.

Lexicography: The pursuit of lexicography is divided into two related disciplines:
Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries.
Theoretical lexicography is the scholary discipline of analysing and describing the semantic relationships within the lexicon (vocabulary) of a language and developing theories of dictionary components and structures linking the data in dictionaries. This is sometimes referred to as metalexicography.
A person devoted to lexicography is called a lexicographer, famously defined in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as "A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words".
General lexicography focuses on the design, compilation, use and evaluation of general dictionaries, i.e. dictionaries that provide a description of the language in general use. Such a dictionary is usually called a general dictionary or LGP dictionary. Specialised lexicography focuses on the design, compilation, use and evaluation of specialised dictionaries, i.e. dictionaries that are devoted to a (relatively restricted) set of linguistic and factual elements of one or more specialist subject fields, e.g. legal lexicography. Such a dictionary is usually called a specialised dictionary or LSP dictionary.
There is some disagreement on the definition of lexicology, as distinct from lexicography. Some use "lexicology" as a synonym for theoretical lexicography; others use it to mean a branch of linguistics pertaining to the inventory of words in a particular language.
It is now widely accepted that lexicography is a scholarly discipline in its own right and not a sub-branch of linguistics.

Lexicon: is usually a list of words together with additional word-specific information, i.e., a dictionary. Lexicon is a word of Greek origin (λεξικόν) meaning vocabulary. When linguists study the lexicon, they study such things as what words are, how the vocabulary in a language is structured, how people use and store words, how they learn words, the history and evolution of words, types of relationships between words as well as how words were created.The term is also sometimes used in the title of an encyclopaedic dictionary or an encyclopedia, especially for 19^th century works and those written in German (lexikon). In linguistics, lexicon has a slightly more specialized definition, as it includes the lexemes used to actualize words. Lexemes are formed according to morpho-syntatcic rules and express sememes. In this sense, a lexicon organizes the mental vocabulary in a speaker's mind: First, it organizes the vocabulary of a language according to certain principles (for instance, all verbs of motion may be linked in a lexical network) and second, it contains a generative device producing (new) simple and complex words according to certain lexical rules. For example, the suffix '-able' can be added to transitive verb only such that we get 'read-able' but not '*cry-able'. Furthermore an individual's lexical knowledge (or lexical concept) is that person's knowledge of vocabulary.

Linguistics: is the scientific study of language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. Linguistics covers two main areas: theoretical and applied linguistics.
Theoretical (or general) linguistics tries to systematically describe language by exploring its structure, or grammar, and its meanings, or semantics.
In the study of semantics, autonomous linguistics explores the nature of language abstracted away from the many aspects of its day-to-day usage and contextual linguistics combines linguistics with other fields, such as philosophy or sociology, to explain language's social functions.
Linguistics also compares languages and explores their histories, in order to find universal properties of language and to account for its development and origins. Slightly separate from general linguistics are the sub-fields of phonology, which studies the role of language's sounds in particular languages, and phonetics, the study of how sounds are produced and perceived.

Macrostructure: The notion of macrostructure has been used in several disciplines in order to distinguish large-scale, or 'global' structures, from small-scale, or 'local' structures, that is, microstructure. The distinction between macrostructure and microstructure is relative to the perspective, aims or level of description: Macrostructures may again be seen as microstructures at a higher level of description, that is, in relation to even larger-scale macrostructures. For instance, the rooms of a house are microstructures relative to the overall, macrostructure of the house. But the house may again be a microstructure relative to the macrostructure of a neighborhood or a city, and so on. These differences of the level of description are also called differences of granularity: as is the case for photographs, fine-grained descriptions show more detail than coarse-grained ones. In linguistics and discourse analysis semantic macrostructures are the overall, global meanings of discourse, usually also described in terms of topic, gist, or upshot. These semantic macrostructures (global meanings or topics) are typically expressed in for instance the headlines and lead of a news report, or the title and the abstract of a scholarly article. Macrostructures of discourse are distinguished from its microstructures, that is, the local structures of words, clauses, sentences or turns in conversation. Macrostructures may be derived from microstructures by operations such as abstracting, that is, leaving out or summarizing specific details. Semantic macrostructures or topics define what is called the global coherence of discourse.

Meaning: In linguistics, meaning is the content carried by the words or signs exchanged by people when communicating through language. Restated, the communication of meaning is the purpose and function of language. A communicated meaning will (more or less accurately) replicate between individuals either a direct perception or some sentient derivation thereof. Meanings may take many forms, such as evoking a certain idea, or denoting a certain real-world entity. Linguistic meaning is studied in philosophy and semiotics, and especially in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, logic and communication theory. Fields like sociolinguistics tend to be more interested in non-linguistic meanings. Linguistics lends itself to the study of linguistic meaning in the fields of semantics (which studies conventional meanings and how they are assembled) and pragmatics (which studies in how language is used by individuals). Literary theory, critical theory, and some branches of psychoanalysis are also involved in the discussion of meaning. Legal scholars and practitioners have discussed the nature of meaning of statutes, precedents and contracts since Roman law. However, this division of labor is not absolute, and each field depends to some extent upon the others. Questions about how words and other symbols mean anything, and what it means that something is meaningful, are pivotal to an understanding of language. Since humans are in part characterized by their sophisticated ability to use language, it has also been seen as an essential subject to explore in order to understand human experience. In semiotics, the meaning of a sign is its place in a sign relation, in other words, the set of roles that it occupies within a given sign relation. This statement holds whether sign is taken to mean a sign type or a sign token. Defined in these global terms, the meaning of a sign is not in general analyzable with full exactness into completely localized terms, but aspects of its meaning can be given approximate analyses, and special cases of sign relations frequently admit of more local analyses. Two aspects of meaning that may be given approximate analyses are the connotative relation and the denotative relation. The connotative relation is the relation between signs and their interpretant signs. The denotative relation is the relation between signs and objects. An arbitrary association exists between the signfied and the signifier.

Media:

Media may refer to various aspects:

In communication:

Print media, communications delivered via paper
Electronic media, communications delivered via electronic or electromechanical energy

Multimedia, communications that incorporate multiple forms of information content and processing

Published media, any media made available to the public

Mass media, all means of mass communication

Broadcast media, communications delivered over mass electronic communication networks
News media, mass media focused on communicating news

In data storage:

Digital media, electronic media used to store information
Recording media, devices used to store information

Megastructure: The entire dictionary, including the metadata, the front and back matter, explanations on abbreviations and grammar and the body of the dictionary.

Meronym: (from the Greek words meros = part and onoma = name) is a semanitk relation concept used in linguistics. A meronym denotes a constituent part of, or a member of something. That is,
X is a meronym of Y if Xs are parts of Ys, or
X is a meronym of Y if Xs are members of Ys.
For example, 'finger' is a meronym of 'hand' because a finger is part of a hand. Similarly 'wheel' is a meronym of 'auto'.
Meronymy is the opposite of holonymy. A closely related concept is that of mereology, which specifically deals with part/whole relations and is used in logic. It is formally expressed in terms of first-order logic.
A meronym means part of a whole. A word denoting a subset of what another word denotes is a hyponym.

Mesostructure: The mesostructure refers to each lexical entry and its relation to other entries within the dictionary (entries in a dictionary are like hypertexts, a network of information).

Metadata: (Greek meta "after" and Latin data "information") are data that describe other data.

Metalanguage: In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to make statements about other languages (object languages). Formal syntactic models for the description of grammar, e.g. generative grammar, are a type of metalanguage. More broadly, it can refer to any terminology or language used to discuss language itself —a written grammar, for example, or a discussion about language use.

Metaphor: In language, a metaphor (from the Greek: metapherin rhetorical trope) is defined as a direct comparison between two or more seemingly unrelated subjects and mainly uses "is a" to join the first subjects. A metaphor is commonly confused with a simile which compares two subjects using "like" or "as". An example of a simile: "He was as sly as a wolf." In the simplest case, a metaphor takes the form: "The [first subject] is a [second subject]." More generally, a metaphor casts a first subject as being or equal to a second subject in some way. Thus, the first subject can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second subject are used to enhance the description of the first. This device is known for usage in literature, especially in poetry, where with few words, emotions and associations from one context are associated with objects and entities in a different context.

Metonymy: In rhetoric, metonymy (from Greek μετά- beyond/changed and -ωνυμία, a suffix used to name figures of speech from ὄνυμα name (OED)) (IPA: [mɛ.'tɒ.nə.mi]) is the substitution of one word for another with which it is associated. In cognitive linguistics, metonymy refers to the use of a single characteristic to identify a more complex entity and is one of the basic characteristics of cognition. It is extremely common for people to take one well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect of something and use that aspect to stand either for the thing as a whole or for some other aspect or part of it.

Microstructure: The structure of each definiens, the smallest unit of lexicon structure.

Middle English: is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the introduction of the printed press into England by William Caxton in the 1470s, and slightly later by Richard Pynson. By this time the Northumbrian dialect spoken in south east Scotland was developing into the Scots language. The language of England as spoken after this time, up to 1650, is known as Early Modern English.

Unlike Old English, which tended largely to adopt Late West Saxon scribal conventions in the immediate pre-Conquest period, Middle English as a written language displays a wide variety of scribal (and presumably dialectal) forms. However, the diversity of forms in written Middle English signifies neither greater variety of spoken forms of English than could be found in pre-Conquest England, nor a faithful representation of contemporary spoken English (though perhaps greater fidelity to this than may be found in Old English texts). Rather, this diversity suggests the gradual end of the role of Wessex as a focal point and trend-setter for scribal activity, and the emergence of more distinct local scribal styles and written dialects, and a general pattern of transition of activity over the centuries which follow, as Northumbria, East Anglia and London emerge successively as major centres of literary production, with their own generic interests.

Morpheme: In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning.
In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes, the smallest linguistically distinctive units of sound.
The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes cannot stand as words on their own. A morpheme is free if it can stand alone, or bound if it is used exclusively along side a free morpheme.
English example: The word "unbreakable" has three morphemes "un-", (meaning not x) a bound morpheme, "-break-" a free morpheme, and "-able". "un-" is also a prefix, "-able" is a suffix. Both are affixes.

Morphology: In linguistics, morphology is the study of word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognise that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognise these relations by virtue of the unconscious linguistic knowledge they have of the rules of word-formation processes in English. Therefore, these speakers intuit that dog is to dogs as cat is to cats; similarly, dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules comprehended by the speaker in each case reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such patterns of word-formation across and within languages, and attempts to explicate formal rules reflective of the knowledge of the speakers of those languages.

Network: An interrelated, interconnected list which is found in dictionaries and online documents.

Node: A node is a device that is connected as part of a computer network. Every node must have a MAC address or Data Link Control address if it is at least an OSI model layer 2 device. Nodes can be computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones, or various other network appliances, such as routers, switches, and hubs. Nodes that actively route data for the other networked devices as well as themselves are called supernodes. In broad general terms, a node is a specific location in a telecommunication network. In Cable TV systems (CATV), this term has assumed a broader context and is generally associated with a Fiber Optic Node. A fiber optic node is those homes or businesses within a specific geographic area that are served from a common fiber optic receiver. A fiber optic node is generally described in terms of the number of Homes Passed that are served by that specific fiber node. Network node (NN): A grouping of one or more network elements (at one or more sites) which provides network related functions, and is administered as a single entity. A single site may contain more than one network node. For the purpose of this glossary, a network node is considered synonymous with a network element, and is usually at a single site. This restriction simplifies the definition of the network node interface (NNI) and INI, which would not apply between network elements. In networks, a processing location. A node can be a computer or some other device, such as a printer. Every node has a unique network address, sometimes called a Data Link Control (DLC) address or Media Access Control (MAC) address.

Oblong: A geometrical figure longer than wide, such as a Rectangle.

Old English: Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon and English) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. It is a West Germanic language and therefore is closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. It also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.

Omomatopeia: (occasionally spelled omomatopœia) is a word, or occasionally, a grouping of words, that imitates the sound it is describing, and thus suggests its source object, such as “bang” or “click”, or animal such as “moo”, “oink”, “quack” or “meow”.

Onomasiological: A thesaurus, a writer’s dictionary.

Ontology: In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek ν, genitive ντος: of being (part. of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία: science, study, theory) is the study of being or existence. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework. Ontology can be said to study conceptions of reality.

Orthography: The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs, including spelling, pronunciation, and capitalization. The term is derived from Greek ορθά ortha- ("correctly") and γράφειν graphein ("to write"). Orthography is distinct from typography. Orthography includes the writing system of a language. English, for example, has an alphabet of 26 letters for both consonants and vowels, but no glyph for stress. However, each English letter may represent more than one sound, and many English sounds (phoneme) may be written by more than one letter. An example of an orthographic rule describing how letters are used is I before e except after c; another is that the plural is written with the letter s regardless of whether it is pronounced as an [s], as in cats, or as a [z], as in dogs. In addition, combinations of letters called digraphs, such as th, represent single sounds in English orthography. Other languages which use the same alphabet as English may not use the same digraphs. One of the most complex orthographies is that of Japanese, which uses a combination of several thousand logographic glyphs (Chinese characters Hanzi) called kanji, two syllabaries called katakana and hiragana, and the Latin alphabet, romaji. All words in Japanese can be written in either katakana, hiragana, or rōmaji, and most also have a kanji form. The choice of which type of writing to use depends on a number of factors, including standard conventions, readability, and stylistic choices. An orthography may be described as 'efficient' if it has one glyph per speech sound (phoneme) and vice versa, but few systems are perfect.

An orthography that does not represent all the sounds of a language, such as those of Italien, English or Arabic, is called 'defective'. Both inefficient and defective orthographies may motivate spelling reform.

Ostensive defintion: Picture lexicons define the words by showing an image of the object found in the real word. This kind of definition is called “an ostensive definition”.

Paradigmatic: Since the late 1960, the word paradigm (IPA: [pæ.ɹəˌdaɪm]) has referred to a thought pattern in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context. Initially the word was specific to grammar: the 1900 Merriam-Webster dictionary defines its technical use only in the context of grammar or, in rhetoric, as a term for an illustrative parable or fable. Also, in linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure used paradigm to refer to a class of elements with similarities.

Paraphrase: A paraphrase is a statement or remark explained in other words or another way, so as to simplify or clarify its meaning. It can be used as a replacement for a direct quotation when the original text is unavailable or under copyright restriction. A paraphrase can substitute a euphemism for a direct statement, in order to avoid offences. As with a quotation, a paraphrase is introduced by a verbum dicendi, or disclaimer.

Part of Speech (POS): In grammar, a lexical category (also word class, lexical class, or in traditional grammar part of speech) is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items) that are usually defined by their particular syntactic or morphological behaviours. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others. There are open word classes, which constantly acquire new members, and closed word classes, which acquire new members infrequently if at all. Different languages may have different lexical categories, or they might associate different properties to the same one. For example, Spanish uses adjectives almost interchangeably as nouns while English cannot. Japanese has two classes of adjectives where English has one; Chinese and Japanese have measure words while European languages have nothing resembling them; many languages don't have a distinction between adjectives and adverbs, or adjectives and nouns, etc. Many linguists argue that the formal distinctions between parts of speech must be made within the framework of a specific language or language family, and should not be carried over to other languages or language families.

Phoneme: A phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. It is a sound of a language as represented (or imagined) without reference to its position in a word or phrase. A phoneme, therefore, is the conception of a sound in the most neutral form possible and distinguishes between different words or morphemes — changing an element of a word from one phoneme to another produces either a different word or obvious nonsense.

Phonemes are not the physical segments themselves, but mental abstraction of them. A phoneme could be thought of as a family of related phones, called allophones, that the speakers of a language think of, and hear or see, as being categorically the same and differing only in the phonetic environment in which they occur. In sign languages, the basic movements were formerly called cheremes (or cheiremes), but usage changed to phoneme when it was recognized that the mental abstractions involved are essentially the same as in oral languages. A phonemically "perfect" alphabet is one that has a single symbol for each phoneme. Although the concept has been fundamental to the development of phonological analysis of language beneath the level of the syllable, some linguists reject the theoretical validity of the phoneme. Some think that phonemes are more a product of literacy (i.e., the need to categorize the phonetics of a language in order to write it down systematically with a minimum number of letters). Other critics charge that the mind processes sub-phonemic elements of speech (e.g. features) in meaningful ways. A common test to determine whether two phones are allophones or separate phonemes relies on finding so-called minimal pair: words that differ only in the phones in question.

Phonemic transcription: A broad transcription that transcribes the speech sounds that (normally) have to occur in standard pronunciation (RP or GenAm). Phonemic transcriptions have to be written in slashes / /.

Phonetic transcription: A narrow transcription that transcribes the actual speech sounds (also if different form the standard accent). Phonetic transcriptions include diacritics and allophones (variants of a phoneme). It is written in square brackets [ ].

Phonetics: (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning 'sound, voice') is the study of sounds and the humanic voice. It is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones) as well as those of non-speech sounds, and their production, audition and perception, as opposed to phonology, which is the study of sound systems and abstract sound units (such as phonemes and distinctive features). Phonetics deals with the sounds themselves rather than the contexts in which they are used in languages. Discussions of meaning (semantics) do not enter at this level of linguistic analysis, therefore.
While writing systems and alphabets often attempt to represent the sounds of speech, phoneticians are more concerned with the sounds themselves than the symbols used to represent them. So close is the relationship between them, however, that many dictionaries list the study of the symbols (more accurately semiotics) as a part of phonetic studies. Logographic writing systems typically give much less phonetic information, although it is not necessarily non-existent. For instance, in Chinese characters, a phonetic is a portion of the character that hints at its pronunciation, while the radical gives semantic information. Characters featuring the same phonetic typically have similar pronunciations, but by no means are the pronunciations predictably determined by the phonetic; this is because pronunciations diverged over many centuries while the characters remained the same. Not all Chinese characters are radical-phonetic compounds, but a good majority of them are.
Phonetics has three main branches:
-articulatory phonetics, concerned with the positions and movements of the lips, tongue, vocal tract and folds and other speech organs in producing speech;
-acoustic phonetics, concerned with the properties of the sound waves and how they are received by the inner ear;
-auditory phonetics, concerned with speech perception, principally how the brain forms perceptual representations of the input it receives.

There are over a hundred different phones recognised as distinctive by the International Phonetic Association (IPA) and transcribed in their International Phonetic Alphabet.

Phonology: (Greek phonē = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages.
An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. In English, for example, /p/ and /b/ are distinctive units of sound, (i.e., they are phonemes / the difference is phonemic, or phonematic). This can be seen from minimal pairs such as "pin" and "bin", which mean different things, but differ only in one sound. On the other hand, /p/ is often pronounced differently depending on its position relative to other sounds, yet these different pronunciations are still considered by native speakers to be the same "sound". For example, the /p/ in "pin" is aspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, eg Thai and Quechua, this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes.
In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English described above, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation.
The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages, in which it is argued that the same or a similar phonological system underlies both signed and spoken languages. (Signs are distinguished from gestures in that the latter are non-linguistic or supply extra meaning alongside the linguistic message.)

Polysemy: (from the Greek πολυσημεία = multiple meaning) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a word, phrase, etc...) or signs to have multiple meanings (sememes, i.e. a large semantic field). This is a pivotal concept within social sciences, such as media studies and linguistics.

Portfolio: In education, portfolio refers to a personal collection of information describing and documenting a person’s achievements and learning. There is a variety of portfolios ranging from learning logs to extended collections of achievement evidence. Portfolios are used for many different purposes such as accreditation of prior experience, job search, continuing professional development, certification of competences.

Pragmatics: In linguistics and semiotics, pragmatics is concerned with bridging the explanatory gap between sentences meaning and speaker's meaning. The study of how context influences the interpretation is then crucial. In this setting, context refers to any factor — linguistic, objective, or subjective — that affects the actual interpretation of signs and expressions. Pragmatics is interested predominantly in utterances, made up of sentences, and usually in the context of conversations. A distinction is made in pragmatics between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. Sentence meaning is the literal meaning of the sentence, while the speaker meaning is the piece of information (or proposition) that the speaker is trying to convey. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is called metapragmatics.

Prefix: A prefix is the initial portion of some linear object (usually text or speech, but one could speak of the prefix of a parade) with a separate meaning, typically modifying the meaning of the remaining part. Dev made this theory happen.

Recursive definition: A definition that refers to itself and thus defines an infinite set of things.

Referent: In general, a reference is something that refers to or designates something else, or acts as a connection or a link between two things. The objects it links may be concrete, such as books or locations, or abstract, such as data, thoughts, or memories. The object which is named by a reference, or to which the reference points, is the referent.

SAMPA: The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists. It is intended to provide a standardised, accurate and unique way of representing the sounds of any spoken language, and is used, often on a day-to-day basis, by linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, foreign language teachers teachers, lexicographers, and translators. In its unextended form (as of 2005) it has approximately 107 base symbols and 55 modifiers.

Although the IPA is meant to represent only those qualities of speech that are relevant to language itself (such as tongue position, manner of articulation, and the separation and accentuation of words and syllables), an extended set of symbols called Extended IPA has been created by phonologists to record qualities of speech that have no direct effect on meaning (such as tooth-gnashing, lipsing, and sounds made by people with a cleft).

Semantics: (Greek semantikos, giving signs, significant, symptomatic, from sema, sign) refers to the aspects of meaning that are expressed in a language, code, or other form of representation. Semantics is contrasted with two other aspects of meaningful expression, namely, syntax, the construction of complex signs from simpler signs, and pragmatics, the practical use of signs by agents or communities of interpretation in particular circumstances and contexts. By the usual convention that calls a study or a theory by the name of its subject matter, semantics may also denote the theoretical study of meaning in systems of signs.
Though terminology varies, writers on the subject of meaning generally recognise two sorts of meaning that a significant expression may have: (1) the relation that a sign has to objects and objective situations, actual or possible, and (2) the relation that a sign has to other signs, most especially the sorts of mental signs that are conceived of as concepts.
Most theorists refer to the relation between a sign and its objects, as always including any manner of objective reference, as its denotation. Some theorists refer to the relation between a sign and the signs that serve in its practical interpretation as its connotation, but there are many more differences of opinion and distinctions of theory that are made in this case. Many theorists, especially in the formal semantic, pragmatic, and semiotic traditions, restrict the application of semantics to the denotative aspect, using other terms or altogether ignoring the connotative aspect.

Semasiological Dictionary: Reader’s or encoding dictionary.

Signs: In semiotics, a sign is generally defined as, "...something that stands for something else, to someone in some capacity. It may be understood as a discrete unit of meaning, whether denotative or connotative. Signs are not just words, but also include images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds — essentially all of the ways in which information can be processed into a codified form and communicated as a message by any sentient, reasoning mind to another.
Initially, within linguistics and later semiotics, there were two general schools of thought: those who proposed that signs are dyadic, and those who proposed that signs are interpreted in a recursive pattern of triadic relationships.

Simple word: is a short word that is a stem or a root. F.ex.: Boy, dog, girl, etc

Spreadsheet: A spreadsheet is a rectangular table (or grid) of information, often financial information. The word came from "spread" in its sense of a newspaper or magazine item (text and/or graphics) that covers two facing pages, extending across the center fold and treating the two pages as one large one. The compound word "spread-sheet" came to mean the format used to present bookkeeping ledgers—with columns for categories of expenditures across the top, invoices listed down the left margin, and the amount of each payment in the cell where its row and column intersect—which were traditionally a "spread" across facing pages of a bound ledger (book for keeping accounting records) or on oversized sheets of paper ruled into rows and columns in that format and approximately twice as wide as ordinary paper.

Structure: Is a manner of construction/ arrangement of single elements/ lexical entries in a larger context/ network.

Suffix: : A suffix is a special kind of affix, added to the end of a root or a stem.

Syllable: A syllable (Ancient Greek: συλλαβή) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. It is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter, its stress patterns, etc. A word that consists of a single syllable (like English cat) is called a monosyllable (such a word is monosyllabic), while a word consisting of two syllables (like monkey) is called a disyllable (such a word is disyllabic). A word consisting of three syllables (such as indigent) is called a trisyllable (the adjective form is trisyllabic). A word consisting of more than three syllables (such as intelligence) is called a polysyllable (and could be described as polysyllabic), although this term is often used to describe words of two syllables or more.

Synonym: (In ancient Greek syn 'συν' = plus and onoma 'όνομα' = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings and are interchangeable. Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings. (Synonym and antonym are antonyms.) An example of synonyms are the words cat and feline. Each describes any member of the family Felidae. Similarly, if we talk about a long time or an extended time, long and extended become synonyms. In the figurative sense, two words are often said to be synonymous if they have the same connotation: "a widespread impression that … Hollywood was synonymous with immorality" (Doris Kearns Goodwin)

Synonyms can be nouns, adverbs or adjectives, as long as both members of the pair are the same part of speech. More examples of English synonyms:

baby and infant (noun)
student and pupil (noun)
pretty and attractive (adjective)
sick and ill (adjective)
interesting and fascinating (adjective)
quickly and speedily (adverb)

Syntagmatic relation: Morphemes are put together to words and lexical words are linked together by function words (glue). Small units are always put together in order to form larger units.

Syntax: In linguistics, Syntax is the study of the rules, or "patterned relations", that govern the way words combine to form phrases and phrases combine to form sentences. The word originates from the Greek words συν (syn), meaning "co-" or "together", and τάξις (táxis), meaning "sequence, order, or arrangement". The combinatory behaviour of words is governed to a first approximation by their part of speech (noun, adjective, verb, etc., a categorisation that goes back in the Western tradition to the Greek grammarian Dionysios Thrax). Modern research into natural language syntax attempts to systematise descriptive grammar and, for many practitioners, to find general laws that govern the syntax of all languages. It is unconcerned with prescriptive grammar.

Tatpurusa or endocentric compounds:

Endocentric compounds only comprehend a hyponym to the second word of the compound (the head). For example: jam-jar, pie-dish.

In order to illustrate the meaning of these compounds you can always add the prepostion “for” and obtain phrases like: “jar for jam”, “dish for pie”.

Taxonomy: (from Greek verb τασσεν or tassein = "to classify" and νόμος or nomos = law, science, cf "economy") was once only the science of classifying living organisms (alpha taxonomy), but later the word was applied in a wider sense, and may also refer to either a classification of things, or the principles underlying the classification. Almost anything, animate objects, inanimate objects, places, and events, may be classified according to some taxonomic scheme.

Thesaurus: The word thesaurus is derived from 16th century New Latin, in turn from Latin thesaurus, from ancient Greek θησαυρός thesauros, "store-house", "treasury". Besides its meaning as a treasury or storehouse, it more commonly means a listing of words with similar, related, or opposite meanings (this new meaning of thesaurus dates back to Roget’s Thesaurus). For example, a book of jargon for a specialized field; or more technically a list of subject headings and cross-references used in the filing and retrieval of documents (or indeed papers, certificates, letters, cards, records, texts, files, articles, essays and perhaps even manuscripts), film, sound recordings, machine-readable media, etc. The first example of this genre, Roget's Thesaurus, was published in 1852, having been compiled earlier, in 1805, by Peter Roget. Entries in Roget's Thesaurus are not listed alphabetically but conceptually and are a great resource for writers. Although including synonyms and antonyms, entries in a thesaurus should not be taken as a list of them. The entries are also designed for drawing distinctions between similar words and assisting in choosing exactly the right word. Nor does a thesaurus entry define words. That work is left to the dictionary. In Information Technology, a thesaurus represents a database or list of semantically orthogonal topical search keys. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, a thesaurus may sometimes be referred to as an ontology. Thesaurus databases, created by international standards, are generally arranged hierarchically by themes and topics. Such a thesaurus places each term in context, allowing a user to distinguish between "bureau" the office and "bureau" the furniture. A thesaurus of this type is often used as the basis of an index for online material. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus, for example, is used to index the national databases of museums, Artefacts Canada, held by the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN).

Translation: Is the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language (the "source text") and the production, in another language, of an equivalent text (the "target text," or "translation") that communicates the same message. Translation must take into account a number of constraints, including context, the rules of grammar of the two languages, their writing conventions, their idioms and the like. Consequently, as has been recognized at least since the time of the translator Martin Luther, one translates best into the language that one knows best. Traditionally translation has been a human activity, though attempts have been made to computerize or otherwise automate the translation of natural- language texts (machine translation) or to use computers as an aid to translation (computer- assisted translation).

Typology: Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity of the world's languages. It includes three subdisciplines: Qualitative typology deals with the issue of comparing languages and within-language variance, Quantitative typology deals with the distribution of structural patterns in the world’s languages, and Theoretical typology explains these distributions.

Valence:In linguistics, valency or valence refers to the capacity of a verb to take a specific number and type of argument (noun phrase positions). A monovalent verb (for example, sleep) cannot take a direct object (*he sleeps it). A trivalent verb has three arguments (e. g., give has the giver, the recipient, and the thing given).

Valency: is closely related, though not identical, to transitivity. Transitivity refers to the number of core arguments of the verb that are not optional (giving intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and ditransitve verbs). For example:

(1) Newlyn lies. (valency of lie = 1, intransitive)

(2) John kicks the ball. (valency of kick = 2, transitive)

(3) John gives Mary a flower. (valency of give = 3, ditransitive)

The concept of valency is however undermined by the fact that non-optional or core meanings are hard to pin down. For example:

(4) Ask, and God will give.

(5) John kicks Mary the ball.

(6) The horse kicks.

and it becomes rather difficult to define what is non-optional. Modern trends such as cognitive grammars take the view that optionality is a gradation, i.e. different arguments have different degrees of co-occurrence, and this makes valency a moot issue.

Valency (Lexical) : The term valence has a related technical meaning in lexical semantics that elaborates on the role of argument structure - it refers to the capacity of other lexical units to combine with the given word. For instance, valence is one of the elements defining a construction in some Construction Grammars. This sense of the term, sometimes called Lexical Valency, is related to the above, but is far richer than the numerical notion inherited from Chemistry.

Website: A Website (or Web site ) is a collection of web pages, typically common to a particular domain name or subdomain on the World Wide Web on the Internet. A web page is a document, typically written in HTAM, that is almost always accessible via HTTP, a protocol that transfers information from the website's server to display in the user's web browser.

Word root: A root is a simple lexical morpheme.

Zero affix: is for instance used to built an irregualar plural form. The word “sheep” can be either singular or plural, because its plural morpheme is a zero affix (it does not exist: *sheeps). The meaning of this term (singular or plural) can only be transferred by the context.

Zero-Derivation: In linguistics,conversion, also called zero derivation, is a kind of word formation; specifically, it is the creation of a word from an existing word without any change in form. Conversion is more productive in some languages than in others; in English it is a fairly productive process.
Often a word of one lexical category (part of speech) is converted from a word of another lexical category; for example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green. Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more remarked upon is verbing, the creation of a verb by a converting a noun or other word.
The boundary between conversion and functional shift (the extension of an existing word to take on a new syntactic function) is not well-defined.

Sources:
The previous definitions and explanations have been quoted from: www.wikipedia.com

Introduction to Linguistics

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Glossary

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