A symbolic linguistic representation is a representation of an

utterance In spoken language analysis, an utterance is a continuous piece of speech, by one person, before or after which there is silence on the part of the person. In the case of oral language, spoken languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded ...

that uses

symbol A symbol is a mark, Sign (semiotics), sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, physical object, object, or wikt:relationship, relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by cr ...

s to represent linguistic information about the utterance, such as information about

phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

, or

semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic Meaning (philosophy), meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction betwee ...

. Symbolic linguistic representations are different from non-symbolic representations, such as recordings, because they use symbols to represent linguistic information rather than measurements. Symbolic representations are widely used in linguistics. In syntactic representations, atomic category symbols often refer to the syntactic category of a

lexical item In lexicography, a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words (catena (linguistics), catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are ''cat'', ''traffic light'', ''take ca ...

. Examples include lexical categories such as auxiliary verbs (INFL), phrasal categories such as relative clauses (SRel) and empty categories such as wh-traces (t_WH). In some formalisms, such as

Lexical Functional Grammar Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is a constraint-based grammar framework in theoretical linguistics. It posits several parallel levels of syntactic structure, including a phrase structure grammar representation of word order and constituency, an ...

, these symbols can refer to both grammatical functions and values of

grammatical categories In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive ...

. In linguistics, empty categories are represented with ∅. Symbolic representations also appear in

phonetic transcription Phonetic transcription (also known as Phonetic script or Phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phonetics'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the ...

, descriptions of phonological processes,

trochees In poetic metre, a trochee ( ) is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, in qualitative meter, as found in English, and in modern linguistics; or in quantitative meter, as found in Latin and Ancient ...

phonemes A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

, morphophonemes, natural classes, semantic features such as

animacy Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around ...

and the qualia structures of Generative Lexicon Theory. In natural language processing, linguistic representations, such as syntactic representations, have long been in the service of improving the output of information retrieval systems, such as search engines and machine translation systems. Recently, in span-based neural constituency parsing lexical items begin as wordpiece tokens or BPE tiktokens before they are transformed into several other representations: word vectors (word encoder), terminal nodes (span vectors, fenceposts), non-terminal nodes (span classifier), parse tree ( neural CKY). It's suggested that the mapping from terminals to non-terminals learns what constructions are permitted by the language.Jurafsky & Martin, Chapter 17.7, pg 17 Symbolic linguistic representations are frequently used in

computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics ...

. Other representations in linguistics that are not symbols or measurements include

rules Rule or ruling may refer to: Human activity * The exercise of political or personal control by someone with authority or power * Business rule, a rule pertaining to the structure or behavior internal to a business * School rule, a rule tha ...

and rankings.

Notes

External links

LFG notation

References

* Sells, Peter (1985). ''Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories: An Introduction to Government-Binding Theory, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and Lexical-Function Grammar''. CSLI. * Pustejovsky, James (1995). ''The Generative Lexicon''. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262661409. * Watanabe et al (2000). ''Improving Natural Language Processing by Linguistic Document Annotation''. In Proceedings of the COLING-2000 Workshop on Semantic Annotation and Intelligent Content, pages 20–27, Centre Universitaire, Luxembourg. International Committee on Computational Linguistics. * Jurafsky, Daniel; Martin, James H. (2024). ''Speech and Language Processing. Draft of February 3, 2024.'' * https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/17.pdf#section.17.7 Linguistics Phonetics Phonology Linguistic morphology Syntax Semantics Computational linguistics {{syntax-stub