Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
39 results found in Linguistics.
- ASL Gloss (Sign Language Gloss, Glossing)
- A written notation system used to transcribe sign language by representing each sign with an English word written in capital letters. ASL gloss is used primarily for linguistic research, teaching, and…
- Classifier Predicates (CL Predicates, Classifiers)
- A type of sign language construction in which signers use their hands to represent the location, movement, size, shape, and spatial relationships of objects and people. Classifier predicates are among…
- Coreference (Coreference Resolution, Anaphora Resolution)
- The linguistic phenomenon of two or more expressions in a text referring to the same real-world entity — for example, "Sam", "she", and "the scientist" all referring to the same person. Coreference re…
- Direct Machine Translation (Direct MT, Dictionary-Based Machine Translation)
- The simplest machine-translation paradigm: source-language words are translated into target-language words using a bilingual dictionary, with limited or no syntactic analysis and only shallow reorderi…
- ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator)
- A free, open-source annotation tool developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics for creating, editing, and searching multi-tier, time-aligned annotations on video and audio recordings.…
- Entity Grid (Entity-Grid Model)
- A model of local text coherence proposed by Barzilay and Lapata (2008) that represents a document as a two-dimensional grid: rows are sentences, columns are salient entities, and each cell records the…
- Evocation (Word Association Strength, Semantic Evocation)
- A measure of how strongly one word brings another word to mind, reflecting the associative connections between concepts in human semantic memory. Unlike formal semantic relationships such as synonymy …
- Eye-Gaze in Sign Language (Eye Gaze, Gaze Direction)
- The use of eye direction and movement as a grammatical and communicative feature in sign languages. In American Sign Language and other sign languages, eye-gaze serves multiple linguistic functions in…
- Facial Expressions in Sign Language (Non-Manual Markers, Non-Manual Signals, NMMs)
- Meaningful facial movements and configurations that serve grammatical, lexical, and affective functions in sign languages. In American Sign Language, facial expressions are not merely emotional indica…
- Grammaticality (Grammatical correctness, Grammatical acceptability)
- The degree to which a sentence conforms to the grammatical rules of a language. In accessibility and NLP research, grammaticality is typically assessed via a 5-point Likert subjective judgement (e.g.,…
- Halant (Virama, Hasanta)
- A diacritical mark used in Indian (Indic) scripts to suppress the inherent vowel of a consonant, enabling the formation of consonant clusters or conjuncts. When a halant follows a consonant, it indica…
- Iconicity (Iconic Motivation, Sign Iconicity)
- A property of a linguistic sign in which its form resembles or is motivated by its meaning, rather than being arbitrary. In sign languages, iconicity is pervasive: many signs visually depict an action…
- Interlingua (Interlingual Representation, Interlingual MT)
- In machine translation, a language-neutral semantic representation that serves as an intermediate form between the source and target languages. An interlingual MT system first analyses the source text…
- Languaging
- A sociolinguistic concept that reframes language as an ongoing activity rather than a fixed system. Developed by scholars including Alastair Pennycook and Li Wei, languaging treats communication as th…
- Lexical Access (Lexical Retrieval, Word Access)
- The cognitive process of retrieving words from the mental lexicon during language production or comprehension. Lexical access involves activating the phonological, semantic, and syntactic properties o…
- Lexical Chain (Lexical Chaining, Lexical Cohesion)
- A sequence of semantically related words running through a text — for example, "doctor", "hospital", "nurse", "patient" — connected by relations like synonymy, hypernymy, or hyponymy. Lexical chains c…
- Lexical Signing (Lexical Sign, LS)
- In American Sign Language and related signed languages, the production of meaning by syntactically combining individual lexical signs drawn from the language's vocabulary — analogous to combining word…
- Linguistic Minority (Language Minority)
- A group whose primary language differs from the dominant language of the surrounding society, often placing them at a disadvantage in education, employment, civic participation, and access to informat…
- Mimetic Language (Sound Symbolism, Phonomimes, Ideophones)
- Words or vocalizations whose sounds imitate or evoke the sensory qualities of what they describe, such as the rustle of leaves, the thud of a drum, or the hiss of escaping air. Mimetic language sits a…
- Multichannel Signal (Multi-Channel Signal, Parallel Signal Channels)
- A communication signal that conveys information simultaneously through multiple independent or semi-independent channels. In the context of sign languages, a multichannel signal includes the concurren…