Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
48 results found in linguistics.
- Signing Space (Sign Space)
- The three-dimensional area in front of a signer where sign language is produced, typically extending from waist to head height and shoulder width to either side. In American Sign Language and other si…
- Spatial Grammar (Spatial Syntax)
- Spatial grammar is the set of grammatical rules that signed languages express through the three-dimensional signing space in front of the signer, rather than through linear word order. Signers establi…
- Spatial Inflection (Verb Agreement, Directional Verb, Inflecting Verb)
- A grammatical process in sign languages where the motion path and orientation of a verb sign are modified based on the 3D locations in space that have been assigned to its subject and/or object during…
- Stokoe Notation (Stokoe System)
- A notational system for representing the formational components of sign language signs, devised by William C. Stokoe for the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles. The sys…
- Syntactic NMS (Syntactic Non-Manual Sign)
- Non-manual signs that define sentence types and grammatical structure in sign languages. In ASL, syntactic NMS include raised eyebrows for Yes/No questions, furrowed brows and forward head tilt for WH…
- Verb Inflection (Sign Language Verb Inflection, Directional Verbs)
- In sign languages, verb inflection refers to the modification of a verb sign's movement path, speed, or direction to encode grammatical information such as subject, object, number, and aspect. Unlike …
- Visual Language (Visuo-Gestural Language)
- A language that uses the visual-gestural modality for communication, as opposed to the auditory-vocal modality of spoken languages. Sign languages are visual languages that encode information through …
- Word importance (Lexical importance, Information content)
- A measure of how critical a specific word is to the overall meaning of a sentence, typically computed using neural language models that estimate how predictable a word is from its context. In captioni…