|
Pseudoword
A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless. Such words lacking a meaning in a certain language or absent in any text corpus or dictionary can be the result of (the interpretation of) a truly random signal, but there will often be an underlying deterministic source, as is the case for examples like ''jabberwocky'' and '' galumph'' (both coined in a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll), '' dord'' (a ghost word published due to a mistake), ciphers, and typos. A string of nonsensical words may be described as gibberish. Word salad, in contrast, may contain legible and intelligible words but without semantic or syntactic correlation or coherence. Characteristics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nonce Word
In linguistics, a nonce word—also called an occasionalism—is any word (lexeme), or any sequence of sounds or letters, created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word in a given language.''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language''. Ed. David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 132. Nonce words have a variety of functions and are most commonly used for humor, poetry, children's literature, linguistic experiments, psychological studies, and medical diagnoses, or they arise by accident. Some nonce words have a meaning at their inception or gradually acquire a fixed meaning inferred from context and use, but if they eventually become an established part of the language (neologisms), they stop being nonce words.Crystal, David. (1997) ''A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics'' (4th Edition). Oxford and Cambridge (Mass., USA): Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Other nonce words may be essentially me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wug Test
Jean Berko Gleason (born 1931) is an American psycholinguist and professor emerita in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University who has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of language acquisition in children, aphasia, gender differences in language development, and parent–child interactions. Gleason created the Wug Test, in which a child is shown pictures with nonsense names and then prompted to complete statements about them, and used it to demonstrate that even young children possess implicit knowledge of Morphology (linguistics), linguistic morphology. Lise Menn, Menn and Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ratner have written that "Perhaps no innovation other than the invention of the tape recorder has had such an indelible effect on the field of child language research", the "wug" (one of the imaginary creatures Gleason drew in creating the Wug Test) being "so basic to what [psycholinguists] know and do that increasingly it appears in the p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gibberish
Gibberish, also known as jibber-jabber or gobbledygook, is speech that is (or appears to be) nonsense: ranging across speech sounds that are not actual words, pseudowords, language games and specialized jargon that seems nonsensical to outsiders. "Gibberish" is also used as an imprecation to denigrate or tar ideas or opinions the user disagrees with or finds irksome, a rough equivalent of "nonsense", " folderol", "balderdash", or " claptrap". The implication is that the criticized expression or proposition lacks substance or congruence, as opposed to being a differing view. The related word ''jibber-jabber'' refers to rapid talk that is difficult to understand. Etymology The etymology of ''gibberish'' is uncertain. The term was seen in English in the early 16th century. It is generally thought to be an onomatopoeia imitative of speech, similar to the words ''jabber'' (to talk rapidly) and ''gibber'' (to speak inarticulately). It may originate from the word '' jib'', w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing system, writing. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of Productivity (linguistics), productivity and Displacement (linguistics), displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning. Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between and . Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morphophonemics
Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (minimal meaningful units) when they combine to form words. The origins of morphophonology trace back to the early 20th century with foundational works in structural linguistics. Notable contributions include Roman Jakobson's insights into phonological alternations and Chomsky and Halle's ''The Sound Pattern of English'' (1968), which formalized the relationship between phonology and morphology within generative grammar. Subsequent theories, such as Autosegmental Phonology and Optimality Theory, have refined the analysis of morphophonological patterns Morphophonological analysis often involves an attempt to give a series of formal rules or constraints that successfully predict the regular sound changes occurring in the morphemes of a given ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Accidental Gap
In linguistics an accidental gap, also known as a gap, paradigm gap, accidental lexical gap, lexical gap, lacuna, or hole in the pattern, is a potential word, word sense, morpheme, or other form that does not exist in some language despite being theoretically permissible by the grammatical rules of that language. For example, a word pronounced is theoretically possible in English, as it would obey English phonological rules, but does not currently exist. Its absence is therefore an accidental gap, in the ontologic sense of the word ''accidental'' (that is, circumstantial rather than essential). Accidental gaps differ from systematic gaps, those words or other forms which do not exist in a language due to the boundaries set by phonological, morphological, and other rules of that specific language. In English, a word pronounced does not and ''cannot'' exist because it has no vowels and therefore does not obey the word-formation rules of English. This is a systematic, rather th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Psycholinguistic
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language. Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a listener. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, mainly due to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain processes language, and less so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Trigram
Trigrams are a special case of the ''n''-gram, where ''n'' is 3. They are often used in natural language processing for performing statistical analysis of texts and in cryptography for control and use of ciphers and codes. See results of analysis ofLetter Frequencies in the English Language. Frequency Context is very important, varying analysis rankings and percentages are easily derived by drawing from different sample sizes, different authors; or different document types: poetry, science-fiction, technology documentation; and writing levels: stories for children versus adults, military orders, and recipes. Typical cryptanalytic frequency analysis finds that the 16 most common character-level trigrams in English are: Because encrypted messages sent by telegraph Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages where the sender uses symbolic codes, known to the recipient, rather than a physical exchange of an object bearing the message. Thus flag semaphore i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bigram
A bigram or digram is a sequence of two adjacent elements from a string of tokens, which are typically letters, syllables, or words. A bigram is an ''n''-gram for ''n''=2. The frequency distribution of every bigram in a string is commonly used for simple statistical analysis of text in many applications, including in computational linguistics, cryptography, and speech recognition. ''Gappy bigrams'' or ''skipping bigrams'' are word pairs which allow gaps (perhaps avoiding connecting words, or allowing some simulation of dependencies, as in a dependency grammar). Applications Bigrams, along with other n-grams, are used in most successful language models for speech recognition. Bigram frequency attacks can be used in cryptography to solve cryptograms. See frequency analysis. Bigram frequency is one approach to statistical language identification. Some activities in logology or recreational linguistics involve bigrams. These include attempts to find English words beginning wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phonotactics
Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek 'voice, sound' and 'having to do with arranging') is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences by means of ''phonotactic constraints''. Phonotactic constraints are highly language-specific. For example, in Japanese, consonant clusters like do not occur. Similarly, the clusters and are not permitted at the beginning of a word in Modern English but are permitted in German and were permitted in Old and Middle English. In contrast, in some Slavic languages and are used alongside vowels as syllable nuclei. Syllables have the following internal segmental structure: * Onset (optional) * Rhyme (obligatory, comprises nucleus and coda): ** Nucleus (obligatory) ** Coda (optional) Both onset and coda may be empty, forming a vowel-only syllable, or alternatively, the nucleus can be occup ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language, and analogous systems of sign languages), and pragmatics (how the context of use contributes to meaning). Subdisciplines such as biolinguistics (the study of the biological variables and evolution of language) and psycholinguistics (the study of psychological factors in human language) bridge many of these divisions. Linguistics encompasses Outline of linguistics, many branches and subfields that span both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretical linguistics is concerned with understanding the universal grammar, universal and Philosophy of language#Nature of language, fundamental nature of language and developing a general ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
