Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
39 results found in Linguistics.
- Native Signer (Native Sign Language User, L1 Signer)
- A person who acquired a sign language as their first language (L1) during the critical period of language development, typically before age 5. Native signers usually learned sign language from deaf pa…
- Non-Manual Markers (NMMs, Non-Manual Signals, Facial Grammar, Non-Manuals)
- Grammatical elements in sign languages conveyed through facial expressions, head movements, eye gaze, and body posture rather than hand movements. In American Sign Language, non-manual markers are ess…
- Non-Manual Signals (Non-Manual Markers, NMS, NMM, Non-Manual Features)
- Linguistic information conveyed through parts of the body other than the hands in sign languages, including facial expressions, mouth movements, eye gaze, head tilts, head shakes, and body shifts. In …
- Part of Speech (POS, Word Class, POS Tag)
- A grammatical category assigned to each word (or, in signed languages, each sign) in a sentence — such as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, or conjunction. Automatic part-of-speech …
- Part-of-Speech (POS, Word Class, Lexical Category)
- The grammatical category of a word — noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, pronoun, conjunction, determiner, and so on. Part-of-speech labels are the basic output of part-of-speech tagging and a…
- Pronominal Reference (Pronoun Reference, Anaphoric Reference)
- The use of pronouns or pronoun-like expressions to refer back to entities previously introduced in a discourse. In spoken and written languages this is typically achieved with words such as "he," "she…
- Psycholinguistics
- The scientific study of the cognitive and neural processes that underlie the production, comprehension, and acquisition of language. Psycholinguistic research measures phenomena such as reading and si…
- Regional Sign Variation (Sign Language Dialect, Regional Sign Dialect)
- Regional sign variation refers to systematic differences in the form of signs across geographic regions within a single sign language, analogous to dialects in spoken languages. Variation arises from …
- Rhetorical Question (ASL) (ASL Rhetorical Question, RHQ)
- In American Sign Language, a grammatical construction in which the signer poses a question and then immediately answers it, used as a cohesive rhetorical device rather than as a genuine inquiry. ASL r…
- Second Language Acquisition (SLA, L2 Acquisition)
- The process by which a person learns a language other than their first (native) language. In deaf education and accessibility, second language acquisition theory is particularly relevant because writt…
- Semantic Network (Semantic Web, Associative Network)
- A knowledge representation structure in which concepts are represented as nodes and the relationships between them as links or edges. In accessibility and AAC contexts, semantic networks model how wor…
- Sign Language Classifier (Classifier Sign, Depicting Sign, Classifier Predicate)
- A type of sign in sign languages that is not part of a fixed vocabulary but is created dynamically during discourse to represent a class of objects sharing a common shape, size, or physical characteri…
- Sign Linguistics (Sign Language Linguistics)
- The scientific study of the structure and properties of sign languages. Sign linguistics examines the phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic components of visual-gestural languages. Key …
- Spatial Reference (ASL) (Spatial Reference Point, Locus, ASL Spatial Reference)
- In American Sign Language and other signed languages, the use of points in the signing space in front of the signer as invisible placeholders for entities under discussion — people, objects, or concep…
- Speech Acts Theory (Speech Act Theory, Illocutionary Acts)
- A theory from the philosophy of language, originally developed by J.L. Austin and John Searle, which holds that utterances are not just statements of fact but also actions that accomplish things — suc…
- Syntactic Parse Tree (Parse Tree, Syntactic Tree)
- A tree-shaped data structure that represents the grammatical structure of a sentence according to a formal grammar. Internal nodes correspond to phrases (noun phrase, verb phrase, clause, sentence) an…
- Transfer Machine Translation (Transfer MT, Rule-Based Transfer Translation)
- A rule-based machine-translation paradigm that analyses the source text into a syntactic or semantic structure, applies a set of transfer rules to produce a corresponding structure in the target langu…
- Transliteration (Sign Language Transliteration)
- The word-by-word conversion of text from one system into another — for example, rendering a name in one script using the characters of another. In sign-language accessibility the term has a specific m…
- WordNet
- A large-scale electronic lexical database of the English language developed at Princeton University, in which nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets…