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+title: "Abstract and concrete labour"
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+
+Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable worktime versus human labour as a particular activity that has a specific useful effect. As discussed in this article, according to Marx abstract labour is a concept that was known and used already in ancient society, but it evolved across time, and is fully developed only in the market relations of industrial capitalism.
+
+== Overview ==
+As economically valuable worktime, human labour adds value to products or assets (thereby conserving their capital value, and/or transferring value from inputs to outputs). In this sense, labour is an activity which creates/maintains economic value pure and simple. This could be realized as a sum of money once labour's product is sold or acquired by a buyer. If an employer hires a worker for a contractually specified time to produce something but the worker does not actually do any work, it's not only a waste of time, but also an extra cost to the employer (a loss of value). The value-creating ability of labour is most clearly visible, when all labour is stopped, for example during a strike or a disaster. If all labour is withdrawn, the value of the capital assets worked with will normally deteriorate. In the end, if all labour is permanently withdrawn, nothing remains but a ghost town.
+As a useful activity of a particular kind, human labour can have a useful effect by producing/supplying particular tangible products which are used by others, or by the producers themselves. In this sense, labour is an activity which creates use-values, i.e. "tangible products, results or effects", which can be used or consumed. The use-value of products is usually taken for granted. Its importance becomes very clear only when goods and services are created, which are (1) of poor quality, (2) not supplied on time and (3) mainly useless to the consumer. Labour must be applied to produce usable and useful products, regardless of how much they are sold for, otherwise they cannot be used and there is no use-value or utility at all. If labour produces useless products or results, it creates no value and it is simply a waste of labour-time. Most likely, useless products cannot be sold other than perhaps to a recycling business.
+So, Marx argues that human work is both (1) an activity which, by its useful effect, helps to create particular kinds of products, and (2) in an economic sense, a value-forming activity that, if it is productively applied, can help create more value than there was before. If an employer hires labour, the employer thinks both about how useful the labour service will be for his business operations, and about the value that the labour can create for his business. That is, the right kind of work not only needs to get done, but it also needs to get done in a way that it helps the employer to make money.
+If the labour makes no net addition to new value produced, then the employer makes no money from it. The labour will be only an expense to him. If the labour is only a net expense (overhead), then it is commercially speaking unproductive labour. Yet, it may be very necessary to employ this unproductive labour. If that labour was not done, then considerable capital value might be lost from the employer's financial investments. Indeed, the business might fail without it. That is, labour may be very necessary to maintain capital value, although it does not actually add value to capital, and does not directly add to net profit. So, the employer also buys the "unproductive labour", because it reduces his costs. His labour costs will be lower than the loss of value that would occur, if he did not employ unproductive labour to maintain capital value, and to prevent loss of capital value. For example, cleaning work might seem a very menial and low-value activity. But if business equipment fails, customers stay away, and the staff get sick or injured, it costs the business a lot of extra money.
+
+== Origin ==
+
+In the introduction to his Grundrisse manuscript, Marx argued that the category of abstract labour "expresses an ancient relation existing in all social formations"; but, he continued, only in modern bourgeois society (exemplified by the United States) is abstract labour fully realized in practice. Because only there does a system of price-equations exist within a universal market, which can practically reduce the value of all forms and quantities of labour uniformly to sums of money, so that any kind of labour becomes an interchangeable, tradeable good or "input" with a known price tag – and is also practically treated as such. In the Grundrisse, Marx also distinguished between "particular labour" and "general labour", contrasting communal production with production for exchange.
+Marx published about the categories of abstract and concrete labour for the first time in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)  and they are discussed in more detail in chapter 1 of Capital, Volume I, where Marx writes:

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+---
+
+"On the one hand all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labour power, and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is the expenditure of human labour power in a special form and with a definite aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it produces use values. ... At first sight a commodity presented itself to us as a complex of two things – use value and exchange value. Later on, we saw also that labour, too, possesses the same twofold nature; for, so far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to it as a creator of use values. I was the first to point out and to examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities. ... this point is the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns"
+
+== Abstract labour and exchange ==
+Marx himself considered that all economising reduced to the economical use of human labour-time; "to economise" ultimately meant saving on human energy and effort.
+"The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity."
+However, according to Marx, the achievement of abstract thinking about human labour, and the ability to quantify it, is closely related to the historical development of economic exchange in general, and more specifically commodity trade (the trade in wares and merchandise).
+The expansion of trade requires the ability to measure and compare all kinds of things - not just length, volume and weight, but also time itself. Originally, the units of measurement used were taken from everyday life—the length of a finger or limb, the volume of an ordinary container, the weight one can carry, the duration of a day or a season, the number of cattle. Socially standardized measurement units began to be used probably from circa 3000 BC onwards in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and then state authorities began to supervise the use of measures, with rules to prevent cheating and swindling (for example, supplying false quantities, overcharging, failure to pay, or selling poor quality goods). In a biblical story where God delivers moral guidelines to Moses which people must follow, dishonest measures and mismeasurement are explicitly prohibited: “You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measures of length or weight or quantity. You shall have just balances, just weights…" (Leviticus 19:35). Once standard measuring units existed, mathematics could begin to develop.
+In fact, Marx argues the abstraction of labour in thought is the reflex of a real process, in which commercial trade in products not only alters the way labour is viewed, but also how it is practically treated. In other words, when labour becomes a commercial object traded in the marketplace, then the form and content of work in the workplace is transformed as well, to conform to commercial requirements. This transformation is practically possible, because labour already contains the potential to adapt to the requirements of capitalist business. This potential has already been shaped up by previous schooling and training. But Marx also comments that "The productiveness of labour that serves as [the] foundation and starting-point of [Capital], is a gift, not of nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries." In other words, human work abilities are the result of a very lengthy evolutionary social process, in which humans acquire the capacities and dispositions to do all kinds of tasks to survive and prosper.
+If different products are exchanged in market trade according to specific trading ratios, Marx argues, the exchange process at the same time relates, values and commensurates the quantities of human labour expended to produce those products, regardless of whether the traders are consciously aware of that or not (see also value-form).
+Therefore, Marx implies, the exchange process itself involves the making of a real abstraction, namely abstraction from (or indifference to) the particular characteristics of concrete (specific) labour that produced the commodities whose value is equated in trade.
+At first, the relationship between quantities of traded commodities symbolically represents relative costs in labour time. This relationship is ordinarily quite transparent because goods are traded by the people who produced them. Next, money-prices begin to represent symbolically the commodities being traded. In this way, a system of symbolic representation emerges which can facilitate the exchange of the most diverse products with great efficiency. In the end, products as commodities become simply objects of value, and since their value can rise and fall, they can be bought and sold purely for capital gain. Closely related to this, is the growth of a cash economy, and Marx claims that:

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+
+"In proportion as exchange bursts its local bonds, and the value of commodities more and more expands into an embodiment of human labour in the abstract, in the same proportion the character of money attaches itself to commodities that are by Nature fitted to perform the social function of a universal equivalent. Those commodities are the precious metals."
+In a more complex division of labour, it becomes difficult or even impossible to equate the value of all different labour-efforts directly. But money enables us to express and compare the value of all different labour-efforts—more or less accurately—in money-units (initially, quantities of gold, silver, or bronze). Marx then argues that labour viewed concretely in its specifics creates useful things, but labour-in-the-abstract is value-forming labour, which conserves, transfers and/or creates economic value (see Valorisation). In 1844, Marx said that:
+
+"As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace."
+In the feudal society of medieval Europe, Marx comments,
+
+"The natural form of labour, its specific kind—and not, as in a society of commodity production, its universality—is here its immediate social form. The corvee can be measured by time in just the same way as the labour which produces commodities, but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord is a specific quantity of his own personal labour-power. The tithe owed to the priest is more clearly apparent than his blessing. Whatever we may think, then, of the different character masks with which people confront each other in such a society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour appear at all events as their own personal relations, and are not disguised as social relations between things, between the products of labour. ... For a society of commodity producers—whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this business-like form bring their individual, private labours into relation with each other as homogenous human labour—Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion.")
+
+== Abstract labour and capitalism ==
+If the production process itself becomes organised as a specifically capitalist production process, then the abstraction process is deepened, because production labour itself becomes directly treated and organised in terms of its commercial exchange value, and in terms of its capacity to create new value for the buyer of that labour.
+Quite simply, in this case, a quantity of labour-time is equal to a quantity of money, and it can be calculated that X hours of labour—regardless of who in particular performs them—create, or are worth, Y amounts of new product value. In this way, labour is practically rendered abstract.
+The abstraction is completed when a labour market is established which very exactly quantifies the money-price applying to all kinds of different occupational functions, permitting equations such as:
+X amount of qualified labour = Y amounts of unskilled labour = Z number of workers = P amount of money = Q amount of goods.
+This is what Marx calls a value relationship ("Wertverhältnis" in German). It can also be calculated that it costs a certain amount of time and money to train a worker to perform a certain task, and how much value that adds to the workers' labour, giving rise to the notion of human capital.
+As a corollary, in these conditions workers will increasingly treat the paid work they do as something distinct or separate from their personality, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Work becomes "just work", it no longer necessarily says anything at all about the identity, creativity or personality of the worker. With the development of an average skill level in the workforce, the same job can also be done by many different workers, and most workers can do many different jobs; nobody is necessarily tied to one type of work all his life anymore. Thus we can talk of "a job" as an abstract function that could be filled by anybody with the required skills. Managers can calculate that with a certain budget, a certain number of paid working hours are required or available to do the work, and then divide up the hours into different job functions to be filled by suitably qualified personnel.
+Marx's theory of alienation considers the human and social implications of the abstraction and commercialization of labour. His concept of reification reflects about the inversions of object and subject, and of means and ends, which are involved in commodity trade.
+Marx regarded the distinction between abstract and concrete labour as being among the most important innovations he contributed to the theory of economic value, and subsequently Marxian scholars have debated a great deal about its theoretical significance.
+
+=== Evolutionary or historically specific ===
+For ultraleftist Marxists, abstract labour is an economic category which applies only to the capitalist mode of production, i.e. it applies only, when human labour power or work-capacity is universally treated as a commodity with a certain monetary cost or earnings potential. Thus Professor John Weeks claims that

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+
+"...only under capitalism is concrete labor in general metamorphosed into abstract labor, and only under capitalism is this necessary in order to bring about the reproduction of class relations."
+The logical implication of this ultraleftist interpretation is, that if capitalism is destroyed (by the revolutionary Marxist Party and the working class), then abstract labour is also destroyed and eradicated.
+Other Marx-scholars, such as Makoto Itoh, take a more evolutionary view (like Marx did and archaeologists do). They argue that the abstract treatment of human labour-time is something that evolved and developed in the course of the whole history of trade, or even precedes it, to the extent that primitive agriculture already involves attempts to economise labour, by calculating the comparative quantities of labour-time involved in producing different kinds of outputs.
+In this sense, Marx already argued in his book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) that
+
+"This abstraction, human labour in general, exists in the form of average labour which, in a given society, the average person can perform, productive expenditure of a certain amount of human muscles, nerves, brain, etc. It is simple labour [English economists call it "unskilled labour"] which any average individual can be trained to do and which in one way or another he has to perform. The characteristics of this average labour are different in different countries and different historical epochs, but in any particular society it appears as something given." 
+In the same text, Marx comments that
+
+"Steuart knew very well that in pre-bourgeois eras also products assumed the form of commodities and commodities that of money; but he shows in great detail that the commodity as the elementary and primary unit of wealth and alienation [i.e. transfer of property or transfer of command over resources] as the predominant form of appropriation are characteristic only of the bourgeois period of production, and that accordingly labour which creates exchange-value is a specifically bourgeois feature." 
+Originally, in ancient society and medieval society ("premodern" or "pre-bourgeois" society), commodity production co-existed with subsistence production, a situation of "partial commodity production" (see also simple commodity production). When Marx discusses the origin and evolution of exchange, he notes that:
+
+"This division of the product into a useful thing and a thing possessing value appears in practice only when exchange has already acquired a sufficient extension and importance to allow useful things to be produced for the purpose of being exchanged, so that their character as values has already to be taken into consideration during production. From this moment on, the labour of the individual producer acquires a twofold social character."
+Such a division of labour featuring partial commodity production is already achieved in many different precapitalist societies, and consequently the category of abstract labour already existed in precapitalist societies. However, only under conditions of generalized commodity production in a capitalist society does abstract labour become a truly "universal" characteristic of production - because the vast majority of inputs and outputs of production are tradeable goods and services regulated by values and price-levels in competitive markets. The category of abstract labour is fully realized because it becomes an objectified quantity.
+
+=== Skilled labour ===
+Another controversy concerns the differences between unskilled (simple) and skilled (qualified) labour. Skilled labour costs more to produce than unskilled labour, and can be more productive. Generally Marx assumed that—irrespective of the price for which it is sold—skilled labour power had a higher value (it costs more to produce, in money, time, energy and resources), and that skilled work could produce a product with a higher value in the same amount of time, compared to unskilled labour. This was reflected in a skill hierarchy, and a hierarchy of wage-levels. In this sense, Friedrich Engels comments in Anti-Duhring:

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+
+"The product of one hour of compound labour is a commodity of a higher value—perhaps double or treble—in comparison with the product of one hour of simple labour. The values of the products of compound labour are expressed by this comparison in definite quantities of simple labour; but this reduction of compound labour is established by a social process which goes on behind the backs of the producers, by a process which at this point, in the development of the theory of value, can only be stated but not as yet explained. ... How then are we to solve the whole important question of the higher wages paid for compound labour? In a society of private producers, private individuals or their families pay the costs of training the qualified worker; hence the higher price paid for qualified labour-power accrues first of all to private individuals: the skilful slave is sold for a higher price, and the skilful wage-earner is paid higher wages. 
+Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production would over time replace people with machines, and encourage the easy replacement of one worker by another, and thus that most labour would tend to reduce to an average skill level and standardized norms of work effort. However he provided no specific calculus by which the value of skilled work could be expressed as a multiple of unskilled work, nor a theory of what regulates the valuation of skill differences. This has led to some theoretical debate among Marxian economists, but no definitive solution has yet been given. In the first volume of Das Kapital Marx had declared his intention to write a special study of the forms of labour-compensation, but he never did so. In contemporary society, a division is emerging between creative, skilled and specialized jobs attracting extraordinarily large salaries, and routine jobs paying very low salaries, where the enormous differences in pay rates are difficult to explain.
+The economist Anwar Shaikh from the New School for Social Research has analyzed input-output data, wage data and labour data for the US economy, to create an empirically testable economic theory of the market valuation of skill differences. The counterargument is, that the valuation of skills in a heavily bureaucratized education system depends to a great extent on the balance of class forces between the rich educated class, and the "lower-skilled" working class. The rent-seeking educated class, on this view, can often raise its income far beyond the real worth of its work, if they occupy a privileged position, if its specialist skills happen to be in short supply or in demand, or if they are hired through the "old boy" networks. That is to say, to an extent, the assumed skill level of the employee may be more imaginary, than real; it all depends on how skills, experience and qualifications are defined and valued by privileged professionals whose rules reward their own kind the most. Skilled labour may be over-valued and unskilled labour under-valued at the same time.
+
+== Criticism ==
+Marx did not think there was anything particularly mysterious about the fact that people valued products because they have to spend time working to produce them, or to buy them. However, academics have made many objections to his idea. The conceptual issues associated with the idea of abstract labour have been one of the main reasons why many economists abandoned the labour theory of value. It may be that the problems have never been resolved because they have been approached far too abstractly, using conceptual distinctions not really adequate for the purpose.
+Without referring explicitly to Marx's work on the labour theory of value of David Ricardo, the marginal utility theorist William Stanley Jevons clearly stated the main criticism of the concept of abstract labour in his 1871 treatise:
+
+"Labour affects supply, and supply affects the degree of utility, which governs value, or the ratio of exchange. In order that there may be no possible mistake about this all-important series of relations, I will restate it in a tabular form, as follows: 
+Cost of production determines supply;
+Supply determines final degree of utility;
+Final degree of utility determines value.
+But it is too easy to go too far in considering labour as the regulator of value; it is equally to be remembered that labour is itself of unequal value. Ricardo, by a violent assumption, founded his theory of value on quantities of labour considered as one uniform thing. He was aware that labour differs infinitely in quality and efficiency, so that each kind is more or less scarce, and is consequently paid at a higher or lower rate of wages. He regarded these differences as disturbing circumstances which would have to be allowed for; but his theory rests on the assumed equality of labour. [My] theory rests on a wholly different ground. I hold labour to be essentially variable, so that its value must be determined by the value of the produce, not the value of the produce by that of the labour. I hold it to be impossible to compare a priori the productive powers of a navvy, a carpenter, an iron-puddler, a school master and a barrister. Accordingly, it will be found that not one of my equations represents a comparison between one man's labour and another's."
+
+=== Response to these criticisms ===
+Replying to this type of criticism, the Russian Marxist Isaak Illich Rubin argued that the concept of abstract labour was really much more complex than it seemed at first sight. He distinguished between "physically equal" labour, labour which is "socially equated" by means of consensual social evaluation or comparison, and labour efforts equated via the exchange of products using money as a universal equivalent.
+To these three aspects we could add at least five others, which are also mentioned by Marx:

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+title: "Abstract and concrete labour"
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+---
+
+the existence of normal labour-averages applying to different work tasks, which function as "labour norms" in any society;
+the gradation of many different labour efforts along one general, hierarchical dimension of worth, for the purpose of compensation;
+the universal exchangeability of labour efforts themselves, in a developed labour market;
+the general mobility of labour from one job or worksite to another; and
+the ability of the same workers to do all kinds of different jobs.
+Some further aspects of the concept of abstract labour are provided by Marxian anthropologist Lawrence Krader and the mathematician Ulrich Krause. Possibly, these conceptual issues can be resolved, through a better empirical appreciation of the political economy of education, skills and the labour market.
+
+== Recent discussion ==
+In his book Crack Capitalism, John Holloway considers abstract labour as the most radical foundational category of Marx's theory, and therefore he recommends the struggle against abstract labour as the centrepiece of the political struggle against capitalism.
+The British computer scientist Paul Cockshott in 2013 wrote a piece critical of the German Marxist academic Michael Heinrich who, Cockshott argued, wrongly reinterpreted the concept of abstract labour so that it is no longer a scientifically testable concept.
+
+== See also ==
+Abstraction
+Critique of political economy
+Exchange value
+Labour power
+Labour theory of value
+Law of value
+Socially necessary labour time
+Value-form
+Working time
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Abstraction (linguistics)"
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+
+The term abstraction has a number of uses in the field of linguistics. It can describe the way some languages form abstract ideas from concrete objects or instances, as in the plural of abstraction. It can denote a process (also called object abstraction) in the development of language, whereby terms become used for concepts further removed from the objects to which they were originally attached. It can also denote a process applied by linguists themselves, whereby phenomena are considered without the details that are not relevant to the desired level of analysis.
+
+
+== Object abstraction ==
+Object abstraction, or simply abstraction, is a concept wherein terms for objects become used for more abstract concepts, which in some languages develop into further abstractions such as verbs and grammatical words (grammaticalisation). 
+Abstraction is common in human language, though it manifests in different ways for different languages. In language acquisition, children typically learn object words first, and then develop from that vocabulary an understanding of the alternate uses of such words.
+For example, the word "book" refers objectively to a physical object constructed with bound pages, but in abstraction refers to a particular literary creation —regardless of how many physical copies of the "book" there are, it is one "book." The word "book" then developed more abstract uses, such as in keeping a record (bookkeeping), or to keep a record of betting (booking), or as a verb for entering persons into a record ("to book"). Words may then be further abstracted and even have  embedded puns, such as in 'to make history of oneself' ("he booked").
+An early example of this kind of study came from John Horne Tooke, who in his conversational The Diversions of Purley (1786), proposed that the abstract word through came to English through both sound change and derivation from the Gothic:
+
+"For as the French peculiar preposition CHEZ is no other than the Italian substantive CASA or CA, so is the English preposition THOROUGH no other than the Gothic substantive dauro, or the Teutonic substantive thuruh: and like them, means door, gate, passage. I am persuaded that Door and Through have one and the same Gothic origin dauro, mean one and the same thing, and are in fact one and the same word."
+Tooke was incorrect about "through," but his insights about the way words migrated via geography, language, sound change, and meaning were innovative, and fundamentally correct.
+
+
+== Abstraction as used by linguists ==
+
+
+=== Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics ===
+The relation among syntax, semantics, and pragmatics has also been cashed out in terms of what could be called an "abstraction hierarchy." For instance, Rudolf Carnap in his Introduction to Semantics (1942, Harvard University Press) writes:
+
+If… explicit reference is made to the speaker, or, to put it in more general terms, to the user of a language, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics. (Whether in this case reference to designata is made or not makes no difference for this classification.) If we abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their designata, we are in the field of semantics. And if, finally, we abstract from the designata also and analyze only the relations between the expressions, we are in (logical) syntax. The whole science of language, consisting of the three parts mentioned, is called semiotic. (p. 9)
+A related statement was made a few years earlier by Carnap's fellow American philosopher Charles W. Morris, PhD student of the sociologist and pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead, and heavily influenced by the pragmatist and founder of (analytical) semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce:   
+
+"Syntactics, as the study of the syntactical relations of signs to one another in abstraction from the relations of signs to objects [i.e., semantics] or to interpreters [i.e., pragmatics], is the best developed of all the branches of semiotic." (p. 13)
+The relation between abstraction and Morris' influential trichotomy is a matter of ongoing discussion.
+
+
+=== Emic units ===
+A kind of abstraction commonly considered in linguistics is the phoneme, which abstracts speech sounds in such a way as to neglect details that cannot serve to differentiate meaning. Other analogous kinds of abstractions (sometimes called "emic units") include morphemes, graphemes and lexemes.
+
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Anaphoric clitic"
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+---
+
+In linguistics, anaphoric clitics are a specific subset of clitics: morphologically-bound morphemes that syntactically resemble one word unit, but are bound phonologically to another word unit. Anaphoric clitics are a type of anaphor, meaning that they refer to previously mentioned constituents. Anaphoric clitics thus fill a position in a clause that would otherwise be occupied by a noun phrase, meaning that they are in complementary distribution with full noun phrases. A sentence can thus either contain an anaphoric clitic or a full noun phrase carrying out a particular grammatical function, but not both.
+For example, in the Yagua language, spoken in Peru, there is an anaphoric clitic sa which appears before the verb, in subject function: the verb can either have a full noun phrase subject, or the clitic sa. 
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation_(linguistics)-0.md

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+---
+title: "Antecedent-contained deletion"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antecedent-contained_deletion"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:35.322977+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), also called antecedent-contained ellipsis, is a phenomenon whereby an elided verb phrase appears to be contained within its own antecedent. For instance, in the sentence "I read every book that you did", the verb phrase in the main clause appears to license ellipsis inside the relative clause which modifies its object. ACD is a classic puzzle for theories of the syntax-semantics interface, since it threatens to introduce an infinite regress. It is commonly taken as motivation for syntactic transformations such as quantifier raising, though some approaches explain it using semantic composition rules or by adoption more flexible notions of what it means to be a syntactic unit.
+
+
+== Movement-based analyses ==
+To understand the issue, it is necessary to understand how VP-ellipsis works. Consider the following examples, where the expected but elided VP is represented with a smaller font and subscripts and the antecedent to the ellipsis are in bold:
+
+John washed the dishes, and Mary did wash the dishes, too.
+John washed the dishes on Tuesday, and Mary did wash the dishes on Tuesday, too.
+In each of these sentences, the VP has been elided in the second half, and the elided VP should be essentially identical to the antecedent in the first clause. That is, the missing VP in the first sentence can mean only wash the dishes, and in the second sentence, the missing VP can mean only wash the dishes on Tuesday. Assuming the missing VP must be essentially identical to an antecedent VP leads to a problem, first noticed by Bouton (1970):
+
+John read every book that Mary did read every book that Mary did read every book that Mary did read every book etc..
+Since the elided VP must be essentially identical to its antecedent, and assuming that the antecedent is a full VP, an infinite regress occurs (the subscripted text). That is, if we substitute in the antecedent VP into the position of the ellipsis, we must repeat the substitution process ad infinitum. The difficulty is further illustrated with the tree for the sentence:
+
+The light grey font indicates the elided constituent, i.e. the ellipsis, and the underline marks the antecedent constituent to the ellipsis. Since the antecedent constituent contains the ellipsis itself, resolution of the ellipsis necessitates an infinite regress as the antecedent is substituted ad infinitum into the ellipsis site. To avoid this problem, Sag (1976) proposed that the NP every book that Mary did undergoes quantifier raising (QR) to a position above the verb.
+
+[every book that Mary did...]i John read ti.
+Now the reference for the elided VP is simply the following:
+
+read ti
+The analysis can now assume that the elided VP in the example corresponds to just read, since after QR, the antecedent VP no longer contains the object raised NP:
+
+[every book that Mary did read] John read.
+The infinite regress is now avoided because after QR, the antecedent VP contains just the verb read.
+
+
+== See also ==
+
+
+== Notes ==
+
+
+== References ==

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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)-0.md

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+---
+title: "Backchannel (linguistics)"
+chunk: 1/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:37.938749+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics, a backchanneling during a conversation occurs when one participant is speaking and another participant interjects responses to the speaker. A backchannel response can be verbal, non-verbal, or both. Backchannel responses are often phatic expressions, primarily serving a social or meta-conversational purpose, such as signifying the listener's attention, understanding, sympathy, or agreement, rather than conveying significant information. Examples of backchanneling in English include such expressions as "yeah", "OK", "uh-huh", "hmm", "right", and "I see".
+
+== Definition and use ==
+The term was coined by Victor Yngve in 1970, in the following passage: "In fact, both the person who has the turn and his partner are simultaneously engaged in both speaking and listening.  This is because of the existence of what I call the back channel, over which the person who has the turn receives short messages such as 'yes' and 'uh-huh' without relinquishing the turn." Backchannel responses are a part of basic human interaction because to have a productive or meaningful person-person interaction humans must cooperate with one another when participating in a conversation. Meaning, when two people are involved in a conversation, at any given moment only one person is primarily speaking and the other is primarily listening, yet the listener is often giving minor messages through backchannel responses.
+The term "backchannel" was designed to imply that there are two channels of communication operating simultaneously during a conversation. The predominant channel is the speaker who directs primary speech flow. The secondary channel of communication—or backchannel—is the listener providing continuers or assessments, defining the listener's comprehension and/or interest. Recent research, which can be seen below, has also suggested new terms for these two functions. They have proposed the term generic in place of continuers and specific in place of assessments.
+Usually, the way backchannel is used would be a person telling a story or explaining something to one or more individuals, involved in a conversation, who would respond to them with short verbal messages or non-verbal body language. In order to indicate that they are listening and paying attention to the speaker, they might produce sounds as "right", "yeah", etc. or give a nod. Such acknowledgments or small gestures help the speaker understand that the listeners are interested and that they should go on with their story.
+In recent years, scholars have challenged the mainstream definition by adding the "optionality" in the definition of "backchannel". The use of backchannel is never necessary and is always a supplement to a pre-existing conversation.
+
+=== Language differences ===
+Backchannel communication is present in all cultures and languages, though frequency and use may vary. For example, backchannel responses also appear in sign languages. Confusion or distraction can occur during an intercultural encounter if participants from both parties are not accustomed to the same backchannel norms. For example, German speakers produce smaller backchannel responses and use back channel responses less frequently than in American English. 
+Japanese backchannels are frequently misinterpreted by non-native speakers as the listener showing agreement and approval. Business relations in particular can be hampered by non-native speakers assuming that their Japanese counterparts have been agreeing to their suggestions all along, especially with the word hai (はい; "yes"), when the native Japanese speaker meant only that they follow or understand the suggestions – "got it", not "agreed". Japanese speakers also backchannel through the use of echo questions formed by adding the question marker desu ka (ですか) to a key noun in the speaker's sentence which can sound very repetitive to speakers of other languages.
+Studies have shown that when people learn a second language they learn or adapt to how people that are native speakers of that language use backchannel responses. This may occur in terms of the frequency at which a person produces backchannel responses or the sounds or gestures of those responses.
+
+== Types ==
+Research in recent years has expanded the set of recognized backchannel responses to include sentence completions, requests for clarification, brief statements, and non-verbal responses. These have been categorised as non-lexical, phrasal, or substantive.
+
+=== Non-lexical backchannels ===
+A non-lexical backchannel is a vocalized sound that has little or no referential meaning but still verbalizes the listener's attention, and that frequently co-occurs with gestures. In English, sounds like uh-huh and hmm serve this role. Non-lexical backchannels generally come from a limited set of sounds not otherwise widely used in content-bearing conversational speech; as a result, they can be used to express support, surprise, or a need for clarification at the same time as someone else's conversational turn without causing confusion or interference.
+English allows for the reduplication, or repetition, of syllables within a non-lexical backchannel, such as in responses like uh-huh, mm-hm, or um-hm, as well as for single-syllable backchanneling. In a study examining the use of two-syllable backchannels that focused on mm and mm-hm, Gardner found that the two tokens are generally not identical in function, with mm being used more productively as a continuer, a weak acknowledgment token, and a weak assessment marker. In contrast, mm-hm is generally used as a backchannel to signal that the speaker is yielding their conversational turn and allowing the other speaker to maintain control of the conversational floor.
+
+=== Phrasal and substantive backchannels ===
+One of the conversational functions of phrasal backchannels is to assess or appraise a previous utterance. Goodwin argues that this is the case for the phrasal backchannel oh wow, where use of the backchannel requires a specific conversational context where something unexpected or surprising was said. Similarly, more substantive backchannels such as Oh come on, are you serious? require a context where the speaker is responding to something exasperating or frustrating. In both of these cases, Goodwin argues that the backchannels focus only on addressing some aspect of the immediately preceding utterance rather than the larger conversation itself. They can appear both in the middle of extended talk as well as at the end of longer conversational turns.

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+title: "Backchannel (linguistics)"
+chunk: 2/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:37.938749+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Recent research ==
+Research in 2000 has pushed back on the notion of backchannels, in which the listener's role is merely to receive information provided by the speaker. Bavelas, Coates, and Johnson put forth evidence that listeners' responses help shape the content of the speaker's utterances. They grouped acknowledgment tokens into two categories: generic and specific. Generic responses could be considered backchannels and would include mm hm and yeah, while specific responses would involve a reaction to the given content. Examples might include Oh! or a facial display of concern.
+They transcribed students telling a fellow participant about a close call experience that they had had. With one group of participants, they had the listener perform another task to distract them from the story being told. The researchers asked independent reviewers to code the verbal and visual responses of the narration events as generic or specific. They also asked other independent reviewers to gauge the quality of the narration in each case.
+They concluded that the responses from the distracted listeners included significantly fewer specific responses than from the undistracted listeners. In addition, they found that the quality of the narration was dramatically lower when the listener was distracted. Their basic contention was that listeners are co-narrators and help the storyteller in his or her narration. In other words, a storyteller tells a better story with an audience that is engaged than one that is not.
+Tolins and Foxtree have also published research demonstrating how backchannel communication influences speakers. Their research was specifically looking at how speakers respond to generic responses compared to specific responses.
+In 2017, Kyoto University's Graduate program of Informatics began developing a robot to assist individuals, more specifically the elderly, with mental health through the use of attentive listening. They utilized backchannel generation as a method for the robot to have some form of feedback to feel like a real conversation. Further research is being conducted to be more practical.
+In 1997 there was a study on 205,000 telephone utterances that showed 19% of those constituted a "backchannel". This study was a part of a new method of "discourse detection" and "statistical modeling" that allowed them to have such a large sample size, giving the possibility of generalizing this data to larger communities.
+
+== See also ==
+Aizuchi
+Phatic expression
+
+== References ==
+
+== External links ==
+Backchannel Facts by Nigel Ward

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltistics-0.md

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+title: "Baltistics"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltistics"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:39.165843+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Baltistics, also referred to as Baltic studies, is a multidisciplinary study of the language and culture (history, literature, folklore and mythology) of the Baltic nations. Baltistics by its subject splits into Lithuanistics, Latvistics, Prussistics, etc. Special attention is paid to the language studies, especially to the reconstruction of the Proto-Baltic language, which some linguists have argued is the same as the Proto-Balto-Slavic language, while others (V. Toporov, V. Ivanov, V. Mažiulis etc.) have believed that the Proto-Slavic language has formed out of from the Proto-Baltic peripheral-type dialects. 
+Currently there are about 30 centres of Baltistics, most of them based in Europe, the University of Vilnius considered to be the most active centre.
+
+
+== History ==
+
+First signs of researching and comparing of the Baltic languages – Lithuanian and Latvian – were seen in the writings of the grammar creators (Daniel Klein, Grammatica Litvanica 1653, Gotthard Friedrich Stender, Lettische Grammatik 1783). For the first time, scientifically Baltic languages were researched and compared with other Indo-European languages in the 19th century, when Franz Bopp in 1816 laid the ground for comparative linguistics. In his Vergleichende Grammatik, published in 1833, Lithuanian was included. Prussian language was researched by Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann (Die Sprache der alten Preussen an ihren Ueberresten erlaeutert, 1845) and Erich Berneker (Die preussische Sprache, 1896). It was Nesselmann who first suggested the term "Baltic languages".
+From 1718 to 1944, a seminar for the study of the Lithuanian language took place in the University of Königsberg.
+
+
+== Current status ==
+Despite the trend in education since the latter part of the 20th century towards economic rationalism and its impacts on humanities departments, baltistics as a course of study is still offered by a surprising number of universities in the Baltic region and further afield. The majority of universities offering such programs are located in central and northern Europe, with courses offered at an undergraduate level at the University of Greifswald, Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, University of Warsaw in Poland, Masaryk University in the Czech Republic and Stockholm University in Sweden. Some universities also offer individual modules as part of broader programs, for example the Bachelor of Linguistics at the University of Mainz,) Germany, which offers language modules in Lithuanian or Latvian, as part of a Bachelor in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria, or courses for specialists in comparative historical linguistics by the philological department at Moscow State University. In North America, there is an undergraduate Baltic studies program offered by Washington University in St. Louis.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Slavic studies
+Indo-European studies
+Category:Balticists
+Category:Balts
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Gimbutas, Marija (1963). The Balts. London : Thames and Hudson, Ancient peoples and places 33.
+Compiler Adomas Butrimas (2009). „Baltų menas / Art of the Balts“. Vilnius : Vilniaus dailės akademijos leidykla. ISBN 978-9955-854-36-4
+
+
+== External links ==
+Baltic languages | Britannica.com

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrowing_(linguistics)-0.md

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+title: "Borrowing (linguistics)"
+chunk: 1/1
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+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:40.432595+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics, borrowing is a type of language change in which a language or dialect undergoes change as a result of contact with another language or dialect. In typical cases of borrowing, speakers of one language (the "recipient" language) adopt into their own speech a novel linguistic feature that they were exposed to due to its presence in a different language (the "source" or "donor" language).
+
+The most common type of borrowing is for a word that originated in one language to come to be used in another; this is because individual words are relatively superficial components of a language, and a new word can be easily incorporated into the lexicon without disrupting other existing structural features of the recipient language. Words that have been borrowed in this way are known as loanwords. Loanwords often appear in the recipient language in a somewhat different form than they have in the source language, typically undergoing some degree of modification or adaptation in order to fit comfortably into the recipient's phonology and morphology. An alternative to borrowing a loanword directly is the creation of a calque, in which a new word is created using the existing resources of the recipient language by literally translating the morphemes of a word from the source language.
+
+Although individual words are by far the most likely component of language to undergo borrowing, it is possible for other components of linguistic structure to be borrowed, including bound morphemes, syntactic patterns, and even phonemes. Borrowing of elements more abstract than simple vocabulary is especially likely to take place in cases of language shift, when the recipient language replaces the source language as the primary language of a given speech community; when contact between the source and recipient languages is particularly intensive and long-term, as in a Sprachbund, leading to language convergence; or when the borrowing takes place between closely related dialects that are mutually intelligible to each other. The borrowing of features between dialects is the basis of the wave model of language change.
+
+When a word in one language is similar to a word in another, one potential explanation for the similarity is that the word was borrowed by one language from the other, or that both borrowed it from some third source. Loanwords must therefore be carefully distinguished from cognates—i.e., similarities between languages that are the result of shared inheritance from a common ancestor. Unlike cognates, borrowing may take place between languages that are unrelated to each other and have no common origin. When attempting to identify language families and trace their history through the comparative method, loanwords must be identified and excluded from analysis in order to determine whether evidence of shared ancestry exists. 
+Historical linguists occasionally appeal to borrowing to explain apparent exceptions to the regularity of sound change. According to the prevailing Neogrammarian hypothesis, changes in the pronunciation of a phoneme are expected to affect all words containing the phoneme in the appropriate context. However, some apparent exceptions exist: for instance, the earlier phoneme /f/ at the beginning of a word appears to have become /v/ in English vat, vane, and vixen (from Old English fatu, fana, and fyxin respectively), but not in other words beginning with /f/. This apparent irregularity is explained by positing that these words were borrowed into Standard English from a regional dialect in which /f/ did regularly become /v/ (such as West Country English), while other words containing /f/ were not so borrowed.
+
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Classifier constructions in sign languages"
+chunk: 1/5
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:41.729109+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In sign languages, classifier constructions, also known as classifier predicates, are a morphological system expressing events and states. They use handshape classifiers to represent movement, location, and shape. Classifiers differ from signs in their morphology, namely in that signs consist of a single morpheme. Signs are composed of three meaningless phonological features: handshape, location, and movement. Classifiers, on the other hand, consist of many morphemes. Specifically, the handshape, location, and movement are all meaningful on their own. The handshape represents an entity and the hand's movement iconically represents the movement of that entity. The relative location of multiple entities can be represented iconically in two-handed constructions.
+Classifiers share some limited similarities with the gestures of hearing non-signers. Those who do not know the sign language can often guess the meaning of these constructions. This is because they are often iconic (non-arbitrary).  It has also been found that many unrelated sign languages use similar handshapes for specific entities. Children master these constructions by the age of eight or nine. Two-handed classifier constructions have a figure-ground relationship. Specifically, the first classifier represents the background whereas the second one represents the entity in focus. The right hemisphere of the brain is involved in using classifiers. They may also be used creatively for storytelling and poetic purposes. 
+Nancy Frishberg coined the word "classifier" in this context in her 1975 paper on American Sign Language. Various connections have been made to classifiers in spoken languages. Linguists have since debated how best to analyze these constructions. Analyses differ in how much they rely on morphology to explain them. Some have questioned their linguistic status, as well as the very use of the term "classifier". Not much is known about their syntax or phonology.
+
+== Description ==
+In classifier constructions, the handshape is the classifier representing an entity, such as a horse. The signer can represent its movement and/or speed in an iconic fashion. This means that the meaning of the movement can be guessed by its form. A horse jumping over a fence may be represented by having the stationary hand be the fence and the moving hand be the horse. However, not all combinations of handshape and movement are possible. Classifier constructions act as verbs.
+The handshape, movement and relative location in these constructions are meaningful on their own. This is in contrast to two-handed lexical signs, in which the two hands do not contribute to the meaning of the sign on their own. The handshapes in a two-handed classifier construction are signed in a specific order if they represent an entity's location. The first sign usually represents the unmoving ground (for example a surface). The second sign represents the smaller figure in focus (for example a person walking). While the handshape is usually determined by the visual aspects of the entity in question, there are other factors. The way in which the doer interacts with the entity or the entity's movement can also affect the handshape choice. Classifiers also often co-occur with verbs. Not much is known yet about their syntax or phonology.
+Classifier constructions are produced from the perspective of the signer. This means that the addressee must mentally flip the construction horizontally to understand it correctly. For example, if the addressee sees the signer place an object on the right side from the addressee's perspective, it means that they (the addressee) must mentally flip the construction to understand that it was placed on the left side. Native signers seem to be able to do this automatically.
+Two-handed lexical signs are limited in form by two constraints. The Dominance Condition states that the non-dominant hand cannot move and that its handshape comes from a restricted set. The Symmetry Condition states that both hands must have the same handshape, movement and orientation. Classifier constructions, on the other hand, can break both of these restrictions. This further exemplifies the difference in phonology and morphology between lexical signs and classifiers.
+Unlike spoken language, sign languages have two articulators that can move independently. The more active hand is termed the dominant hand whereas the less active hand is non-dominant. The active hand is the same as the signer's dominant hand, although it is possible to switch the hands' role. The two hands allow signers to represent two entities at the same time, although with some limitations. For example, a woman walking past a zigzagging car cannot be signed at the same time. This is because two simultaneous constructions cannot have differing movements; one would have to sign them sequentially.
+
+=== Argument structure ===
+Classifiers constructions may show agreement with various arguments in its domain. In the example below, the handshape agrees with the direct object, using a "thin object" handshape for flowers and a "round object" handshape for apples. Agreement between subject and indirect object is marked with a path movement from the former to the latter. This manner of marking agreement is shared with some lexical signs.
+
+There are also correlations in American Sign Language (ASL) between specific types of classifier constructions and the kind of argument structure they have:
+Predicates with a handling classifier are transitive (with an external and an internal argument)
+Predicates with a whole entity classifier are intransitive unaccusative (one single internal argument)
+Predicates with a body part classifier are intransitive unergative (one single external argument)
+
+=== Classification ===
+There have been many attempts at classifying the types of classifiers. The number of proposed types have ranged from two to seven. Overlap in terminology across the classifications systems can cause confusion. In 1993, Engberg-Pedersen grouped the handshapes used in classifier constructions in four categories:

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+title: "Classifier constructions in sign languages"
+chunk: 2/5
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:41.729109+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Whole entity classifiers: The handshape represents an object. It can also represent a non-physical concept, such as culture. The same object may be represented by multiple handshapes to focus on different aspects of the concept. For example, a CD may be represented by a flat palm or by a rounded C-hand.
+Extension and surface classifiers: The handshape represents the depth or width of an entity. For example, a thin wire, a narrow board or the wide surface of a car's roof. These are not always considered to be classifiers in more recent analyses.
+Handling/instrument classifiers: The handshape represents the hands handling an entity or instrument, such as a knife. They resemble whole entity classifiers, but they semantically imply an agent handling the entity. Just as with whole entity classifiers, the entity in handling classifiers does not have to be a physical object.
+Limb classifiers: The handshape represents limbs such as legs, feet or paws. Unlike other classifier types, these cannot be combined with motion or location morphemes.
+The handshape's movement is grouped similarly:
+
+Location morphemes: Movement represents the location of an entity through a short, downward movement. The entity's orientation can be represented by shifting the hand's orientation.
+Motion morphemes: Movement represents the entity's movement along a path.
+Manner morphemes: Movement represents the manner of motion, but not the path.
+Extension morphemes: Movement does not represent actual motion, but the outline of the entity's shape or perimeter. It can also represent the configuration of multiple similar entities, such as a line of books.
+Whole entity classifiers and handling classifiers are the most established classifier types. The former occur with intransitive verbs, the latter occur with transitive verbs. Most linguists don't consider extension and surface classifiers to be true classifiers. This is because they appear in a larger range of syntactic positions. They also cannot be referred back to anaphorically in the discourse, nor can they be combined with motion verbs.
+Certain types of classifiers and movements cannot be combined for grammatical reasons. For example, in ASL manner of motion cannot be combined with limb classifiers. To indicate a person limping in a circle, one must first sign the manner of motion (limping), then the limb classifiers (the legs).
+There is little research on the differences in classifier constructions across sign languages. Most seem to have them and can be described in similar terms. Many unrelated languages encode the same entity with similar handshapes. This is even the case for children not exposed to language who use a home sign system to communicate. Handling classifiers along with extension and surface classifiers are especially likely to be the same across languages.
+
+=== Relation to gestures ===
+
+Gestures are manual structures that are not as conventionalized as linguistics signs. Hearing non-signers use forms similar to classifiers when asked to communicate through gesture. There is a 70% overlap in how signers and non-signers use movement and location, but only a 25% overlap for handshapes. Non-signers use a greater amount of handshapes, but the signers' have more complex phonology. Non-signers also do not constrain their gestures to a morphological system as with sign language users.
+
+=== Lexicalization ===
+
+Certain classifier constructions may also, over time, lose their general meaning and become fully-fledged signs. This process is referred to as lexicalization. These types of signs are referred to as frozen signs. For example, the ASL sign FALL seems to have come from a classifier construction. This classifier construction consists of a V-shaped hand, which represents the legs, moving down. As it became more like a sign, it could also be used with non-animate referents, like apples or boxes. As a sign, the former classifier construction now conforms to the usual constraints of a word, such as consisting of one syllable. The resulting sign must not be a simple sum of its combined parts, but can have a different meaning entirely. They may serve as the root morpheme that serves as the base for aspectual and derivational affixes. Classifiers cannot take these types of affixes.

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+title: "Classifier constructions in sign languages"
+chunk: 3/5
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:41.729109+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== History ==
+It wasn't until the 1960s that sign languages were being studied seriously. Initially, classifier constructions were not regarded as full linguistic systems. This was due to their high degree of apparent variability and iconicity. Consequently, early analyses described them in terms of visual imagery. Linguists started focusing on proving that sign languages were real languages. They started paying less attention to their iconic properties and more to the way they are organized.
+Nancy Frishberg was the first to use the term "classifier" in her 1975 paper on arbitrariness and iconicity in ASL to refer to the handshape unit used in classifier constructions.
+The start of the study of sign language classifier coincided with a renewed interest in spoken language classifiers. In 1977, Allan performed a survey of classifier systems in spoken languages. He compared classifier constructions to the "predicate classifiers" used in the Athabaskan languages. These are a family of oral indigenous languages spoken throughout North America. Reasons for comparing them included standardizing terminology and proving that sign languages are similar to spoken languages. Allan described predicate classifiers as separate verbal morphemes that denote some salient aspect of the associated noun. However, Adam Schembri pointed out the "terminological confusion" surrounding classifiers. Allan's description and comparison came to draw criticism. Later analyses showed that these predicate classifiers did not constitute separate morphemes. Instead, they were better described as classificatory verbs stems rather than classifiers.
+In 1982, Ted Supalla showed that classifier constructions were part of a complex morphological system in ASL. He split the classifier handshapes into two main categories: semantic classifiers (also called "entity classifiers") and size and shape specifiers (SASSes). SASS categories use handshapes to describe the visual properties of an entity. Entity classifiers are less iconic. they refer to a general semantic class of objects such as "thin and straight" or "flat and round". Handling classifiers would be the third type of classifier to be described. This classifier imitates the hand holding or handling an instrument. A fourth type, the body-part classifier, represents a human or animal body parts, usually the limbs. Linguist adopted and modified Supalla's morphological analysis for other sign languages.
+In the 1990s, a renewed interested in the relation between sign languages and gesture took place. Some linguists, such as Liddell (2000), called the linguistic status of classifier constructions into question, especially the location and movement. There were two reasons for doing so. First, the imitative gestures of non-signers are similar to classifiers. Second, very many types of movement and locations can be used in these constructions. Scott Liddell suggested that it would be more accurate to consider them to be a mixture of linguistic and extra-linguistic elements, such as gesture. Schembri and colleagues similarly suggested in 2005 that classifier constructions are "blends of linguistic and gestural elements". Regardless of the high degree of variability, Schembri and colleagues argue that classifier constructions are still grammatically restrained by various factors. For example, they are more abstract and categorical than the gestural forms made by non-signers. It is now generally accepted that classifiers have both linguistic and gestural properties.
+Similar to Allan, Grinevald also compared sign language classifiers to spoken classifiers in 2000. Specifically, she focused on verbal classifiers, which act as verbal affixes. She lists the following example from Cayuga, an Iroquoian language:
+
+The classifier for the word vehicle in Cayuga, -treht-, is similar to whole entity classifiers in sign languages. Similar examples have been found in Digueño, which has morphemes that act like extension and surface classifiers in sign languages. Both examples are attached to the verb and cannot stand alone. It is now accepted that classifiers in spoken and signed languages are similar, contrary to what was previously believed. They both track references grammatically, can form new words and may emphasize a salient aspect of an entity. The main difference is that sign language only have verbal classifiers. The classifiers systems in spoken languages are more diverse in function and distribution. 
+Despite the many proposed alternative names to the term classifier, and questionable relationship to spoken language classifiers, it continues to be a commonly used term in sign language research.

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+---
+title: "Classifier constructions in sign languages"
+chunk: 4/5
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:41.729109+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Linguistic analyses ==
+There is no consensus on how to analyze classifier constructions. Linguistic analyses can be divided into three major categories: representational, morphological, and lexical. Representational analyses were the first attempt at describing classifiers. This analysis views them as manual representations of movements in the world. Because classifier constructions are highly iconic, representational analyses argue that this form-meaning connection should be the basis for linguistic analysis. This was argued because finite sets of morphemes or parameters cannot account for all potentially meaningful classifier constructions. This view has been criticized because it predicts impossible constructions. For example, in ASL, a walking classifier handshape cannot be used to represent the movement of an animal in the animal noun class, even though it is an iconic representation of the event. 
+Lexical analyses view classifiers as partially-lexicalized words.
+A morphological analysis views classifiers as a series of morphemes, and this is currently the predominant school of thought. In this analyses, classifier verbs are combinations of verbal roots with numerous affixes. If the handshape is taken to consist of several morphemes, it is not clear how they should be segmented or analyzed. For example, the fingertips in Swedish Sign Language can be bent in order to represent the front of a car getting damaged in a crash; this led Supalla to posit that each finger might act as a separate morpheme.  The morphological analysis has been criticized for its complexity. Liddell found that to analyze a classifier construction in ASL where one person walks to another would require anywhere between 14 and 28 morphemes. Other linguists, however, consider the handshape to consist of one, solitary morpheme. In 2003, Schembri stated that there is no convincing evidence that all handshapes are multi-morphemic. This was based on grammaticality judgments from native signers.
+Morphological analyses differ in what aspect of the construction they consider the root. Supalla argued that the morpheme which expresses motion or location is the verbal root to which the handshape morpheme is affixed. Engberg-Pedersen disagreed with Supalla, arguing that the choice of handshape can fundamentally change how the movement is interpreted. Therefore, she claims the movement should be the root. For example, putting a book on a shelf and a cat jumping on a shelf both use the same movement in ASL, despite being fundamentally different acts. Classifiers are affixes, meaning that they cannot occur alone and must be bound. Classifiers on their own are not specified for place of articulation or movement. This might explain why they are bound: this missing information is filled in by the root. 
+Certain classifiers are similar to pronouns. Like pronouns, the signer has to first introduce the referent, usually by signing or fingerspelling the noun. The classifier is then taken to refer to this referent. Signers do not have to re-introduce the same referent in later constructions; it is understood to still refer to the that referent. Some classifiers also denote a specific group the same way that the pronoun "she" can refer to women or waitresses. Similarly, ASL has a classifier which refers to vehicles, but not people or animals. In this view, verbal classifiers may be seen as agreement markers for their referents with the movement as its root.
+
+== Acquisition ==
+The gestures of speaking children sometimes resemble classifier constructions. However, signing children learn these constructions as part of a grammatical system, not as iconic representations of events. Owing to their complexity, it takes a long time to master them. Children do not master the use of classifier constructions until the age of eight or nine. There are many reasons for this relatively late mastery. Children must learn to express different viewpoints correctly, select the correct handshape and order the construction properly. Schick found that the handling classifiers were the most difficult ones to master. This was followed by the extension and surface classifier. The whole entity classifiers had the fewest production errors. Young children prefer to substitute complex classifiers with simpler, more general ones.
+Children start using classifiers at the age of two. These early forms are mostly handling and whole entity classifiers. Simple movements are produced correctly as early as 2.6 years of age. Complex movements, such as arcs, are more difficult for children to express. The acquisition of location in classifier constructions depends on the complexity between the referents and the related spatial locations. Simple extension and surface classifiers are produced correctly at 4.5 years of age. By the age of five to six, children usually select the correct handshape. At age six to seven, children still make mistakes in representing spatial relationships. In signs with a figure-ground relationship, these children will sometimes omit the ground entirely. This could be because mentioning them together requires proper coordination of both hands. Another explanation is that children have more trouble learning optional structures in general. Although mostly mastered, children aged nine still have difficulty understanding the locative relations between classifiers.  
+It is widely accepted that iconicity helps in learning spoken languages, although the picture is less clear for sign languages. Some have argued that iconicity plays no role in acquiring classifier construction. This is claimed because constructions are highly complex and are not mastered until late childhood. Other linguists claim that children as young as three years old can produce adult-like constructions, although only with one hand. Slobin found that children under three years of age seem to "bootstrap" natural gesture to make learning the handshape easier. Most young children do not seem to represent spatial situations iconically. They also do not express complex path movements at once, but rather do so sequentially. In adults, it has been shown that iconicity can help in learning lexical signs.

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+---
+title: "Classifier constructions in sign languages"
+chunk: 5/5
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:41.729109+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Brain structures ==
+As with spoken languages, the left hemisphere of the brain is dominant for sign language production. However, the right hemisphere is superior in some aspects. It is better at processing concrete words, like bed or flower, compared to abstract ones. It is also important in showing spatial relations between entities iconically. It is especially important in using and understanding classifier constructions. Signers with damage to the right hemisphere cannot properly describe items in a room. They can remember the items themselves, but cannot use classifiers to express their location.
+The parietal cortex is activated in both hemispheres when perceiving the spatial location of objects. For spoken languages, describing spatial relationships only engages the left parietal cortex. For sign languages, both the left and right parietal cortex are needed when using classifier constructions. This might explain why people with right hemisphere damage have trouble with expressing these constructions. Namely, they cannot encode external spatial relations and use them while signing.
+In order to use certain classifier constructions, the signer must be able to visualize the entity and its shape, orientation and location. It has been shown that deaf signers are better at generating spatial mental images than hearing non-signers. The spatial memory span of deaf signers is also superior. This is linked to their use of sign language, rather than being deaf. This suggests that using sign language might change the way the brain organizes non-linguistic information.
+
+== Stylistic and creative use ==
+It is possible for a signer to "hold" the non-dominant hand in a classifier construction. This is usually the background. This may serve the function of keeping relevant information present during the conversation. During the hold, the dominant hand might also articulate other signs that are relevant to the first classifier.
+In performative story-telling and poetry, classifiers may also serve creative purposes. Just as in spoken language, skilled language use can indicate eloquence. It has been observed in ASL poetry that skilled signers may combine classifiers and lexical signs. The sign for BAT and DARK are identical in British Sign Language; they're also both articulated at the face. This may be used for poetic effect. For example, likening bats with darkness by using an entity classifier showing a bat flying at the face. Classifiers may also be used in expressively characterizing animals or non-human objects.
+
+== Citations ==
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_hearing_science-0.md

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+---
+title: "Cognitive hearing science"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_hearing_science"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:42.890217+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Cognitive hearing science is an interdisciplinary science field concerned with the physiological and cognitive basis of hearing and its interplay with signal processing in hearing aids. The field includes genetics, physiology, medical and technical audiology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, linguistics and social psychology.
+Theoretically the research in cognitive hearing science combines a physiological model for the information transfer from the outer auditory organ to the auditory cerebral cortex, and a cognitive model for how language comprehension is influenced by the interplay between the incoming language signal and the individual's cognitive skills, especially the long-term memory and the working memory.
+Researchers examine the interplay between type of hearing impairment or deafness, type of signal processing in different hearing aids, type of listening environment and the individual's cognitive skills.
+Research in cognitive hearing science has importance for the knowledge about different types of hearing impairment and its effects, as for the possibilities to determine which individuals can make use of certain type of signal processing in hearing aid or cochlear implant and thereby adapt hearing aid to the individual.
+Cognitive hearing science has been introduced by researchers at the Linköping University research centre Linnaeus Centre HEAD (HEaring And Deafness) in Sweden, created in 2008 with a major 10-year grant from the Swedish Research Council.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Resources ==
+Linnaeus Centre HEAD
+Interview, prof. Jerker Rönnberg

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+---
+title: "Communicative dynamism"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_dynamism"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:44.104609+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics, Communicative Dynamism (CD) is one of the key notions of the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), developed mainly by Jan Firbas and his followers in the Prague School of Linguistics.
+CD is canonically described as "a phenomenon constantly displayed by linguistic elements in the act of communication. It is an inherent quality of communication and manifests itself in constant development towards the attainment of a communicative goal; in other words, towards the fulfilment of a communicative purpose."
+Extensive research in FSP has established that Communicative Dynamism is a matter of degree:
+
+"Entering into the flow of communication, the meaning conveyed by a linguistic element acquires the character of information and participates in the development of the communication and in the fulfilment of the communicative purpose. If unhampered by other factors, linear modification produces the following effect. The closer to the end of the sentence an element comes to stand, the greater the extent to which it contributes towards the development and completion of the communication. Whereas the element occurring finally contributes most to this development, the element occurring initially contributes least to it. Elements occurring neither at the beginning nor at the end rank between the two. In this way, the element occurring finally proves to be the most dynamic element within the sentence, for it completes the development of the communication; it is the element towards which the communication is perspectived. The element occurring initially is the least dynamic. The other elements rank between them. In regard to the dynamics of the communication, all elements display different degrees of communicative dynamism (CD)."
+
+The notion of Communicative Dynamism was introduced into linguistics by Jan Firbas in 1956 in a study called Poznámky k problematice anglického slovního pořádku s hlediska aktuálního členění větného [Some notes on the problem of English word order from the point of view of functional sentence perspective].
+Today, the term is firmly established in major academic grammars, as well as in general reference works on language and linguistics:
+
+"Communicative dynamism refers to the variation of communicative value as between different parts of an utterance."
+"communicative dynamism: variation in the importance or prominence of different parts of an utterance in conveying communication."
+
+
+== See also ==
+Topic and comment
+Functional linguistics
+
+
+== Further resources ==
+Libuše Dušková, "Basic distribution of communicative dynamism vs. nonlinear indication of functional sentence perspective" IN Eva Hajičová, Tomáš Hoskovec, Oldřich Leška, Petr Sgall and Zdena Skoumalová (eds): Prague Linguistic Circle Papers - Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague nouvelle série (3), Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999, pp. 249–261. https://doi.org/10.1075/plcp.3
+Libuše Dušková, "Deviations from the basic distribution of communicative dynamism as a style marker", Brno Studies in English 41(1), 2015, pp. 29–40. https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/134762/1_BrnoStudiesEnglish_41-2015-1_4.pdf
+Jan Firbas, "On the concept of communicative dynamism in the theory of functional sentence perspective’, Sborník prací Filozofické fakulty brněnské univerzity A19, 1971, pp. 135–144. https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/100731/A_Linguistica_19-1971-1_14.pdf
+Jan Firbas, "Die Träger des kommunikativen Dynamismus" [Carriers of communicative dynamism] IN Günter Weise (ed.): Kommunikativ-funktionale Sprachbetrachtung 1, Halle an der Saale: Martin-Luther-Universität, 1981, pp. 80–86.
+Jan Firbas, "On the operation of communicative dynamism in functional sentence perspective", Leuvense Bijdragen 76, 1987, pp. 289–304.
+Jan Firbas, Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511597817
+Jan Firbas, "Communicative Dynamism" IN Handbook of Pragmatics, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.5.comm4
+Aleš Svoboda, Kapitoly z funkční syntaxe [Chapters from functional syntax], Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1989.
+Ludmila Uhlířová and Aleš Svoboda, "DISTRIBUČNÍ POLE" [Distributional field]  IN Petr Karlík, Marek Nekula and Jana Pleskalová (eds): CzechEncy - Nový encyklopedický slovník češtiny, online, 2017. https://www.czechency.org/slovnik/DISTRIBU%C4%8CN%C3%8D%20POLE (accessed: 25 March 2021)
+Ludmila Uhlířová and Aleš Svoboda, "STUPNICE VÝPOVĚDNÍ DYNAMIČNOSTI" [Scale of communicative dynamism] IN Petr Karlík, Marek Nekula and Jana Pleskalová (eds): CzechEncy - Nový encyklopedický slovník češtiny, online, 2017. https://www.czechency.org/slovnik/STUPNICE%20V%C3%9DPOV%C4%9ADN%C3%8D%20DYNAMI%C4%8CNOSTI (accessed: 25 March 2021)
+Ludmila Uhlířová and Aleš Svoboda, "VÝPOVĚDNÍ DYNAMIČNOST" [Communicative dynamism] IN Petr Karlík, Marek Nekula and Jana Pleskalová (eds): CzechEncy - Nový encyklopedický slovník češtiny, online, 2017. https://www.czechency.org/slovnik/V%C3%9DPOV%C4%9ADN%C3%8D%20DYNAMI%C4%8CNOST (accessed: 25 March 2021)
+
+
+== Notes ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence-0.md

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+---
+title: "Conditional sentence"
+chunk: 1/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:45.430713+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+A conditional sentence is a sentence in a natural language that expresses that one thing is contingent on another, e.g., "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the sentence’s main clause is conditional on a subordinate clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: the subordinate clause, called the antecedent (or protasis or if-clause), which expresses the condition, and the main clause, called the consequent (or apodosis or then-clause) expressing the result.
+To form conditional sentences, languages use a variety of grammatical forms and constructions. The forms of verbs used in the antecedent and consequent are often subject to particular rules as regards their tense, aspect, and mood. Many languages have a specialized type of verb form called the conditional mood – broadly equivalent in meaning to the English "would (do something)" – for use in some types of conditional sentences.
+
+== Types of conditional sentence ==
+There are various ways of classifying conditional sentences. Many of these categories are visible cross-linguistically.
+
+=== Implicative and predictive ===
+
+A conditional sentence expressing an implication (also called a factual conditional sentence) essentially states that if one fact holds, then so does another. (If the sentence is not a declarative sentence, then the consequence may be expressed as an order or a question rather than a statement.) The facts are usually stated in whatever grammatical tense is appropriate to them; there are not normally special tense or mood patterns for this type of conditional sentence. Such sentences may be used to express a certainty, a universal statement, a law of science, etc. (in these cases if may often be replaced by when):
+
+If you heat water to 100 degrees Celsius (° C), it boils.
+If the sea is stormy, the waves are high.
+They can also be used for logical deductions about particular circumstances (which can be in various mixtures of past, present, and future):
+
+If it's raining here now, then it was raining on the West Coast this morning.
+If it's raining now, then your laundry is getting wet.
+If it's raining now, there will be mushrooms to be picked next week.
+If he locked the door, then Kitty is trapped inside.
+A predictive conditional sentence concerns a situation dependent on a hypothetical (but entirely possible) future event. The consequence is normally also a statement about the future, although it may also be a consequent statement about present or past time (or a question or order).
+
+If I become President, I'll lower taxes.
+If it rains this afternoon, everybody will stay home.
+If it rains this afternoon, then yesterday's weather forecast was wrong.
+If it rains this afternoon, your garden party is doomed.
+What will you do if he invites you?
+If you see them, shoot!
+
+=== Indicative and counterfactual ===
+
+One of the most discussed distinctions among conditionals is that between indicative and counterfactual conditionals, exemplified by the following English examples:
+
+Indicative conditional: If Sally owns a donkey, then she beats it.
+Simple past counterfactual: If Sally owned a donkey, she would beat it.
+These conditionals differ in both form and meaning. The indicative conditional uses the present tense forms "owns" and "beats" and therefore conveys that the speaker is agnostic about whether Sally in fact owns a donkey. The counterfactual example uses the fake tense form "owned" in the "if" clause and the past-inflected modal "would" in the "then" clause. As a result, it conveys that Sally does not in fact own a donkey. Similar contrasts are common crosslinguistically, though the specific morphological marking varies from language to language.
+Linguists and philosophers of language sometimes avoid the term counterfactuals because not all examples express counterfactual meanings. For instance, the "Anderson Case" has the characteristic grammatical form of a counterfactual conditional, but is in fact used as part of an argument for the truth of its antecedent.
+
+Anderson Case: If Jones had taken arsenic, he would have shown just exactly those symptoms which he does in fact show.
+The term subjunctive conditional has been used as a replacement, though it is also acknowledged as a misnomer. Many languages do not have a subjunctive (e.g., Danish and Dutch), and many that do have it don’t use it for this sort of conditional (e.g., French, Swahili, all Indo-Aryan languages that have a subjunctive). Moreover, languages that do use the subjunctive for such conditionals only do so if they have a specific past subjunctive form. The term X-Marked has been used as a replacement, with indicative conditionals renamed as O-Marked conditionals.
+
+=== Speech act conditionals ===
+Biscuit conditionals (also known as relevance or speech act conditionals) are conditionals where the truth of the consequent does not depend on the truth of the antecedent.
+
+There are biscuits on the table if you want some.
+If you need anything, my name is Joshua.
+If I may be honest, you're not looking good
+In metalinguistic conditionals, the antecedent qualifies the usage of some term. For instance, in the following example, the speaker has unconditionally asserted that they saw the relevant person, whether or not that person should really be called their ex-husband.
+
+I saw my ex-husband, if that's the right word for him.
+
+=== Non-declarative conditionals ===
+In conditional questions, the antecedent qualifies a question asked in the consequent.
+
+If Mary comes to the party, will Katherine come too?
+If Angel forgets her guitar, what will we do?
+In conditional imperatives, the antecedent qualifies a command given in the consequent.
+
+If you are at an intersection, turn right!
+
+== Crosslinguistic variation ==
+Languages have different rules concerning the grammatical structure of conditional sentences. These may concern the syntactic structure of the antecedent and consequent clauses, as well as the forms of verbs used in them (particularly their tense and mood). Rules for English and certain other languages are described below; more information can be found in the articles on the grammars of individual languages. (Some languages are also described in the article on the conditional mood.)

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+---
+title: "Conditional sentence"
+chunk: 2/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:45.430713+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Latin ===
+
+Conditional sentences in Latin are traditionally classified into three categories, based on grammatical structure.
+
+simple conditions (factual or logical implications)
+present tense [if present indicative then indicative]
+sī valēs, gaudeo "if you are well, I am glad"
+past tense [if perfect indicative then indicative]
+sī peccāvī, īnsciēns fēcī "if I did wrong, I did so unwittingly"
+2nd person generalisations [if present or perfect subjunctive then indicative]
+memoria minuitur, nisi eam exerceās "memory gets weaker, if you don't exercise it"
+future conditions
+"future more vivid" [if future or future perfect indicative then future indicative]
+haec sī attulerīs, cēnābis bene "if you bring (literally "will have brought") these things, you will dine well"
+"future less vivid" [if present or perfect subjunctive then present subjunctive]
+sī negem, mentiar "if I were to deny it, I would be lying"
+counterfactual conditions
+"present contrary-to-fact" [if imperfect subjunctive then imperfect subjunctive]
+scrīberem plūra, sī Rōmae essēs "I would write more, if you were in Rome"
+"past contrary-to-fact" [if pluperfect subjunctive then pluperfect subjunctive]
+sī Rōmae fuissem, tē vīdissem "if I had been in Rome, I would have seen you"
+
+=== French ===
+In French, the conjunction corresponding to "if" is si. The use of tenses is quite similar to English:
+
+In implicative conditional sentences, the present tense (or other appropriate tense, mood, etc.) is used in both clauses.
+In predictive conditional sentences, the future tense or imperative generally appears in the main clause, but the condition clause is formed with the present tense (as in English). This contrasts with subordinate clauses introduced by certain other conjunctions, such as quand ("when"), where French uses the future (while English has the present).
+In counterfactual conditional sentences, the imperfect is used to express the condition (where English similarly uses the past tense). The main clause contains the conditional mood (e.g. j'arriverais, "I would arrive").
+In counterfactual conditional sentences with a past time frame, the condition is expressed using the pluperfect e.g. (s'il avait attendu, "if he had waited"), and the consequence with the conditional perfect (e.g. je l'aurais vu, "I would have seen him"). Again these verb forms parallel those used in English.
+As in English, certain mixtures and variations of these patterns are possible. See also French verbs.
+
+=== Italian ===
+Italian uses the following patterns (the equivalent of "if" is se):
+
+Present tense (or other as appropriate) in both parts of an implicative conditional.
+Future tense in both parts of a predictive conditional sentence (the future is not replaced with the present in condition clauses as in English or French).
+In a counterfactual conditional, the imperfect subjunctive is used for the condition, and the conditional mood for the main clause. A more informal equivalent is to use the imperfect indicative in both parts.
+In a counterfactual conditional with past time frame, the pluperfect subjunctive is used for the condition, and the past conditional (conditional perfect) for the main clause.
+See also Italian verbs.
+
+=== Slavic languages ===
+In Slavic languages, such as Russian, clauses in conditional sentences generally appear in their natural tense (future tense for future reference, etc.) However, for counterfactuals, a conditional/subjunctive marker such as the Russian бы (by) generally appears in both condition and consequent clauses, and this normally accompanies the past tense form of the verb.
+See Russian grammar, Bulgarian grammar, etc. for more detail.
+
+== Logic ==
+While the material conditional operator used in classical logic is sometimes read aloud in the form of a conditional sentence, the intuitive interpretation of conditional statements in natural language does not always correspond to it. Thus, philosophical logicians and formal semanticists have developed a wide variety of conditional logics that better match actual conditional language and conditional reasoning. They include the strict conditional and the variably strict conditional.
+
+== See also ==
+Anankastic conditional
+Conditional mood
+Modality
+Propositional attitude
+
+== References ==
+
+== External links ==
+Latin Conditionals
+Conditional Sentences in English Grammar

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+title: "Constructed language"
+chunk: 1/5
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:46.805051+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+A constructed language is a language for communication between humans (i.e. not with or between computers) which, unlike most languages that naturally emerge from human interaction, is intentionally devised by a person or group for a particular purpose. The term constructed language is often shortened to conlang and, as a relatively broad term, it encompasses subcategories including: fictional, artificial, engineered, planned and invented languages. Conlangs may include aspects reminiscent of natural language including phonology, grammar, orthography, and vocabulary. Interlinguistics includes the study of constructed languages.
+
+== History ==
+
+=== Ancient linguistic experiments ===
+Grammatical speculation dates from classical antiquity; for instance, it appears in Plato's Cratylus in Hermogenes's contention that words are not inherently linked to what they refer to; that people apply "a piece of their own voice [...] to the thing".
+Athenaeus tells the story of two figures, Dionysius of Sicily and Alexarchus:
+
+Dionysius of Sicily created neologisms like menandros 'virgin' (from menei 'waiting' and andra 'husband') for standard Greek parthenos; menekratēs 'pillar' (from menei 'it remains in one place' and kratei 'it is strong') for standard stulos; and ballantion 'javelin' (from balletai enantion 'thrown against someone') for standard akon.
+Alexarchus of Macedon, the brother of King Cassander of Macedon, was the founder of the city of Ouranopolis. Athenaeus recounts a story told by Heraclides of Lembos that Alexarchus "introduced a peculiar vocabulary, referring to a rooster as a 'dawn-crier', a barber as a 'mortal-shaver', a drachma as 'worked silver', [...] and a herald as an aputēs [from ēputa 'loud-voiced']. [...] He [Alexarchus] once wrote something [...] to the public authorities in Casandreia. [...] As for what this letter says, in my opinion not even the Pythian god could make sense of it."
+While the mechanisms of grammar suggested by classical philosophers were designed to explain existing languages (Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit), they were not used to construct new grammars. Roughly contemporary to Plato, in his descriptive grammar of Sanskrit, Pāṇini constructed a set of rules for explaining language, so that the text of his grammar may be considered a mixture of natural and constructed language.
+
+=== Early constructed languages ===
+
+A legend recorded in the seventh-century Irish work Auraicept na n-Éces claims that Fénius Farsaid visited Shinar after the confusion of tongues, and he and his scholars studied the various languages for ten years, taking the best features of each to create in Bérla tóbaide 'the selected language', which he named Goídelc –  the Irish language. This appears to be the first mention of the concept of a constructed language in literature.
+The earliest non-natural languages were considered less "constructed" than "super-natural", mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota, recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen, is an example, and apparently the first entirely artificial language. It is a form of private mystical cant (see also Enochian). An important example from Middle-Eastern culture is Balaibalan, invented in the 16th century. Kabbalistic grammatical speculation was directed at recovering the original language spoken by Adam and Eve in Paradise, lost in the confusion of tongues. The first Christian project for an ideal language is outlined in Dante Alighieri's De vulgari eloquentia, where he searches for the ideal Italian vernacular suited for literature. Ramon Llull's Ars Magna was a project of a perfect language with which the infidels could be convinced of the truth of the Christian faith. It was basically an application of combinatorics on a given set of concepts. During the Renaissance, Lullian and Kabbalistic ideas were drawn upon in a magical context, resulting in cryptographic applications.
+
+=== Perfecting language ===
+Renaissance interest in Ancient Egypt, notably the discovery of the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, and first encounters with the Chinese script directed efforts towards a perfect written language. Johannes Trithemius, in Steganographia and Polygraphia, attempted to show how all languages can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical languages was continued by the Rosicrucians and alchemists (like John Dee and his Enochian). Jakob Boehme in 1623 spoke of a "natural language" (German: Natursprache) of the senses.
+Musical languages from the Renaissance were often tied up with mysticism, magic and alchemy, sometimes also referred to as the language of the birds. A non-mystic musical language was Solresol.
+
+=== 17th and 18th century: advent of philosophical languages ===
+The 17th century saw the rise of projects for "philosophical" or "a priori" languages, such as:

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+title: "Constructed language"
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+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:46.805051+00:00"
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+---
+
+Francis Lodwick's A Common Writing (1647) and The Groundwork or Foundation laid (or So Intended) for the Framing of a New Perfect Language and a Universal Common Writing (1652)
+Sir Thomas Urquhart's Ekskybalauron (1651) and Logopandecteision (1652)
+George Dalgarno's Ars signorum, 1661
+John Wilkins' An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language, 1668
+These early taxonomic constructed languages produced systems of hierarchical classification that were intended to result in both spoken and written expression. Leibniz had a similar purpose for his lingua generalis of 1678, aiming at a lexicon of characters upon which the user might perform calculations that would yield true propositions automatically, as a side-effect developing binary calculus. These projects were not only occupied with reducing or modelling grammar, but also with the arrangement of all human knowledge into "characters" or hierarchies, an idea that with the Enlightenment would ultimately lead to the Encyclopédie. Many of these 17th–18th century languages were pasigraphies, or purely written languages with no spoken form or a spoken form that would vary greatly according to the native language of the reader.
+Leibniz and the encyclopedists realized that it is impossible to organize human knowledge unequivocally in a tree diagram, and consequently to construct an a priori language based on such a classification of concepts. Under the entry Charactère, D'Alembert critically reviewed the projects of philosophical languages of the preceding century. After the Encyclopédie, projects for a priori languages moved more and more to the lunatic fringe. Individual authors, typically unaware of the history of the idea, continued to propose taxonomic philosophical languages until the early 20th century (e.g. Ro), but most recent engineered languages have had more modest goals; some are limited to a specific field, like mathematical formalism or calculus (e.g. Lincos and programming languages), others are designed for eliminating syntactical ambiguity (e.g., Loglan and Lojban) or maximizing conciseness (e.g., Ithkuil).
+
+=== 19th and 20th centuries: auxiliary languages ===
+
+Already in the Encyclopédie attention began to focus on a posteriori auxiliary languages. Joachim Faiguet de Villeneuve in the article on Langue wrote a short proposition of a "laconic" or regularized grammar of French. During the 19th century, a bewildering variety of such International Auxiliary Languages (IALs) were proposed, so that Louis Couturat and Léopold Leau in Histoire de la langue universelle (1903) reviewed 38 projects.
+The first of these that made any international impact was Volapük, proposed in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer; within a decade, 283 Volapükist clubs were counted all over the globe. However, disagreements between Schleyer and some prominent users of the language led to schism, and by the mid-1890s it fell into obscurity, making way for Esperanto, proposed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, and its descendants. Interlingua, the most recent auxlang to gain a significant number of speakers, emerged in 1951, when the International Auxiliary Language Association published its Interlingua–English Dictionary and an accompanying grammar. The success of Esperanto did not stop others from trying to construct new auxiliary languages, such as Leslie Jones' Eurolengo, which mixes elements of English and Spanish.
+Loglan (1955) and its descendants constitute a pragmatic return to the aims of the a priori languages, tempered by the requirement of usability of an auxiliary language. Thus far, these modern a priori languages have garnered only small groups of speakers.
+Robot Interaction Language (2010) is a spoken language that is optimized for communication between machines and humans. The major goals of ROILA are that it should be easily learnable by the human user, and optimized for efficient recognition by computer speech recognition algorithms.
+
+== Categorization ==
+
+=== By purpose ===
+Most constructed languages can be divided by purpose:
+
+Engineered language (engelang), further subdivided into logical language (loglang), philosophical language and experimental language, devised for experimentation in logic, philosophy, or linguistics
+International auxiliary language (auxlang or IAL), devised for interlinguistic or international communication
+Artistic language (artlang), devised to create aesthetic pleasure or humorous effect, including sub-categories such as secret languages, joke languages, and mystical languages
+The boundaries between these categories are by no means clear, and a language could fall into more than one category. A logical language created for aesthetic reasons would also be classifiable as an artistic language. One created with philosophical motives could also be used as an auxiliary language.
+
+=== A priori and a posteriori ===
+An a priori constructed language is one with features not based on an existing language, and an a posteriori language is the opposite. This categorization, however, is not absolute, as many constructed languages may be called a priori when considering some linguistic factors, and at the same time a posteriori when considering other factors.
+An a priori language has features that are invented or elaborated to work differently or to allude to different purposes. Some a priori languages are designed to be international auxiliary languages that remove what could be considered an unfair learning advantage for native speakers of a source language that would otherwise exist for a posteriori languages. Others, known as philosophical or taxonomic languages, try to categorize their vocabulary, either to express an underlying philosophy or to make it easier to recognize new vocabulary. Finally, many artistic languages, created for either personal use or for use in a fictional medium, employ consciously constructed grammars and vocabularies, and are best understood as a priori. Examples include:

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+title: "Constructed language"
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+category: "reference"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:46.805051+00:00"
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+---
+
+International auxiliary
+Balaibalan, attributed to Fazlallah Astarabadi or Muhyi Gulshani (14th century)
+Solresol by François Sudre (1827)
+Ro by Edward Foster (1906)
+Sona by Kenneth Searight (1935)
+Babm by Rikichi Okamoto (1962)
+aUI by W. John Weilgart (1962)
+Mirad (aka Unilingua) by Noubar Agopoff (1966)
+Kotava by Staren Fetcey (1978)
+Experimental
+Láadan by Suzette Haden Elgin (1982)
+Ithkuil by John Quijada (2004)
+Artistic
+Quenya and Sindarin by J. R. R. Tolkien for his legendarium (first published with The Hobbit, 1937)
+Klingon by Marc Okrand for the science-fiction franchise Star Trek (1985)
+Kēlen by Sylvia Sotomayor (1998)
+Naʼvi by Paul Frommer for the movie Avatar (2009)
+Dothraki and Valyrian by David Peterson for the television series Game of Thrones (2011)
+Kiliki by Madhan Karky for the Baahubali films (2015)
+Community
+Damin (Yangkaal and Lardil people, 19th century or earlier)
+Eskayan (Eskaya, c. 1920)
+Medefaidrin (Ibibio, 1930s)
+Palawa kani (Palawa, 1990s)
+An a posteriori language (from Latin meaning "from the latter"), according to French linguist Louis Couturat, is any constructed language whose elements are borrowed from or based on existing languages. The term can also be extended to controlled language, and is most commonly used to refer to vocabulary despite other features. Likewise, zonal auxiliary languages (auxiliary languages for speakers of a particular language family) are a posteriori by definition.
+While most auxiliary languages are a posteriori due to their intended function as a medium of communication, many artistic languages are fully a posteriori in design –  many for the purposes of alternate history. In distinguishing whether the language is a priori or a posteriori, the prevalence and distribution of respectable traits is often the key.
+Examples of a posteriori languages:
+
+Artistic
+Talossan (Romance) by Robert Ben Madison for micronation Kingdom of Talossa (1980)
+Brithenig (Latin and Welsh) by Andrew Smith (1996)
+Atlantean (Indo-European) by Marc Okrand for the film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
+Toki Pona (various including English) by Sonja Lang (2001)
+Wenedyk (Latin and Polish) by Jan van Steenbergen (2002)
+Trigedasleng (English) by David Peterson for the TV series The 100 (2014)
+Controlled auxiliary
+Latino sine flexione (Latin, 1911)
+Basic English (English, 1925)
+N'Ko (Manding, 1949)
+Learning English (English, 1959)
+Kitara (SW Ugandan Bantu, 1990)
+Globish (English, 2004)
+International auxiliary
+(1868) Universalglot
+(1879) Volapük
+(1885) Pasilingua
+(1887) Esperanto
+(1888) Mundolinco
+(1902) Idiom Neutral
+(1907) Ido
+(1912) Reform-Neutral
+(1922) Interlingue
+(1928) Novial
+(1937) Esperanto II
+(c. 1943) Mondial
+(1951) Interlingua
+(1961) Neo
+(1970) Afrihili
+(c. 1979) Glosa
+(1986) Uropi
+(1991) Romániço
+(1998) Lingua Franca Nova
+(2007) Sambahsa
+(2010) Lingwa de planeta
+Zonal auxiliary
+
+Efatese (c. Vanuatu Oceanic, 19th century)
+Romanid (Romance, 1956)
+Palawa kani (Aboriginal Australian, 1992)
+Folkspraak (Germanic, 1995)
+Budinos (Finno-Ugric, 2000s)
+Neolatino Romance (Romance, 2006)
+Interslavic (Slavic, 2011)
+
+=== Sensitivity ===
+The term planned language is sometimes used to classify an international auxiliary language since the common alternative, artificial, may be perceived as pejorative. Outside Esperanto culture, the term language planning means the prescriptions given to a natural language to standardize it; in this regard, even a "natural language" may be artificial in some respects, meaning some of its words have been crafted by conscious decision. Prescriptive grammars, which date to ancient times for classical languages such as Latin and Sanskrit, are rule-based codifications of natural languages, such codifications being a middle ground between naïve natural selection and development of language and its explicit construction. The term glossopoeia is also used to mean language construction, particularly construction of artistic languages.
+Classifications are used differently by tradition. For example, few speakers of Interlingua consider their language artificial, since they assert that it has no invented content. Interlingua's vocabulary is taken from a small set of natural languages, and its grammar is based closely on these source languages, even including some degree of irregularity. Its proponents prefer to describe its vocabulary and grammar as standardized rather than artificial or constructed. Similarly, Latino sine flexione (LsF) is a simplification of Latin from which the inflections have been removed. As with Interlingua, some prefer to describe its development as planning rather than constructing. Some speakers of Esperanto and Esperantidos also avoid the term artificial language because they deny that there is anything unnatural about it.
+
+=== Accuracy ===
+Some argue that all human language is artificial, not natural. François Rabelais's fictional giant Pantagruel said: "C'est abus dire qu'ayons langage naturel. Les langages sont par institutions arbitraires et convenances des peuples : les voix, comme disent les dialecticiens, ne signifient naturellement, mais à plaisir." (transl. "It is a misuse of terms to say that we have natural language; languages exist through arbitrary institutions and the conventions of peoples. Voices, as the dialecticians say, don't signify naturally, but capriciously.")
+
+=== Naturalistic ===
+Fictional or experimental languages can be considered naturalistic if they model real world languages. For example, if a naturalistic language is derived a posteriori from another language (real or constructed), it should imitate natural processes of phonological, lexical, and grammatical change. In contrast with languages such as Interlingua, naturalistic fictional languages are not usually intended for easy learning or communication. Thus, naturalistic fictional languages tend to be more difficult and complex. While Interlingua has simpler grammar, syntax, and orthography than its source languages (though more complex and irregular than Esperanto or its descendants), naturalistic fictional languages typically mimic behaviors of natural languages like irregular verbs and nouns, and complicated phonological processes.

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+title: "Constructed language"
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+---
+
+== Rationale ==
+Reasons to create a constructed language include: to ease human communication; to give fiction or an associated constructed setting an added layer of realism; for experimentation in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning; for artistic creation; for fantasy role-playing games; and for language games. Some people may also make constructed languages as a hobby, or in connection to worldbuilding.
+A famous but disputed Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is sometimes cited which claims that the language one speaks influences the way one thinks. Thus, a better language should allow the speaker to think better –  more clearly or intelligently or to encompass more points of view. This was the intention of Suzette Haden Elgin in creating Láadan, a feminist language embodied in her feminist science fiction series Native Tongue. Constructed languages have been included in standardized tests such as the SAT, where they were used to test the applicant's ability to infer and apply grammatical rules. By the same token, a constructed language might also be used to restrict thought, as in George Orwell's Newspeak, or to simplify thought, as in Toki Pona. However, linguists such as Steven Pinker argue that ideas exist independently of language. For example, in the book The Language Instinct, Pinker states that children spontaneously re-invent slang and even grammar with each generation. These linguists argue that attempts to control the range of human thought through the reform of language would fail, as concepts like "freedom" will reappear in new words if the old words vanish.
+Proponents claim a particular language makes it easier to express and understand concepts in one area, and more difficult in others. An example can be taken from the way various programming languages make it easier to write certain kinds of programs and harder to write others.
+Another reason cited for using a constructed language is the telescope rule, which claims that it takes less time to first learn a simple constructed language and then a natural language, than to learn only a natural language. Thus, if someone wants to learn English, some suggest learning Basic English first. Constructed languages like Esperanto and Interlingua are in fact often simpler due to the typical lack of irregular verbs and other grammatical quirks. Some studies have found that learning Esperanto helps in learning a non-constructed language later (see propaedeutic value of Esperanto).
+
+== Development ==
+Most modern developers, called conlangers, create constructed languages as a hobby, for a fictional work, or for personal fulfillment. Conlangers typically create languages by defining their language's phonology, syntax, grammar, and other properties. Doing so requires at least a rudimentary understanding of linguistics.
+Various papers on constructed languages were published from the 1970s through the 1990s, such as Glossopoeic Quarterly, Taboo Jadoo, and The Journal of Planned Languages.
+The Conlang Mailing List was founded in 1991, and later split off an AUXLANG mailing list dedicated to international auxiliary languages. In the early to mid-1990s, a few constructed language-related zines were published as email or websites, such as Vortpunoj and Model Languages. The Conlang Mailing List has developed a community of conlangers with its own customs, such as translation challenges and translation relays, and its own terminology. Sarah Higley reports from results of her surveys that the demographics of the Conlang list are primarily men from North America and western Europe, with a smaller number from Oceania, Asia, the Middle East, and South America, with an age range from 13 to over 60; the number of women participating has increased over time.
+Later online communities include the Zompist Bulletin Board (ZBB; since 2001) and the Conlanger Bulletin Board. Discussion on these forums includes presentation of members' constructed languages and feedback from other members, discussion of natural languages, whether particular features of constructed languages have natural language precedents, and how interesting features of natural languages can be repurposed for constructed languages, posting of interesting short texts as translation challenges, and meta-discussion about the philosophy of developing constructed languages, conlangers' purposes, and whether the creation of constructed languages is an art or a hobby. Another 2001 survey by Patrick Jarrett showed an average age of 30.65, with the average time since starting to invent languages 11.83 years. A more recent thread on the ZBB showed that many conlangers spend a relatively small amount of time on any one language, moving from one project to another; about a third spend years on developing the same language.
+One constraint on a constructed language is that if it was constructed to be a natural language for use by fictional characters, as with Dothraki and High Valyrian in the Game of Thrones series, the language should be easily pronounced by actors, and should fit with and incorporate any fragments of the language already invented by the book's author, and preferably also fit with any personal names of fictional speakers of the language.
+
+== Organic change ==
+When a constructed language has a community of speakers, especially a large population, it tends to evolve and hence loses its constructed nature. For example, Modern Hebrew and its pronunciation norms were developed from existing traditions of Hebrew, such as Mishnaic Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew following a general Sephardic pronunciation, rather than engineered from scratch, and has undergone considerable changes since the state of Israel was founded in 1948. However, linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that Modern Hebrew, which he terms "Israeli", is a Semito-European hybrid based not only on Hebrew but also on Yiddish and other languages spoken by revivalists. Zuckermann therefore endorses the translation of the Hebrew Bible into what he calls "Israeli". Esperanto as a living spoken language has evolved significantly from the prescriptive blueprint published in 1887, so that modern editions of the Fundamenta Krestomatio, a 1903 collection of early texts in the language, require many footnotes on the syntactic and lexical differences between early and modern Esperanto.

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+title: "Constructed language"
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+---
+
+== Acceptance ==
+Proficient speakers of constructed languages are few and far between. For example, the Hungarian census of 2011 found 8,397 speakers of Esperanto, and the census of 2001 found 10 of Romanid, two each of Interlingua and Ido and one each of Idiom Neutral and Mundolinco. The Russian census of 2010 found that in Russia there were about 992 speakers of Esperanto (the 120th most common) and nine of the Esperantido Ido.
+According to Ethnologue, there are 200–2000 who speak Esperanto as a first language.
+d'Armond Speers, a member of the Klingon Language Institute, attempted to raise his son as bilingual, using both English and the constructed Klingon language.
+
+== Identification codes ==
+Codes for constructed languages include the ISO 639-2 art for constructed languages; however, some constructed languages have their own ISO 639 language codes (e.g. eo and epo for Esperanto, jbo for Lojban, ia and ina for Interlingua, tlh for Klingon, io and ido for Ido, lfn for Lingua Franca Nova, and tok for Toki Pona).
+
+== Ownership ==
+The matter of whether a constructed language can be owned or protected by intellectual property laws, or if it would even be possible to enforce those laws, is contentious.
+In a 2015 lawsuit, CBS and Paramount Pictures challenged a fan film project called Axanar, stating the project infringed upon their intellectual property, which included the Klingon language, among other creative elements. During the controversy, Marc Okrand, the language's original designer expressed doubt as to whether Paramount's claims of ownership were valid. The Language Creation Society submitted an amicus curiae brief claiming that the Klingon language itself is not copyrightable under section 102(b) of the Copyright Act of 1976, as it is "a procedure, process, or system for communication," rather than an expression of an idea.
+David J. Peterson, who created multiple well-known constructed languages including the Valyrian languages and Dothraki, advocated a similar opinion, saying that "Theoretically, anyone can publish anything using any language I created, and, in my opinion, neither I nor anyone else should be able to do anything about it."
+However, Peterson also expressed concern that the respective rights-holders –  regardless of whether or not their ownership of the rights is legitimate –  would be likely to sue individuals who publish material in said languages, especially if the author might profit from said material.
+Furthermore, comprehensive learning material for such constructed languages as High Valyrian and Klingon has been published and made freely accessible on the language-learning platform Duolingo –  but those courses are licensed by the respective copyright holders. Because only a few such disputes have occurred thus far, the legal consensus on ownership of languages remains uncertain.
+The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre claims ownership of palawa kani, an attempted composite reconstruction of up to a dozen extinct Tasmanian indigenous languages, and has asked Wikipedia to remove its article on the project. However, there is no current legal backing for the claim.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== Notes ==
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Contrastive linguistics"
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+---
+
+Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages (hence it is occasionally called "differential linguistics").
+
+
+== History ==
+While traditional linguistic studies had developed comparative methods (comparative linguistics), chiefly to demonstrate family relations between cognate languages, or to illustrate the historical developments of one or more languages, modern contrastive linguistics intends to show in what ways the two respective languages differ, in order to help in the solution of practical problems. (Sometimes the terms diachronic linguistics and synchronic linguistics are used to refer to these two perspectives.) 
+Contrastive linguistics, since its inception by Robert Lado in the 1950s, has often been linked to aspects of applied linguistics, e.g., to avoid interference errors in foreign-language learning, as advocated by Di Pietro (1971) (see also contrastive analysis), to assist interlingual transfer in the process of translating texts from one language into another, as demonstrated by Vinay & Darbelnet (1958) and more recently by Hatim (1997) (see translation), and to find lexical equivalents in the process of compiling bilingual dictionaries, as illustrated by Heltai (1988) and Hartmann (1991) (see bilingual lexicography). 
+Contrastive descriptions can occur at every level of linguistic structure: speech sounds (phonology), written symbols (orthography), word-formation (morphology), word meaning (lexicology), collocation (phraseology), sentence structure (syntax) and complete discourse (textology). Various techniques used in corpus linguistics have been shown to be relevant in intralingual and interlingual contrastive studies, e.g. by 'parallel-text' analysis (Hartmann 1997).
+Contrastive linguistic studies can also be applied to the differential description of one or more varieties within a language, such as styles (contrastive rhetoric), dialects, registers or terminologies of technical genres.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Contrastive analysis
+Translation
+Contrastive rhetoric
+
+
+== Notes ==
+
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Corpus language"
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+---
+
+A corpus language is a language that has no living speakers but for which numerous records produced by its native speakers survive. Examples of corpus languages are Ancient Greek, Latin, the Egyptian language, Old English, Old Norse, Elamite, and Sanskrit. Some corpus languages, such as Ancient Greek and Latin, left very large corpora and therefore can be fully reconstructed, even though some details of pronunciation may be unclear. Such languages can be used even today, as is the case with Sanskrit and Latin.
+Other languages have such limited corpora that some important words—e.g., some pronouns—are lacking in the corpora. Examples of these are Ugaritic and Gothic. Languages attested only by a few words, often names, and a few phrases, are called Trümmersprache (literally "rubble languages") in German linguistics. These can be reconstructed only in a very limited way, and often their genetic relationship to other languages remains unclear. Examples are Dalmatian, Etruscan, also known as Rasenna, Dadanitic, a Semitic language that may be close to classical Arabic, Lombardic, Burgundian, Vandalic, and Oscan, Umbrian, and Faliscan, all Italic languages that were related to Latin.
+Corpus languages are studied using the methods of corpus linguistics, but corpus linguistics can also be used (and is commonly used) for the study of the writings and other records of living languages.
+Not all extinct languages are corpus languages, since there are many extinct languages in which few or no writings or other records survive, as is the case in the vast majority of languages that have ever existed.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== See also ==
+
+Endangered language
+Language death

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+title: "Critical language awareness"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_language_awareness"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:53.102284+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics, critical language awareness (CLA) refers to an understanding of social, political, and ideological aspects of language, linguistic variation, and discourse. It functions as a pedagogical application of a critical discourse analysis (CDA), which is a research approach that regards language as a social practice. More specifically, critical language awareness is a consideration of how features of language such as words, grammar, and discourse choices reproduce, reinforce, or challenge certain ideologies and struggles for power and dominance.
+Regarding linguistic variation, linguist Norman Fairclough argued that it is insufficient to teach students to use "appropriate" language without considering why that language is preferred and who makes that decision (as well as the implications for speakers who do not use "appropriate language").
+CLA generally includes consideration of how a person may be marginalized by speaking a particular way, especially if that way of speaking serves as an index of their race, ethnicity, religion, social status, etc.
+Because power is reproduced through language, CLA is "a prerequisite for effective democratic citizenship, and should therefore be seen as an entitlement for citizens, especially children developing towards citizenship in the educational system".
+
+
+== Frameworks ==
+In 2022, Shawna Shapiro published the book Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom. It included chapters describing four pathways teachers can use to implement critical language awareness in the classroom: sociolinguistics, critical academic literacies, media literacy and discourse analysis, and  "communicating-across-difference".
+Others have argued for the implementation of critical language awareness in other fields such as business and professional communications.
+
+
+== Applications ==
+Critical language awareness has been applied to educating students in South Africa how language was used to maintain and perpetuate the apartheid state.
+It has also been applied to present small groups of children with tasks which encourage a focus on the similarities and differences between languages.
+
+
+== See also ==
+
+Critical applied linguistics
+Critical discourse analysis
+Critical pedagogy
+Political correctness
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+CLA Collective, "an online resource hub and gathering space for teachers committed to promoting Critical Language Awareness (CLA) in our writing, literacy, and language classrooms and curricula"
+Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom by Shawna Shapiro
+Addressing Political “Confusion Syndrome” Discourses: A Critical Applied Linguistics Perspective, Petra Christian University
+Critical Language Awareness (CLA) and EFL

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+title: "Dialect levelling"
+chunk: 1/7
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+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:54.369184+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Dialect levelling (or leveling in American English) is an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of a dialect's features when in contact with one or more other dialects. This can come about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often amidst a process of language codification, which can be a precursor to standardization. One possible result is a koine language, in which various dialects mix together and simplify, settling into a new and more widely embraced form of the language. Another possible path is that a speech community increasingly adopts or exclusively preserves features with widespread social currency at the expense of their more local or traditional dialect features.
+Dialect levelling has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialization and modernization of the areas in which they are spoken. However, while less common, it could be observed in pre-industrial times too, especially in colonial dialects like American and Australian English or when sustained linguistic contact between different dialects over a large geographical area continues for long enough as in the Hellenistic world that produced Koine Greek as a result of dialect leveling from Ancient Greek dialects.
+
+== Definition ==
+Dialect levelling has been defined as the process by which structural variation in dialects is reduced, "the process of eliminating prominent stereotypical features of differences between dialects", "a social process [that] consists in negotiation between speakers of different dialects aimed at setting the properties of, for example, a lexical entry", "the reduction of variation between dialects of the same language in situations where speakers of these dialects are brought together", "the eradication of socially or locally marked variants (both within and between linguistic systems) in conditions of social or geographical mobility and resultant dialect contact", and the "reduction... of structural similarities between languages in contact", of which "interference and convergence are really two manifestations".
+Leonard Bloomfield implicitly distinguished between the short-term process of accommodation between speakers and the long-term process of levelling between varieties and between the social and the geographical dimensions. On the geographical dimension, levelling may disrupt the regularity that is the result of the application of sound laws. It operates in waves but may leave behind relic forms. Dialect levelling and Mischung, or dialect mixing, have been suggested as the key mechanisms that destroy regularity and the alleged exceptionlessness of sound laws.
+Dialect levelling is triggered by contact between dialects, often because of migration, and it has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after the industrialisation and the modernisation of the area or areas in which they are spoken. It results in unique features of dialects being eliminated and "may occur over several generations until a stable compromise dialect develops". It is separate from the levelling of variation between dialectal or vernacular versions of a language and standard versions.
+
+== Motivations ==
+Contact leading to dialect levelling can stem from geographical and social mobility, which brings together speakers from different regions and social levels. Adolescents can drive levelling, as they adapt their speech under the influence of their peers, rather than their parents.
+In 20th-century British English, dialect levelling was caused by social upheaval leading to larger social networks. Agricultural advancements caused movement from rural to urban areas, and the construction of suburbs caused city-dwellers to return to former rural areas. The World Wars brought women into the workforce and men into contact with more diverse backgrounds.
+While written and spoken language can diverge significantly, the presence of long distance communication – which prior to inventions such as the telephone was virtually always written – usually drives or necessitates the use of a lingua franca, dialect levelling or both. To be understood by their correspondence partners farther away, authors will naturally tend to reduce exceedingly local forms and incorporate loanwords from the dialect of the person they're writing to. If enough such correspondence is undertaken over a long enough time frame by enough people a new written standard or de facto standard can emerge. Examples include Middle Low German as employed by the Hanseatic League or Koine Greek. In the absence of long distance communication and travel, languages and dialects can diverge significantly in comparatively short time spans.
+
+== Role in creole formation ==
+It has been suggested that dialect levelling plays a role in the formation of creoles. It is responsible for standardising the multiple language variants that are produced by the relexification of substrate languages with words from the lexifier language. Features that are not common to all of the substrata and so are different across the varieties of the emerging creole tend to be eliminated. The process begins "when the speakers of the creole community stop targeting the lexifier language and start targeting the relexified lexicons, that is, the early creole". Dialect levelling in such a situation may not be complete, however. Variation that remains after dialect levelling may result in the "reallocation" of surviving variants to "new functions, such as stylistic or social markers". Also, differences between substrata, including between dialects of a single substratum, may not be levelled at all but instead persist, as differences between dialects of the creole.
+
+== Case studies ==
+
+=== In New Zealand English ===

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+title: "Dialect levelling"
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+
+New Zealand English is a relatively new native variety of English. The English language was brought to the islands in 1800 but became influential only in the 1840s because of large-scale migration from Britain. The most distinctive part of the language is the formation of the accent that has developed through complex series of processes involving dialect contact between different varieties of British English, followed by dialect mixture. Although New Zealand English sounds very similar to Australian English, it is not a direct transplant, as Australians were only 7% of the immigrants before 1881, and the majority of the linguistic change in New Zealand English happened between 1840 and 1880. The speed with which New Zealand English became a unique, independent form of English can be attributed to the diversity of speakers who came into contact through colonisation. Features from all over the British Isles and the Māori people, who had inhabited the island for 600 years prior to colonisation, can be identified in the form that New Zealand English has taken.
+Rudimentary levelling in New Zealand English occurred around 1860, the result of contact between adult speakers of different regional and social varieties and the accommodation that was required from the speakers in face-to-face interaction. Settlements attracted people from all walks of life and created highly-diverse linguistic variation, but there were still families that lived in almost total isolation. Thus, the children did not gain the dialect of their peers, as was normally expected, but instead maintained the dialect of their parents. Speakers who grow up in that type of situation are more likely to demonstrate intra-individual variability than speakers whose main source of influence is their peers. When the emerging dialect stabilises, it is the result of a focusing process, which allowed for a very small amount of regional variation.
+New Zealand English is largely based around the typology and forms of southeastern England because of the levelling out of demographic minority dialect forms. Trudgill (1986) suggests that situations that involve transplantation and contact between mutually-intelligible dialects lead to the development of new dialects by focusing on specific qualities from the variants of the different dialects and reducing them until only one feature remains from each variable. The process may take an extended length of time. Reduction then takes place as the result of group accommodation between speakers in face-to-face interaction. Accommodation may also lead to the development of interdialectal forms, forms that are not present in contributing dialects but may be the result of hyperadaptation.
+
+==== Vowels ====
+Variables have been maintained through the process of levelling, such as the vowels of foot and strut indicate a system of five, rather than six, short checked vowels, a feature common in working-class accents in most of England north of the Bristol Channel, an area that encompasses about half of England's geography and population. However, only one consultant had the feature, indicating that it was likely a minority feature in adults and was then exposed to children.
+/a:/ has levelled from realisations all over an utterance to being found in front realisations only.
+Closed variants [i, e, ɛ] (typical of 19th-century Southern England) are more common in the recordings, rather than the open variants of Northern England, Scotland and Ireland [ɛ, æ]. The fact that the close variants have survived suggests an influence from southeastern England, Australia and Scotland.
+Diphthong shift is equivalent to diphthongs from Southern England to the West Midlands. Most of diphthong shift happens along /au/, starting at a point that is close to [æ] or /ai/ starting farther back than /a:/
+
+==== Consonants ====
+/h/-dropping did not survive in New Zealand English, and the merger of /w/ and /ʍ/ is only now beginning to emerge.
+Irish English dental /t/ and /d/ have been levelled out in New Zealand English, in favour of /θ/ and /ð/.
+
+=== In Limburg ===
+In this case study, Hinskens (1998) researches dialect levelling in the Dutch province of Limburg. Based on his findings, he argues that dialect levelling does not necessarily lead to convergence towards the standard language. The research for this case study takes place in Rimburg, a small village on the southeast of Limburg, where Ripuarian dialects are spoken. The southeast area of Limburg experienced rapid industrialisation at the turn of the 20th century with the largescale development of coal mining. That created job opportunities, which led to considerable immigration to the area (Hinskens:38), which, in turn, led to language contact and a diversification of language varieties. It is the area where most of the dialect levelling occurred.
+Geographically, the dialects of Limburg are divided into three zones. The westernmost zone (C-zone) features East-Limburg dialects, the easternmost zone (A-zone) Ripuarian dialects, with the central zone (B-zone) being a transition zone between the two varieties. As one travels from west to east, the dialect features deviate more and more from the standard language. Additionally, the dialect features accumulate from west to east and features found in East-Limburg dialects are also found in Ripuarian dialects but not the other way around (Hinskens 1998:37).
+The study analysed dialect features from all three zones, among which are the following:

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+title: "Dialect levelling"
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+
+/t/ deletion is typical to all three zones
+derivational suffix -lɪɣ marks the A/B-zone dialects; C-zone dialects and the standard language have -lɪk
+postlexical ɣ-weakening is typical of the dialects in the A-zone
+The study found that "the ratio of dialect features showing overall loss to dialect features investigated decreases with increasing geographical distribution" (Hinskens:43).
+In other words, the wider the distribution of the dialectal feature, the less likely that it will level with the standard language. For example, dialectal features found in all three zones, such as /t/ deletion, were maintained, and features such as the postlexical ɣ-weakening, which occurs only in the Ripuarian dialects (A-zone), were lost.
+Of the 21 features that are analysed, 14 resulted in a loss of a dialect feature. Some of the features that were levelled did not lead to convergence toward the standard language and, in some cases, there was even divergence (Hinksens:45).
+One feature that is a marker for only the Rimburg dialect, which occurs in the A-zone, is the non-palatalisation of the epenthetic /s/ in the diminutive suffix:
+
+"Rimburg dialect is in the process of adopting the morpho-phonemics of the surrounding B-zone dialects," rather than Standard Dutch (Hinskens:27). Dialect levelling in this case cannot be explained in terms of convergence with the standard language.
+The study concludes that dialect levelling resulted from accommodation. "Accommodation and dialect levelling should be understood in the light of the continuous struggle between... the tendencies towards unification on the one hand and those towards particularism and cultural fragmentation on the other" (Hinskens:42). Those who spoke the same dialect were part of the in-group, and those who spoke a different variety were part of the out-group. Based on conversation data, Hinskens found that "the more typical/unique a dialect feature is for a speaker's dialect, the larger the relative number of linguistic conditions in which the use of this dialect feature is suppressed in out-group contact situations". (Hinskens:41). Accommodation, or suppression of dialect features, then facilitates mutual comprehension and results in the convergence of dialect features.

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+title: "Dialect levelling"
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+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:54.369184+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
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+
+To this day, the by now almost five centuries old Luther Bible is preferred by some Lutherans in Germany over more modern translations and it is generally seen as one of the earliest texts in the Early New High German stage of the now increasingly standardizing German written language. This shift allowed "language societies" to modify the language further in the 17th century by translating Latinate compounds using German morphemes, which could be understood by any German-speaking child. Grammarians developed a body of usage within the canonical corpus, which was evaluated to monitor the use of the language. It was then that the ge-prefix for non-auxiliary past participles was regularized. Linguistic purism was also an issue, with French terms in particular being the target of deliberate attempts to replace them – many of them successful but others not. The most notable group of linguistic purists in Germany during that era was the fruchtbringende Gesellschaft. The middle of the 18th century produced a slew of northern writers, who would ultimately shape the interaction between Catholic Germany, which had resisted Luther's linguistic influence, and the rest of the German-speaking world, directing the language's development path. The south did not have any comparable literary innovators to counterbalance the sudden emergence of standardized language in the north, so for two generations, the south's most influential literary minds spoke Lutheran-influenced dialects. In 1871, after centuries of highly-variable spelling and punctuation, a conference was held to create a uniform framework for German spelling, steered by the publication of a Bavarian dictionary in 1879 and a Prussian dictionary in 1880. Similar to the abortive attempts to create a singular German language standard in the High Middle Ages, it would again be poets enjoying court patronage that gave the impetus for a standardized pronunciation of the written form. For the luminaries of Weimar Classicism, it would just not do, that a play written the same way all throughout German lands would sound different in Goethe's native Frankfurt to Schiller's native Württemberg to their adoptive Weimar. So the deutsche Bühnenaussprache was developed — initially intended for theater only, it would become the standard for radio, television and whenever someone from out of town tried to get understood by the locals. Ultimately the school system would encourage the spoken standard just as much as the written standard and by the 21st century, dialects, that had been first attested in writing a millennium before a written – let alone spoken – German standard language would emerge, are fighting a losing rearguard action against the increasing dominance of Standard German. Jacob Grimm and Rudolf von Raumer created controversy in the 19th century, as they proposed conflicting criteria for defining spelling. Grimm argued that history and etymology should determine spelling, but van Raumer claimed that spelling should be based on pronunciation. Grimm's historical case found its way into orthography, with two different spellings of final /p, t, t-x/, depending on the surrounding environments. Any sort of standard pronunciation, therefore, was heavily reliant on standard writing.

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+
+=== In Denmark and Sweden ===
+Kjeld Kristensen and Mats Thelander discuss two socio-dialectal investigations, one Danish and one Swedish. The paper suggests that the development of urban society and an increasing degree of publicness were mentioned as important non-linguistic causes of the accelerating dialect levelling. For example, heavy migration from the countryside to towns and cities, increased traffic and trade, longer schooling within a more centralized system of education and the spread of mass media and other kinds of technological development may all be factors that explain why the process has been more rapid during the 20th century than it was in the 19th or why levelling hits dialects of certain regions more than dialects elsewhere. The levelling of dialects of Danish towards the metropolitan standard of Copenhagen has been dubbed Copenhagenization by Tore Kristiansen.
+
+=== In African American Vernacular English (AAVE) ===
+In this case study, Anderson (2002) discusses dialect levelling of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) spoken in Detroit. In her research, she analyzes a very particular linguistic variable, the monophthongization of /aɪ/ before voiceless obstruents. While monophthongization of the diphthong /aɪ > aː/ is common in AAVE, it generally occurs in the environment of voiced, not voiceless, obstruents. For example, a southern speaker of AAVE would pronounce the word tide (voiced obstruent) as [taːd] and pronounce the word tight (voiceless obstruent) as [taɪt], but some southern white speakers would pronounce it as [taːt].
+The monophthongization of /aɪ/ before voiceless obstruents is a salient characteristic of southern white dialects such as Appalachian and Texas varieties of English, and in the southern states, it indexes group membership with southern white people. To the north, however, in Detroit, the linguistic feature does not mark group membership with white people.
+Anderson presents evidence that this linguistic marker has been adopted among speakers of AAVE in Detroit, in part because of contact with white Appalachian immigrants. In other words, the diphthongization of /aɪ/ before voiced obstruents, which is a common feature of AAVE, has been levelled with that of southern white dialects and is now then being pronounced as a monophthong.
+In her article, Anderson reports that black and white segregation in Detroit is higher than in any other American city. She describes the demographics stating that the overwhelming majority of white people have moved to the suburbs and most local black people live in the inner city of Detroit (pp. 87–8). White Appalachians who have migrated to Detroit have found refuge in the inner city and have maintained close ties with black people. That is partly because of their cultural orientation to the South but also because both groups have been marginalised and, hence, subject to discrimination.
+The contact among them has led to the levelling of AAVE with a southern white variety in which speakers of AAVE have adopted the monophthongization of /aɪ/ before voiceless obstruents. In the South, the linguistic marker indexes group membership between black people and white people, but in the North, the linguistic marker no longer works since white Detroiters do not use this feature in their speech. Anderson concludes that "the overall effect is that Detroit AAVE aligns with a Southern vowel system for the /ai/ vowel variable, including that of the Detroit Southern White community, while indexing an opposition with Northern Whites" (p. 95).
+
+=== Mandarin tonal levelling in Taiwan ===
+A study of Mandarin leveling in Taiwan investigated the tonal leveling of Mandarin between Mandarin-Waishengren (外省人) and Holo-Benshengren (本省人) in Taiwan. The results indicated that the tonal leveling of Mandarin between these two ethnic groups started one generation earlier than the general patterns suggested by Trudgill. This leveling has nearly reached its completion in the following generation, taking approximately 30 years.
+Four factors were proposed to interpret the rapidity of this dialectal leveling:
+
+The intensiveness of immigration to Taiwan
+The exclusive Mandarin-only language policy
+The pre-established social order and infrastructure during the Japanese colonial period
+The frequent contacts between Waishengren and Benshengren.
+
+=== In Britain ===
+
+== Related terms ==
+
+=== Language convergence ===
+Language convergence refers to what can happen linguistically when speakers adapt "to the speech of others to reduce differences". As such, it is a type of accommodation (modification), namely the opposite of divergence, which is the exploitation and making quantitatively more salient of differences. One can imagine this to be a long-term effect of interspeaker accommodation.
+Unlike convergence, dialect levelling in the sense used in this study (a) is not only a performance phenomenon, but (b) also refers to what ultimately happens at the level of the 'langue', and (c) though in the long-term meaning it comes down to dissimilar varieties growing more similar, it does not necessarily come about by mutually or one-sidedly taking over characteristics of the other variety.
+Like interference, dialect levelling is a contact phenomenon. However, it cannot be considered to be a type of interference according to Weinreich (1953), since (a) it is not a concomitant of bilingualism, and (b) it is not merely a performance phenomenon. Dialect leveling need not produce a new usage, but it may very well result in qualitative changes.
+
+=== Geographical diffusion ===
+Geographical diffusion is the process by which linguistic features spread out from a populous and economically and culturally dominant centre. The spread is generally wave-like, but modified by the likelihood that nearby towns and cities will adopt the feature before the more rural parts in between. At the individual level in such a diffusion model, speakers are in face-to-face contact with others who have already adopted the new feature, and (for various reasons) they are motivated to adopt it themselves. The reduction or attrition of marked variants in this case brings about levelling.

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+title: "Dialect levelling"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:54.369184+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Mutual accommodation ===
+Kerswill mentions that standardisation does not necessarily follow from dialect levelling; it is perfectly possible for dialects to converge without getting closer to the standard, which does happen in some situations.
+The mechanism for standardisation lies in the kinds of social networks people have. People with more broadly based (more varied) networks will meet people with a higher
+social status. They will accommodate to them in a phenomenon known as upward convergence. The opposite, downward convergence, where a higher-status person accommodates to a lower status person, is much rarer. This accommodation is thought to happen mainly among adults in Western societies, not children or adolescents, because in those societies children and adolescents have much more self-centred, narrower peer groups. In societies where standardisation is generally something that adults do, children and adolescents perform other kinds of levelling.
+Accommodation between individual speakers of different dialects takes place with respect to features that are salient, displaying phonetic or surface phonemic contrasts between the dialects. This process is mostly limited to salient features, geographical (distance), and demographic (population size) factors. Accommodation is not the same thing as levelling, but it can be its short-term preamble.
+
+=== Koinéization ===
+Koinéization, unlike dialect levelling, "involves the mixing of features of different dialects, and leads to a new, compromised dialect". It results from "integration or unification of the speakers of the varieties in contact". Clearly, dialect levelling is not strictly synonymous with koinéisation. First, dialect levelling does not merely take place in the space between dialects; it may also occur between a dialect and a standard language. Second, its end product cannot be equated with that of koinéisation, a koiné being the structurally stabilized and sociologically more or less standard product of heavy intermixture.
+According to Milroy (2002), the difference between dialect levelling and koinéization is that dialect levelling involves the eradication of linguistic variants due to language contact while koinéization involves the creation of a new linguistic variety based on language contact.
+
+== See also ==
+Accent reduction
+Language death
+Language shift
+Lingua franca
+Linguistic discrimination
+Linguistic prescription
+Linguistic purism
+Prestige language
+Cultural cringe
+Decreolization
+Language attrition
+Linguistic imperialism
+
+== References ==
+
+== Bibliography ==
+Anderson, Bridget. 2002. Dialect leveling and /ai/ monophthongization among African American Detroiters. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(1). 86–98.
+Bloomfield, L. 1933. Language. New York: H. Holt and Company.
+Britain, David. 1997. Dialect Contact and Phonological Reallocation: "Canadian Raising" in the English Fens. Language in Society 26(1). 15–46.
+Chambers, J. K., & Trudgill, P. 1980. Dialectology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
+Cheshire, Jenny; Ann Gillett; Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams. 1999. The role of adolescents in dialect levelling: Final report submitted to the Economic and Social Research Council.
+Fitzmaurice, Susan M. 2000. The Great Leveler: The Role of the Spoken Media in Stylistic Shift From the Colloquial to the Conventional. American Speech 75(1). 54–68.
+Gibson, Maik. Dialect Levelling in Tunisian Arabic: Towards a New Spoken Standard. Language Contact and Language Conflict in Arabic, Aleya Rouchdy. Routledge, 2003.
+Hinskens, Frans. 1998. Dialect Levelling: A Two-dimensional Process. Folia Linguistica 32 (1-2). 35–52.
+Hinskens, Frans. (ed.) 1996. Dialect levelling in Limburg: Structural and sociolinguistic aspects. Linguistische Arbeiten.
+Hsu, Hui-ju and John Kwock-ping Tse. The Tonal Leveling of Taiwan Mandarin: A Study in Taipei. Concentric: Studies in Linguistics 35, no. 2 (2009): 225–244.
+Kerswill, Paul. 2001. Mobility, meritocracy and dialect levelling: the fading (and phasing) out of Received Pronunciation. "British studies in the new millennium: the challenge of the grassroots". University of Tartu, Tartu.
+Kristensen, Kjeld and Mats Thelander. 1984. On dialect levelling in Denmark and Sweden. Folia Linguistica 28(1/2). 223–246.
+Lefebvre, C. 1998. Creole genesis and the acquisition of grammar: The case of Haitian creole. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
+Lefebvre, Claire. 2004. The relexification account of creole genesis: The case of Haitian Creole. Issues in the Study of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Lefebvre, Claire (ed.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins. pp. 59-180
+Miller, Michael I. 1987. Three Changing Verbs: Bite, Ride and Shrink. Journal of English Linguistics 20(1). 3-12.
+Schøning, Signe Wedel and Inge Lise Pedersen. 2009. Vinderup in Real Time: A Showcase of Dialect Levelling. ed. by Dufresne, Monique, Fernande Dupuis and Etleva Vocaj. 233–244.
+Siegel, J. 1985. Koines and koineization. Language in Society 14/3, 357–78.
+Siegel, Jeff. 1997. Mixing, Levelling and pidgin/creole development. In A. Spears and D. Winford (eds.), The structure and status of pidgins and creoles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 111–49.
+Trudgill, Peter, Elizabeth Gordon, Gillian Lewis and Margaret MacLagan. 2000. Determinism in new-dialect formation and the genesis of New Zealand English. Journal of Linguistics 36 (2). 299–318. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
+Twaddell, William. F. 1959. Standard German: Urbanization and Standard Language: A Symposium Presented at the 1958 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association. Anthropological Linguistics 1(3). 1–7.
+Wrong, Margaret. 1942. Ibo Dialects and the Development of a Common Language. Journal of the Royal African Society 41(163). 139–141.

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+title: "Digital leisure studies"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_leisure_studies"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:12.096223+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Digital leisure studies is an academic interdisciplinary sub-discipline of leisure studies that focuses on the study of digital leisure cultures, including digital leisure practices, experiences, spaces, communities, institutions, and subjectivities. It is an area of scholarship aimed at making sense of the place of digital leisure “in understandings of embodiment, power relations, social inequalities, social structures and social institutions”. To do so, leisure scholars use theoretical and methodological approaches from within leisure studies as well as from other academic disciplines such as political science, history, communication studies, cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, geography, anthropology, and others. Scholars in this field also focus on how to engage digital practices to make their research accessible, and focus on exposing, examining, and challenging social inequalities and injustices related to digital leisure.
+
+
+== Digital leisure ==
+Digital leisure, similar to leisure, is a contentious term. Leisure has traditionally been defined in three main ways, as time (that which is not work), as activity (freely chosen), and as a state of mind (denoted by such things as intrinsic motivation, perceived freedom, and positive affect). Digital leisure practices and spaces are intertwined with work in ways that physical leisure spaces are not. Widespread surveillance of digital leisure practices and spaces allows companies to benefit monetarily from the data collected during the users’ leisure experiences (hence, the user is indeed working during their leisure time). Therefore, digital leisure is time spent engaged in digital practices and spaces while in a leisurely state of mind.
+
+
+== Digital leisure cultures ==
+Traditionally, leisure scholars have focused on analogue leisure cultures such as sports, outdoor activities, fandom, and summer camps. In a digital age, there are very few (if any) pure analogue leisure spaces in existence. Most leisure cultures have been digitized in some way. With wearable fitness trackers digitizing every aspect of our leisure (even our sleep) and smartphones-turned-watches, our very leisured bodies have become digital assemblages. Lupton noted how the metaphor of entanglement is commonly used to explain our relationship with digitization, as it “emphasizes the inextricably intertwined relationships of human subjects with material objects” (p. 41). As such, digital leisure cultures refer to the digitization of previous analogue areas of leisure research. Digital leisure cultures “covers some of the following technologies and practices which have built cultures around them: namely apps (applications), smartphones, online games, interaction on some form of social media, and the downloading of films, live televised sports events and music”.
+Brabazon has identified two systemic ways in which analogue leisure cultures and digital cultures differ: deterritorialization and disintermediation. Deterritorilization refers to the ways digitization is post-territory. As a concept, it captures “how particular media platforms and communicative systems de-emphasize our position in analogue space and time in favour of virtual space and time”. For example, Brabazon used the example of social media. We can join Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook – and we can be involved in and share content in each of these distinct spaces with each other, even if we do not share physical space with each other.
+Disintermediation refers to the ways in which digital leisure cultures involve “peer-to-peer networks where links are removed from the traditional supply chain”. As part of these networks, the producer can also be the consumer (prosumer). In this way, material in digital leisure cultures can be created and disseminated much more quickly than in analogue leisure cultures.
+
+
+== Digital turn: theories and methodologies ==
+Leisure studies (and academia in general) currently exists in the age of the “digital turn.” The digital turn refers to the different ways digitization influences our lives, including our behaviors, social interactions, environments, economies, and politics. The digital turn signifies a new period in leisure scholarship and demands a conceptual change, one in which leisure scholars turn to new resources and ways of capturing what digitization means for our lives and leisure  Redheadnoted, leisure scholars “need to produce sustained theorizing of the “digital turn” in Leisure Studies and with it more satisfactory theoretically informed empirical studies of digital leisure cultures” (p. 828) to engage in broader scholarly conversations.
+To do so, it has been suggested leisure scholars shift the ways they are thinking about leisure and draw on different disciplines and theories as resources to begin to shape digital leisure theory and theorizing. For example, Redhead has recommended that digital leisure theory be shaped by critical theory and critical theorists from other disciplines such as philosophers, including Baudrillard, Badiou, Zizek, and Virilio. Redhead presented two concepts to guide digital leisure theory: accelerated culture and claustropolitanism.
+Karl Spracklen has presented a theory of communicative and instrumental digital leisure drawing on theorists such as Habermas, Catells, Urry, and Bauman. He argued that digital leisure is more communicative given its possibilities for interactivity and resisting power disparities, but despite these possibilities, it is not immune to instrumental structures that shape traditional (non-digitized) popular leisure. In this way, digital leisure should not be seen as something novel, but as “just another leisure space.” In his work, he has also emphasized the work of leisure theorists, such as Rojek, Stebbins, Aitchison, Blackshaw, Giulianotti and Crouch, who have focused attention towards understanding and critically engaging with digital leisure.
+With the digital turn in research, also comes the need to consider methodologies and methods used to effectively study digital leisure cultures. Digital leisure scholars are still actively working to envision new methodologies and methods and retool existing ones. Netnography, virtual ethnography /cyberethnography/digital ethnography, digital storytelling, digital and visual methodologies, digital media methodologies, and critical technocultural discourse analysis are some examples of such methodologies and methods.
+
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Displacement (linguistics)"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:56.885793+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics, displacement is the capability of language to communicate about things that are not immediately present (spatially or temporally); i.e., things that are either not here or are not here now.
+In 1960, Charles F. Hockett proposed displacement as one of 13 design features of language that distinguish human language from animal communication systems (ACSs):
+
+Man is apparently almost unique in being able to talk about things that are remote in space or time (or both) from where the talking goes on. This feature—"displacement"—seems to be definitely lacking in the vocal signaling of man's closest relatives, though it does occur in bee-dancing.
+
+
+== In animal communication systems ==
+Honeybees use the waggle dance to communicate the location of a patch of flowers suitable for foraging. The degree of displacement in this example remains limited when compared to human language. A bee can only communicate the location of the most recent food source it has visited. It cannot communicate an idea about a food source at a specific point in the past, nor can it speculate about food sources in the future. In addition, displacement in the waggle dance is restricted by the language's lack of creativity and productivity. The bees can express direction and distance, but it has been experimentally determined that they lack a sign for "above". It is also doubtful that bees can communicate about non-existent nectar for the purpose of deception.  Consequently, in honeybee communication, the potential for displacement is limited, but it is there insofar as they have the ability to communicate about something not currently present (i.e., something that is spatially removed).
+Ants have been observed sending out scouts to patrol for food items, and coming back for other workers if the food found is too large to bring to the nest by the finder alone; for example, a dead caterpillar that is too heavy. This again would involve displacement by communicating outside of the here and now.  Recruitment has also been observed by the African Weaver Ant Oecophylla longinoda for the purpose of communicating new food sources, emigration to new sites, and for defense against intruders.  Researchers have described no less than five distinct systems to fulfill these functions in this species.  The ants communicate using a system composed of olfactory or scent clues from several glands together with body movements.  The animals will use antennation, body jerking, and mouth-opening, and will combine these clues with the application of the scent trails or scent release to pass on information regarding resources or intruders.
+Ravens (Corvus corax) have been observed to recruit other ravens to large feeding sites, such as to the carcass of an animal. However, their motivation for recruiting appears less obvious, and the specifics of their communication system are more elusive.  Still, it has been documented that ravens must have such a system, as their patterns of gathering at sites clearly indicate that they must have been informed of the presence of the resource. It is believed that non-mated ravens call in a group of other non-mated birds to be able to feed and not get chased away by mated territorial pairs of established ravens.
+In addition to honeybees, ants, and ravens, the Greater Honeyguide (Indicator indicator) achieves displacement when it signals to humans the location of distant honeybee colonies. This fascinating mutualistic relationship between people and a wild bird, and the communicative system underlying the partnership, has been studied by anthropologists and ornithologists.
+
+
+== Importance in evolution of language ==
+
+The need to convey information using displacement has been suspected to have been the evolutionary pressure leading to language development in humans, as outlined by Derek Bickerton in Adam's Tongue. The pressure of such need is present in species with a foraging strategy that presents the challenge of directing members of its group to a food source too large to be utilized singly or in small numbers, requiring recruitment of assistance.
+
+It's only when you fully appreciate what displacement means, how the absence of displacement is not just a casual feature of ACSs but a crucial defining feature of pre-human minds, that you can start getting the complete picture.
+The unique environmental need selecting for a communication system capable for displacement in humans or their direct ancestors is not identified, but hypotheses include Bickerton's theory of small groups finding large herbivore carcasses, and needing the assistance from other small groups of humans to defend against other dangerous scavengers (large cats, hyenas) competing for the same source of food. Language development most certainly did not stop there—since otherwise bees or ants would have comparable communication systems to humans—but this is where it is hypothesized to have begun, giving human ancestors the ability to take communication out of the here and now.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Bee learning and communication
+Corvus corax – ravens and their extraordinary intelligence
+Design features of language
+Homo erectus – possible use of language in early humans
+Weaver ant social structure
+
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Distributed language"
+chunk: 1/1
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+category: "reference"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:59.534891+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Distributed language is a concept in linguistics that language is not an independent symbolic system used by individuals for communication but rather an array of behaviors that constitute human interaction.  The concept of distributed language is based on a biological theory of the origin of language and the concept of distributed cognition.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Cowley, Stephen J. (2011). Distributed Language. John Benjamins. ISBN 978-90-272-8415-0.
+Thibault, Paul J. "First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: The distributed language view." Ecological Psychology 23 (2011): 210–245. doi:10.1080/10407413.2011.591274
+Steffensen, Sune Vork. "Distributed language and dialogism: notes on non-locality, sense-making and interactivity." Language Sciences 50 (2015): 105–119. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2015.01.004
+Linell, Per. "Distributed language theory, with or without dialogue." Language Sciences 40 (2013): 168–173. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2013.04.001

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+title: "Double articulation"
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+category: "reference"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:00.707125+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics, double articulation, duality of patterning, or duality is the fundamental language phenomenon consisting of the use of combinations of a small number of meaningless elements (sounds, that is, phonemes) to produce a large number of meaningful elements (words, actually morphemes). Its name refers to this two-level structure inherent to sign systems, many of which are composed of these two kinds of elements: 1) distinctive but meaningless and 2) significant or meaningful.
+It is one of Hockett's design features.
+
+
+== Theory ==
+Double articulation refers to the twofold structure of the stream of speech, which can be primarily divided into meaningful signs (like words or morphemes), and then secondarily into distinctive elements (like sounds or phonemes). For example, the meaningful English word "cat" is composed of the sounds /k/, /æ/, and /t/, which are meaningless as separate individual sounds (and which can also be combined to form the separate words "tack" and "act", with distinct meanings). These sounds, called phonemes, represent the secondary and lowest level of articulation in the hierarchy of the organization of speech. Higher, primary, levels of organization (including morphology, syntax, and semantics) govern the combination of these individually meaningless phonemes into meaningful elements.
+
+
+== History ==
+The French concept of double articulation was first introduced by André Martinet in 1949, and elaborated in his Éléments de linguistique générale (1960). The English translation double articulation is a French calque for double articulation (spelled exactly the same in French). It may also be termed duality of patterning.
+"Duality of patterning" was proposed by American linguist Charles F. Hockett in a 1958 textbook A course in modern linguistics. The two terms are similar but different, and Hockett and Martinet proposed their concepts independently. Both of them were probably inspired by Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev's theory of "two planes" of human language. Hjelmslev proposed that human languages have two kinds of planes: planes of plereme ("fullness" in Greek) and planes of ceneme ("emptiness" in Greek). The planes of plereme contain meaningful units, and the planes of ceneme contain meaningless units that make up the meaningful units. For example, the cenemes of spoken language are phonemes, while the pleremes are morphemes or words; the cenemes of alphabetic writing are the letters and the pleremes are the words.
+Sign languages may have less double articulation because more gestures are possible than sound and able to convey more meaning without double articulation.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Origin of language
+Origin of speech
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Wendy Sandler et alii, "The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language", 2009.

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+title: "Economics of language"
+chunk: 1/2
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+category: "reference"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:01.969962+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The economics of language is an emerging field of study concerning a range of topics such as the effect of language skills on income and trade, the costs and benefits of language planning options, the preservation of minority languages, etc. It is relevant to analysis of language policy.
+In his book 'Language and Economy', the German sociolinguist Florian Coulmas discusses "the many ways in which language and economy interact, how economic developments influence the emergence, expansion, or decline of languages; how linguistic conditions facilitate or obstruct the economic process; how multilingualism and social affluence are interrelated; how and why language and money fulfill similar functions in modern societies; why the availability of a standard language is an economic advantage; how the unequal distribution of languages in multilingual societies makes for economic inequality; how the economic value of languages can be assessed; why languages have an internal economy and how they adapt to the demands of the external economy. Florian Coulmas asserts that language is the medium of business, an asset in itself and sometimes a barrier to trade".
+States shoulder language costs, because it maintains themselves by means of it, as does business which needs communication competence. Florian Coulmas discusses the language-related expenditures of government and business in Language and economy. In the same book he also discusses the role of language as a commodity, because languages can behave like economic systems. That is why socio-economic ecologies are (dis)favorable to particular languages. The spread of languages depends in an essential way on economic conditions. Language can be an expression of symbolic power. However, changes in the linguistic map of the world show that these are also powerful linked to economic developments in the world. Assigning an economic value to a certain language in the linguistic market place means vesting it with some of the privileges and power related to that language. Most language communities in the world practice this policy without any concern about reciprocity in language learning investments, forgetting the pursuit of linguistic justice as parity of esteem and while linguistic regimes are sometimes very unjust. States must also face decisions regarding the extent of trade-offs between economic inefficiency and linguistic disenfranchisement.
+
+== Origins ==
+The origins of the economics of language can be traced to Jacob Marschak's 1965 publication Economics of language. Here, he discusses the "efficiency of communication."
+
+== Language skills as human capital ==
+Possession of language skills is often valued in the labor market, since it allows for greater efficiency in trade and communication.
+
+== Global language and global economy ==
+Languages are capital investments in a literal sense: language technology is the most important one. It requires substantial investments which, in the absence of profitability, only affluent countries and businesses can afford. In this respect, today English is seen as a consequence and an instrument of American imperial power, an appreciable asset for American anglophones in the twenty-first-century global contest for competitive advantage, prosperity, and power. Though the best business language remains the language of the customers, meaning multilingual business practices, an "ideal' global economy presupposes a single language for the whole world. But an "ideal" global language presupposes a common acceptable and fair language burden for all business partners. Governments of countries whose language occupies a leading position on the international language market tend to refuse to subsidize the spread of other languages for which they believe they have no need.
+In his report L'enseignement des langues étrangères comme politique publique, François Grin argues that 'though some languages would be more beneficial in terms of cost-benefit analysis' such as e.g. Esperanto  (Esperanto business groups such as IKEF have been active for many years), the problem is that a shifting pattern in the valuation of languages is not always brought about by rationally calculable factors only. In addition to its economic potential, language is also a carrier of political, cultural and sociopsychological properties. In spite of the non-economic values attached to language, what prevails in matters of language is often that which is profitable  and this can lead to the superiority of a dominant language as a means of production, with a high linguistic capital value. In this respect it is evident to see that the will (or necessity) to learn English in the last decades has grown so much and its range of action has been so wide that the economic necessity and other incentives of foreign-language study are generally perceived as unimportant.
+For similar reasons, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher tried to torpedo the LINGUA program of the European Community, as from her point of view, Britain was asked to pay for a program which benefited her country least. Because of the enormous imbalance on current accounts of the major European languages in favor of English, the LINGUA program called for an expansion and diversification of foreign-language education in the Member States. For the individual speaker the unequal linguistic balances imply that the first language is an economically exploitable qualification for some who can simply marketing their mother tongue skills, whereas others can not.

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+---
+title: "Economics of language"
+chunk: 2/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_language"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:01.969962+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Gender gap ==
+In their study Gendered language and the educational gender gap, Davis and Reynolds found a connection between the use of gendered languages and the disparity between men and women. They compared languages with one noun class (e.g. English), two noun classes (e.g. Spanish), for masculine and feminine, and three noun classes (e.g. German), for masculine, feminine, and neuter. They concluded that countries that primarily speak languages with two sex-based noun classes are also countries with "lower rates of female participation in labor and credit markets." In addition, such countries often establish political gender quotas.
+Gendered languages were also found by Van der Velde, Tyrowicz, and Siwinska in Language and (the estimates of) the gender wage gap to relate to the gender wage gap. They pointed out that the presence of gender neutral environments can lead to at least three consequences: less discrimination by employers against women, less pressure placed upon workers to meet certain gender roles and expectations, and the decreasing wage gap.
+
+== Pronouns ==
+Studies have shown that there exists more emphasis on collectivism within societies in which it is not uncommon in the predominant language to drop pronouns. For example, Spanish speakers can say, "Yo estoy cantando," but they are also given the option to say, "Estoy cantando." Other pronoun-drop languages include Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Korean. On the contrary, speakers of languages that do not typically drop pronouns, such as English, German, and French, tend to express more individualistic views.
+Languages with multiple forms of you for the purposes of indicating respect have proven to produce speakers who are more conscious of class differences.
+
+== Selected readings ==
+Gabrielle Hogan-Brun, Linguanomics, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, ISBN 9781474238311
+Gazzola, Michele & Wickström, Bengt-Arne (2016): The Economics of Language Policy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
+(it) Gazzola, Michele 2016. Il valore economico delle lingue  - Lingua, Politica, Cultura. Serta Gratulatoria in Honorem Renato Corsetti. New York, Mundial
+Robichaud, David (2016). "A market failure approach to linguistic justice". Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. 38 (7): 1–10. doi:10.1080/01434632.2016.1192173. S2CID 148176218.
+"Scientific research on languages and the economy: An overview", Round table on "Languages and the economy", Network for the Promotion of Linguistic Diversity (NPLD), Welsh Government European Office, Brussels, Belgium, 21 January 2015 [Invited speaker : Michele Gazzola].
+(eo) Gazzola, Michele, 2015 Ekonomiko, Lingva Justeco kaj Lingva Politiko” Informilo por interlingvistoj, 92-93, (1-2/2015)
+Gazzola, Michele 2014. The Evaluation of Language Regimes. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins
+The economics of language policy, Center for economic studies (CES), 2013
+(it) "Il valore economico delle lingue" (the economic value of languages), Annual conference of the European Observatory for Plurilingualism, Rome, 10 October 2012 [Invited speaker : Michele Gazolla].
+Tarun Jain, Common tongue: The impact of language on economic performance, Indian School of Business, August 14, 2012.
+Chiswick, Barry R., and Paul W. Miller. 2007. The Economics of Language: International Analyses. Routledge.
+Grin, François, 1996, Economic approaches to language and language planning: an introduction
+Grin, François, 2003. "Language Planning and Economics." Current Issues in Language Planning 4 (1):1-66"
+Lamberton, Donald M., ed. 2002. The Economics of Language. Cheltenham, UK: E. Elgar Pub.
+Breton, Albert, ed. 2000. Exploring the Economics of Language. Ottawa : Official Languages Support Program, Canadian Heritage. Archived 2008-06-21 at the Wayback Machine
+Coulmas, Florian, Language and economy, ed. 1992, Blackwell Publishers
+(de) Coulmas, Florian, Die Wirtschaft mit der Sprache, ed. 1992, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp
+Dr. Gergely Kovács, Economic Aspects of Language Inequality in the European Union, 2007, Tatabánya, College for modern business studies.
+(fr - video) LANGUES ET ARGENT : ce qu'on ne vous dit pas
+Kadochnikov, Denis (2016). Languages, Regional Conflicts and Economic Development: Russia.  In: Ginsburgh, V., Weber, S. (Eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 538–580. ISBN 978-1-137-32505-1
+Lazear, Edward (1999). "Culture and Language," Journal of Political Economy, 107(S6), pp. 95–126.  Abstract.
+McCloskey, D.N. (1983). "The Rhetoric of Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, 21(2), pp. 481-517.
+McCloskey, D.N. (1998). 2nd ed. The Rhetoric of Economics. Description & scrollable preview. University of Wisconsin Press.
+
+== See also ==
+Grin, François
+(german) Florian Coulmas
+Van Parijs, Philippe
+Linguistic discrimination
+Linguicism
+
+== References ==
+
+== External links ==
+Research Group "Economics and Language" (REAL) Archived 2017-01-17 at the Wayback Machine
+IKEF

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+---
+title: "Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences"
+chunk: 1/1
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+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
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+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (until third edition in the singular: Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science) is an encyclopedia for library and Information science related issues.
+
+
+== History ==
+It was first published 1968-2003 in 73 volumes under the editorship of Allen Kent, Harold Lancour and Jay E. Daily. The second edition edited by Miriam Drake was published 2003 in 4 volumes, the third edition edited by Marcia J. Bates and Mary Niles Maack came in 2010 in seven volumes and the fourth edition edited by John D. McDonald and Michael Levine-Clark came in 2017 also in seven volumes.
+
+
+== Reviews ==
+Joseph C. Meredith published a “Review of Reviews” summarizing thirty-nine earlier reviews of the first edition. His findings mention “omissions, errors, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies; inadequate cross references; lack of uniformity of style; lack of balance in the length of articles; inadequate references and bibliographies.” He concludes that “although as an encyclopedia, the encyclopedia is a failure, it contains many excellent articles.”
+James D. Anderson reviewed the 2nd edition. He found that "many of the problems of the first edition have been inherited, even exacerbated, by the second edition" and concluded: "It cannot be recommended, especially for libraries that own the first edition. Overall, it appears to be a spin-off aimed primarily at making money rather than describing the state of the art in the twenty-first century."
+The third edition was reviewed by Tony Chalcraft. He notes: "Of the 565 articles, more than 400 are completely new to this edition, amounting to about 70 percent of total material." Whereas ELIS2 was devoted solely to library and information science, ELIS3 also addresses "archival science, museum studies and records management, [...] bibliography, informatics, information systems and social studies of information." He concludes: "There is simply no other work that comes near it in scale or spread and for librarians and information specialists it must be regarded as the pre-eminent reference source for the profession." The editor-in-chief, Marcia J. Bates, also wrote about the scope of the work.
+
+
+== Editions and volumes ==
+The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. First edition, vols. 1-73. 1968-2003. Edited by Allen Kent, Harold Lancour and Jay E. Daily. New York: Marcel Dekker
+Vol. 1: Accountability to Associacao Brasileira De Escolas De Biblioteconomia. 1968.
+Vol. 2: Association Canadienne des Bibliotheques to Book World. 1969.
+Vol. 4: Calligraphy to church. 1970.
+Vol. 13: Inventories of Books to Korea: Libraries in the Republic of. 1975.
+Vol. 23: Poland: Libraries and Information Centers in to Printers and Printing. 1978.
+Vols. 46-47: Indexes to v. 1-45.
+Vol. 73: Index to v. 48-72.
+The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science. Second edition, vols. 1-4. 2003. Edited by Miriam A. Drake. New York: Marcel Dekker. ISBN 0-8247-2075-X. (1 suppl. 2005 ISBN 0849338948)
+Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences. Third edition, vols. 1-7. 2010. Edited by Marcia J. Bates and Mary Niles Maack. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. ISBN 084939712X
+Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences. Fourth edition, vols. 1-7. 2017. Edited by John D. McDonald and Michael Levine-Clark. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. ISBN 146655259X
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Fourth Edition

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+title: "Epanadiplosis"
+chunk: 1/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:04.490811+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Epanadiplosis (from Ancient Greek ἐπαναδίπλωσις/epanadíplôsis, from ἐπί/epí, "on", ἀνά/aná, "again", and διπλόος/diplóos, "double", "doubling in succession") is a figure of speech in which the same word is used at the end of a clause as at the beginning of a preceding clause. The opposite figure is anadiplosis. It allows for melodic and rhythmic interplay to suggest emphasis or humor. Epanadiplosis can also be used to emphasize a word, a group of words, or an idea.
+Epanadiplosis is also a narrative figure used in many literary genres, which is called "narrative epanadiplosis". It's the repetition of an initial scene or motif (in the incipit) at the plot's end (or clausule). It suggests that the narrative is closed in on itself.
+
+== Nature and limits of the figure ==
+Epanadiplosis is a figure of repetition affecting syntactic position (the order of words in the sentence). For César Chesneau Dumarsais, the figure appears "when, of two correlative propositions, one begins and the other ends with the same word", or when, according to Henri Suhamy, only two propositions are involved.
+
+He cites Tacitus as an example:"Principes pro victoria pugnant, comites pro principe (Leaders fight for victory, companions for their leader)".More specifically, epanadiplosis is the repetition at the end of a sentence of a word or even a locution located at the beginning of a proposition. The figure therefore concerns the phrasal level, unlike narrative epanadiplosis, which concerns an entire text. It constitutes a linguistic mechanism that is the opposite of anadiplosis, and can be summarized as follows, according to Patrick Bacry:
+A _______ / _______ A
+As in these verses by François de Malherbe:
+
+[...] But she was of the world, where the most beautiful things
+have the worst fate,
+ And rose she lived what roses live
+
+In the space of a morning. [...]
+For Jean-Jacques Robrieux, epanadiplosis is a figure close to chiasmus, as in this line by Victor Hugo, in which the indefinite pronoun "rien" is repeated symmetrically at the beginning and end of the proposition:"Rien ne me verra plus, je ne verrai plus rien"For Nicole Ricalens-Pourchot, epanadiplosis is signaled by the use of "two juxtaposed propositions, separated by a comma or semicolon'; it is, therefore, as Georges Molinié notes, a 'microstructural figure", as it only affects the limits of the sentence, and therefore only plays on both elocution and construction. It is, moreover, a very rare figure.
+
+=== Limits of the figure ===
+
+==== Combination with other figures ====
+Epanadiplosis is sometimes confused with epanalepsis, in which the same word or group of words is repeated within the same sentence:"Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, ma Dame".
+- Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnet à MarieHowever, these two figures, as well as that of anadiplosis, are often used in conjunction, as in this excerpt from Eugène Ionesco's Rhinocéros (act i):"Yes, I have strength, I have strength for several reasons. First I have strength because I have strength, then I have strength because I have moral strength. I also have strength because I'm not an alcoholic."Epanadiplosis is also often used in combination with epistrophe, as in:"You in the corner are sure. You're certain, that's for sure."
+The whole allows for melodic and stylistic effects, since in the symphony the words or groups of words beginning a phrase and those ending it are repeated at the beginning and end of the following words. Epanadiplosis is combined, so that there is "an interweaving of repetitions".
+
+=== Anaplodiplosis ===
+
+Narrative epanadiplosis, or "anaplodiplosis" (anadiplosis in Latin), from the Greek ἀνάπλωσις ("explanation") and διπλόη ("anything doubled, or divided in two") is a figure of speech that consists in completing a work, usually a novel, as one has begun it. It consists of repeating, at the very end of a work, the initial motif, event, or configuration described in the incipit. Anaplodiplosis is a way of "coming full circle". At the end of the novel (or film), the reader or viewer encounters an identical or similar situation to that of the incipit, giving the work a certain depth. This cyclical conclusion is frequently found in short stories.
+This process is akin to mise en abyme, frequently used in literature. It's common in film and literature, especially in the fantasy genre. It gives narrative coherence to the work as a whole, and above all creates an impression of cycle, of eternal return. In a way, the story recounts the motif of natural cycles, such as the return of the seasons or the succession of generations. For the author, this may be an ironic way of saying that we're back where we started, and that everything that has happened in the meantime is of little importance. Or it may simply be an aesthetic device aimed at creating a kind of symmetry, a regular ordering of the work.

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+title: "Epanadiplosis"
+chunk: 2/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:04.490811+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+== Stylistic use ==
+In visual rhetoric, epanadiplosis can be used for comic purposes or to capture the imagination:"Too much tax kills taxThe looping effect of the figure creates the impression of a paradox and a closed maxim, as in Hobbes' example: "Man is a wolf to man", where the initial argument is taken up as the final argument. In logic and rhetoric, the figure is often used in syllogisms. César Chesneau Dumarsais, in his Traité des tropes, discusses and defines it as: "There is another figure [of words] called epanadiplosis, which occurs when, of two correlative propositions, one begins and the other ends with the same word", as in:"Man can cure everything, not man."
+- Georges Bernanos, Nous autres FrançaisThe figure can also border on tautology:"I am as I am".
+- Jacques Prévert, ParolesAccording to Bernard Dupriez, the purpose of epanadiplosis is often to underline, or even reiterate, as in:"Childhood knows what it wants. It wants to get out of childhood.
+- Jean Cocteau, La Difficulté d'êtreSome instances of epanadiplosis, however, are the result of the randomness of everyday language, without any particular stylistic research:"An immobile donkey on a median strip, like a statue of a donkey."
+- Gilbert Cesbron, Journal sans dateA final effect may be that of parallelism. According to Georges Molinié and Michèle Aquien, epanadiplosis often coordinates two propositions (in the sense of logical and semantic units) in the same sentence, which constitute repetition, by suggesting a parallel construction. They cite this example from La Bruyère:"...for this people seems to adore the prince, and the prince adores God".The two sentence members that follow the conjugated verb "appears" are coordinated with each other in a strictly parallel structure: "the last word of the first member and the first word of the second member are the same" (this is the nominal group "the prince"). The epanadiplosis is doubled by an antimetabole in this example (for the verbal element: "adore le prince").
+
+== Genres covered ==
+
+=== Poetry ===
+Epanadiplosis between the first and last lines is a frequent feature of poems. In Les Regrets, Joachim du Bellay forms a palindromic epanadiplosis:
+Guillaume Apollinaire, for his part, uses the resources of epanadiplosis to make the cycle of the seasons tangible, closing the poem on itself in a single suggestive image:
+
+=== Novel ===
+The incipit and epilogue of Émile Zola's novel Germinal form an epanadiplosis: the same character walks alone along the same road. On the first page, he arrives on a cold night in a mining country: "A single idea occupied the empty head of a worker without work and lodging, the hope that the cold would be less intense after daybreak ', and on the last page, he leaves Montsou, but in the sunshine, and hope: 'Penetrated by this hope, Étienne slows his walk, his eyes lost to the right and the left, in the gaiety of the new season. "
+Many novels use anaplodiplosis. These include Bernadin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788), Raymond Queneau's Le Chiendent (1933), James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939), Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist (1988), Anton Chekhov's The Wood Demon (play) (1889), Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950) and Stephen King's The Dark Tower (1982 to 2004).
+In Primo Levi's stories and essays (La tregua, I sommersi e i salvati), admittedly far removed from novels, narrative epanadiplosis seals the author's radical pessimism: "What has been can happen again", so everything is always to be started again.

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+title: "Epanadiplosis"
+chunk: 3/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:04.490811+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Film and audiovisual ===
+P.R.O.F.S. opens with a student asking the question "What is epanadiplosis? The answer doesn't come until the end of the film, in a scene in which Laurent Gamelon exclaims "That's epanadiplosis.", standing next to a horse. Most of Patrick Schulmann's films form an epanadiplosis.
+Forrest Gump begins and ends with a shot of a feather twirling in the wind.
+La Vie d'Adèle begins with the heroine leaving her home as a teenager, walking down the street to catch her bus, and ends with Adèle leaving an exhibition as an adult, walking down the street to return home from the same angle.
+Ma place au soleil begins and ends with shots of a cyclist riding through Paris.
+Lean On: in the video clip for this song by Major Lazer with DJ Snake and MØ, directed by Tim Erem, the first and last scenes of the clip are an ascending and descending view of the rose window on the ceiling of the palace bedroom.
+Roman Polanski's films make frequent use of epanadiplosis (or rather, anaplodiplosis) to ensure narrative coherence: in The Fearless Vampire Killers, the sleigh-racing scene inverts the fight against the vampires into the vampires' contaminating victory; the concert scene in Death and the Maiden or The Pianist measures the gap between two seemingly similar scenes, but fundamentally different in the narrative of warlike violence that separates them.
+Ridley Scott's Alien Covenant opens and closes with the same piece of music by Wagner.
+The film 1917 opens and closes, some 24 hours apart, with the same character dozing against a tree.
+The first episode of The Middle series opens with an illustration of a plane flying over the state of Indiana, and a steward inviting his passengers to look out of the windows. The same plane appears in the final seconds of the last episode of the final season.
+The film Knives Out opens and closes with a shot of a mug bearing the words "My house, my rules, my coffee".
+At the start of Marcel Pagnol's film Topaze, the honest schoolteacher Topaze is giving dictation to a child who has remained in the classroom. Glancing at the pupil's copy, Topaze sees mistakes and wants to help him spell the word moutons correctly: "c'est-à-dire qu'il n'y avait pas qu'un moutonne, il y avait plusieurs moutonssses". At the end of the film, Topaze, now a swindler, glances at the notes his mistress has just taken about their projects in Morocco - marble quarries, phosphates, olive trees, sheep - and replies: "c'est-à-dire qu'il n'y a pas qu'un moutonne, il y a plusieurs moutonssses".
+
+=== Music ===
+For Anne Quesemand, epanadiplosis is a resource for melodic effects in nursery rhymes, as in Alouette:"Alouette, gentil alouette! Alouette je te plumerai...".
+
+=== Comic strip ===
+In the album Bouge tranquille, from the Génie des alpages series, by F'murr, in the story "Homéotéleute, Tragédie en cinq actes de monsieur Corneille", Épanadiplose is Homéotéleute's sister and expresses herself only in epanadiploses.
+In Moebius and Jodorowsky's L'incal series, the story begins and ends with the fall of hero John Difool into the well of Suicide Alley.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== References ==
+
+== Bibliography ==
+Bacry, Patrick (1992). Les Figures de style et autres procédés stylistiques,coll. « Collection Sujets ». Paris: Armand Colin. ISBN 2-7011-1393-8.
+Dupriez, Bernard (2003). Gradus, les procédés littéraires coll. « Domaine français » (10 ed.). Paris: Union générale d'édition. ISBN 978-2-264-03709-1.
+Quesemand, Anne (2005). Elles sont tropes ! : Figures et tournures de la langue française. Illustrated by Laurent Berman. Paris: Éditions Alternatives. ISBN 2-86227-464-X.
+Robrieux, Jean-Jacques (2004). Les Figures de style et de rhétorique coll. « Les topos ». Paris: Dunod. ISBN 2-10-003560-6.
+Ricalens-Pourchot, Nicole (2003). Dictionnaire des figures de style coll. « Lettres ». Paris: Armand Colin. ISBN 978-2-200-26457-4.
+Suhamy, Henri (2004). Les Figures de style coll. « Que sais-je ? »). Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ISBN 2-13-044604-3.
+Aquien, Michèle; Molinié, Georges (1999). Dictionnaire de rhétorique et de poétique coll. « La Pochothèque ». Paris: LGF. ISBN 2-253-13017-6.
+Robrieux, Jean-Jacques (1993). Éléments de rhétorique et d'argumentation. Paris: Dunod. ISBN 2-10-001480-3.

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+---
+title: "Epiphrase"
+chunk: 1/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:05.688061+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+An epiphrase (meaning "what it is said in addition", from ancient Greek ἐπί/epí "in addition" and  φράσις/phrásis "phrase") is a figure of speech that consists of joining one or more sentence segments to the end of a syntactically completed sentence or group as a conclusion or to emphasize a fact. 
+The epiphrase can be used in two ways. It can indeed be used to add a word to an already finished speech or can allow the author to include a personal comment in their speech. Identifying it can be difficult as it is like other figures such as the epiphonema, the parenthesis, or the hyperbaton.
+Its stylistic resources can be an idea or word amplification, a feeling or reflection highlighting, and the effect of distance or on the contrary of approaching the reader, with an often comic or humorous intention.
+
+== Identification ==
+
+=== Etymology ===
+The "epiphrase" is a neologism with two Greek roots:  ἐπί/epí which means "in addition", and φράσις/phrásis which means "phrase". For the grammar professor and linguist Patrick Bacry, it is literally "what it is said in addition" (there is a related Greek verb ἐπιφράζειν/epiphrázein that means "to say furthermore") or 'added explanation". He also points out that the word "epiphrase" is "not widely used".
+
+=== Definition ===
+The Dictionnaire de la langue française by Émile Littré defines epiphrase as a figure of speech in which "one or more words are added to a phrase that seemed finished in order to develop more ideas". 
+According to the linguist and stylist Bernard Dupriez, the epiphrase is part of a phrase that is added specially to indicate the author or character's feelings as in this example from the novel Le Curé de Cucugnan by Alphonse Daudet:
+
+"Tomorrow, Monday, I will confess the old men and women. It's nothing. Tuesday, the children. I'll be done soon."
+For Pierre Fontanier, an eighteenth-century grammarian, the epiphrase is synonymous with "addition" and is merely a kind of hyperbaton. According to him, it is more precisely a half-parabasis that takes the form of parentheses or an incidental proposition, or even an incidental in a parenthesis. This example from Henry de Montherlant (Les Célibataires) shows that the epiphrase can indeed be added to the typographical parenthesis:
+
+"The expression on Mr. Octave's face when he saw smoke (cigarette smoke) in his room (his room...), and ashes on his carpet (his carpet...), was worthy of the theater."
+For the French academic and specialist in stylistics Henri Suhamy, the epiphrase is almost synonymous with epiphonemas (the addition of an often sententious statement to a textual whole that seems to be finished) and paremboles (a proposition inserted into a speech to express the personal point of view of the author or narrator), especially when it designates "indignant exclamations, moralistic reflections, conclusions and general ideas with which orators or fictitious characters comment on their own speeches". As an example, Suhamy quotes the words of Ferrante, a character in Henry de Montherlant's tragedy La Reine Morte:
+
+"I forgive you. But how vain is forgiveness!"
+Patrick Bacry talks about a quick author's comment, in a few words, in the form of parentheses, about what he is evoking, as in this sentence by Alexandre Dumas in which the epífrase is marked using an incise:
+
+"Their fortune was otherwise made, not their fortune with the king, but their position assured."
+Patrick Bacry points out that the figure also designates a "development, always terminative and as if added to an idea on which the sentence, the narrative, the discourse seemed to have to end." He quotes Ronsard in his Discours:
+
+They broke my dress by breaking my cities,
+Making my citizens despise me,
+Have plundered my hair by pillaging my churches,
+
+My churches, alas! that by force they took,
+In powder, smashing images and altars,
+Venerable residence of our immortal saints.
+
+The sentence, which gave the impression of ending with the third verse, continues in a "sort of final rebound that constitutes the epiphrase."
+Georges Molinié, a specialist in French stylistics, considers that the epiphrase is formed when the added utterance is "thematically and syntactically attached to what precedes", by means of a linguistic index such as an anaphoric for example. However, the figure only serves to flesh out a discourse.
+The epiphrase exists in most other languages, as here in German, with a line from Friedrich von Schiller's play Guillaume Tell:
+
+"Mein Retter seid Ihr und mein Engel."
+("You are my savior and my angel.")
+
+=== The difference with the epiphonema ===
+Etymologically, the figure designates an "added word", close to the epiphonema, but it differs from it by the fact that it adds a brief comment to the discourse. Moreover, if the epiphrase is removed, the discourse does not lose any raw information, as in this sentence by Marcel Proust:
+
+"Mrs. Verdurin was still telling me this on the last day (you know, on the eve of departure we talk better)."
+Michèle Aquien and Georges Molinié classify the epiphrase as a macrostructural figure: it concerns a discourse often considered complete, but which is enriched by a thought, forming the epiphrase, "which could well be produced elsewhere or on its own but which in this case forms a development welded to the articulation of the reasoning in the text." Moreover, the removal of the epiphrase "would distort the argument". It is this non-removable feature that distinguishes the epiphrase from the epiphonema, which is an added but syntactically and semantically optional word. Michèle Aquien and Georges Molinié cite this aphorism of Saint-Just as an example:

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+title: "Epiphrase"
+chunk: 2/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:05.688061+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+"You wanted a Republic; if you did not want at the same time what constitutes it, it would bury the people under its debris. What constitutes a Republic is the destruction of that which is opposed to it."
+The last sentence could be uttered on its own or in contexts other than the quoted speech. However, if it is removed from this passage, Saint-Just's argument becomes flawed.
+The difference can also be semantic: according to Jean-Jacques Robrieux, epiphonemas are distinguished from epiphrases because the former figure is intended to evoke a thought more generally and sententiously, as at this end of a fragment of Pascal's Pensées, where the figurative effect is reinforced using typographical parentheses:
+
+"(How hollow and full of garbage is the heart of man!)"
+
+=== Hyperbaton and epiphrase ===
+The epiphrase is considered by the Group μ in its General Rhetoric as proceeding from linguistic permutation, not from addition. In this sense, the epiphrase is only a hyperbaton, like the anastrophe or the tmesis. The Group μ quotes this line from Jules Laforgue:
+
+"He was beautiful, wasn't he, Narcissus? And distinguished!"
+
+== Two purposes ==
+
+The epiphrase is a figure of speech with two purposes; it can be either a brief comment, in the form of an incise, by an author about the idea he is developing, or an addition at the end of a speech, which allows the development of a final idea.
+
+=== Adding words ===
+The epiphrase has a general value of digression in the sense that it is an added and terminating development of a previously developed idea to which one returns to insist, put forward by the narrator; it is then close to palinody, which consists in returning to words, to contradict oneself voluntarily.
+Like all the incises of the author, or of the narrator, in the development of the plot, the epiphrase is often a specific mark of enunciation. There is indeed an epiphrase when the author intervenes in his work by means of comments inserted in the discourse, points out the literary critic and theorist Gérard Genette, for whom it is, in fact, close to the parenthesis, of which it is considered a variant:
+
+For who avenges his father, there is no forfeit,
+And it is to sell one's blood to surrender to kindness.
+In this sense, it always marks the opinion of the enunciator and can constitute a disjunct. For example, Voltaire ends his portrait of the Duke of Guise, in La Henriade, with an accusatory epiphrase:
+
+He formed in Paris this disastrous League
+Which soon infected all the rest of France;
+A dreadful monster that fed the people and the great,
+
+Fertilized with carnage and fertile with tyrants.
+The nota bene, rejected in the paratext, is like an epiphrase for Bernard Dupriez because it is directed toward the reader.
+
+=== Author's comment ===
+Gérard Genette, in Figures II (chapter " Vraisemblance et motivation "), sees in the epiphrase the privileged mode of appearance of the author within his work, the one by which he can address his reader. The word is thus extracted from the discursive framework to concern the reader, as in a tête-à-tête. In this case, the figure concerns only the author and no longer the narrator. In Figure III, Genette argues that epiphrase is constitutive of the explanatory and moralist genre. He makes the figure the notion designating any intervention of the auctorial discourse in the narrative and considers that the name of "epiphonema" has become "inconvenient" to designate this phenomenon.
+Bernard Dupriez notes that the epode of Greek poetry, sometimes satirical, is close to the epiphrase.
+This commentary, which takes the place of parenthesis, is often placed at the end of a speech or a narrative and has the function of expressing a feeling or an opinion, in an exclamatory manner, according to Jean-Jacques Robrieux. The epiphrase adds a comment from the author, who wants to specify a particular point or to deliver a feeling or an idea, as in this extract from The Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
+
+"I should have counted on this metamorphosis in advance, but so many strange circumstances were attached to it; so many obscure remarks and reticences accompanied it; I was told about it with air so laughably discreet that all these mysteries worried me. I have always hated darkness; it naturally inspires in me a horror that those with which I have been surrounded for so many years have not diminished."
+Jean-Jacques Robrieux considers that the epiphrase is a figure of speech used in rhetoric to "deviate" from the subject. Close to the parenthesis, it allows the author to present his feelings with emphasis, as in this example:
+
+"Tomorrow I'll have finished this tedious work. It's about time! I'll finally be able to go on vacation. And it's deserved!"
+
+== Stylistic use ==
+Pierre Macherey notes that the epiphrases in Honoré de Balzac's work, which he calls "separable statements", are an integral part of the novelistic text and participate fully in its stylistics: "These separable statements are not separate statements: they are in work not as true statements, but as novelistic objects; they are there the term of a designation, of a monstration; their status, in spite of the appearances, is not directly ideological: the mode of their presence is that of a presentation which digs them, exhibits in them a fundamental disparity. Thus, they are not in the text as intruders, but as effects: they have meaning only by the metamorphosis that makes them elements among others of the process of novelistic production."
+By creating an epiphrase, the author allows for a break in tone, an effect of distance or, on the contrary, a rapprochement towards the reader, often with a comic or humorous intention as in this passage from Hector Berlioz in which "the memoirist intervenes directly to break the spell of his style himself":

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+title: "Epiphrase"
+chunk: 3/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:05.688061+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+"For this glorious day, the academicians put on their beautiful green embroidered garments; they shine, they dazzle. They are going to crown in pomp, a painter, a sculptor, an architect, an engraver and a musician. Great is the joy in the gynaecium of the muses. What have I just written there?... it looks like a verse."
+In the short story L'Amour impossible, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly questions his own writing practice through numerous epiphrases:
+
+"The impression that I kept from it, it is that there is in all this book enough the instinct of the nuances and some big features which announce the width of the touch for later; – of the remainder, the style without natural [... A style made of oyster shells, so overloaded with different layers of ideas that it would take punctuation made on purpose to unravel it [...] the truth is that there are too many incidences to my sentence, too many intersecting insights, harming the march of thought and the clarity of expression."
+The epiphrase, by "its massive use, tends here to provoke a certain "18th effect" which is one of the characteristics of L'Amour impossible". Norbert Dodille speaks of a "poetics of the epiphrase", specific to the genre of the essay, and functioning as "interweaving of insights".
+
+== Rhetorical use ==
+The epiphrase can also have a rhetorical use, in the framework of an argument. Thus, explains José Domingues de Almeida, Michel Houellebecq's novel  The Elementary Particles resorts to "this mechanism by which the author makes the characters say his points of view without "getting wet" too much, but being sure of the effect caused on his readership, of the damage caused behind him by his text." In this perspective, Houellebecq's "epiphrastic commentary" is a "tool chosen to describe and denounce this rotten society stuck in its contradictions," used in combination with the cliché.
+Jean-Jacques Robrieux has shown that the epiphrase, often inserted by apposition, participates in Voltaire's hidden arguments in his Treatise on Tolerance.
+
+== See also ==
+Digression
+Hyperbaton
+Palinody or palinode
+Parabasis
+Parenthesis or brackets
+Figure of speech
+
+== References ==
+
+== Bibliography ==
+Bacry, Patrick (1992). Les Figures de style et autres procédés stylistiques. Collection Sujets (in French). Paris: Armand Colin. ISBN 2-7011-1393-8.
+Dupriez, Bernard (2003). Gradus, les procédés littéraires. Domaine français (in French). Paris: Union générale d'édition. ISBN 978-2-264-03709-1.
+Gorp, Van; Delabastita, Dirk; Legros, Georges; Grutman, Rainier; and alii (2005). Dictionnaire des termes littéraires, Hendrik (in French). Hendrik: Honoré Champion. ISBN 978-2-7453-1325-6.
+Robrieux, Jean-Jacques (2004). Les Figures de style et de rhétorique. Les topos (in French). Paris: Dunod. ISBN 2-10-003560-6.
+Robrieux, Jean-Jacques (1993). Éléments de rhétorique et d'argumentation (in French). Paris: Dunod. ISBN 2-10-001480-3.
+Suhamy, Henri (2004). Les Figures de style. Que sais-je ? (in French). Vol. 1889. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ISBN 2-13-044604-3.
+Aquien, Michèle; Molinié, Georges (1999). Dictionnaire de rhétorique et de poétique. La Pochothèque (in French). Paris: LGF. ISBN 2-253-13017-6.
+Groupe μ (1970). Rhétorique générale. Langue et langage (in French). Paris: Larousse. ISBN 2-02-006321-2.
+Genette, Gérard (1972a). Figures II (in French). Paris: Seuil.
+Genette, Gérard (1972b). Figures III. Poétique (in French). Le Seuil.
+Domingues de Almeida, José (2007). Réactions à la réaction. Brèves considérations sur le sens de l'épiphrase dans Les particules élémentaires de Michel Houellebecq. Vol. 3. Çédille. ISSN 1699-4949.
+Dodille, Norbert (2009). L'air ambiant : poétique de l'épiphrase dans L'amour impossible in Barbey d'Aurevilly 13. Sur l'Histoire. Vol. 824–828. Revue des lettres modernes. ISSN 0035-2136.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language-0.md

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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanandum_and_explanans-0.md

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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extramural_English-0.md

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+---
+title: "Extramural English"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extramural_English"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:09.540102+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In the field of second-language acquisition, extramural English (EE) is English that learners come in contact with or are involved in outside the walls of the classroom, often through streaming media and online games. It is an example of informal learning of English. EE includes using English-mediated media, listening to music, watching films or series, using social network sites, reading books and playing video games that require the use of English. EE includes both online and offline activities and is always initiated by the learner, not by the teacher. EE activities can be carried out with or without deliberate intention to improve English language proficiency. Hence, EE encompasses both incidental and intentional language learning. EE research that centers on online activities is often viewed as computer-assisted language learning (CALL) research. EE is linked to the theory of learner autonomy.
+The term extramural English was first coined in 2009 by Pia Sundqvist. It refers to 'English outside the walls' (from Latin extramural, where the prefix, extra, means 'outside' and the stem, mural, means 'wall').
+Research studies report several learning benefits of EE, such as promoting vocabulary acquisition, fostering learner autonomy, increasing literacy development and encouraging self-regulated learning. To bridge learning English outside and inside the classroom some teachers use a 30-day challenge with a focus on EE activities. This way of learning a language is not particular to English but can involve any target language. The overarching term referring to learning any target language is Extramural Ln.
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicity_(pragmatics)-0.md

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+---
+title: "Felicity (pragmatics)"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicity_(pragmatics)"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:12.078006+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics and philosophy of language, an utterance is felicitous if it is pragmatically well-formed. An utterance can be infelicitous because it is self-contradictory, trivial, irrelevant, or because it is somehow inappropriate for the context of utterance. Researchers in semantics and pragmatics use felicity judgments much as syntacticians use grammaticality judgments. An infelicitous sentence is marked with the pound sign.
+The terms felicitous and infelicitous were first proposed by J. L. Austin as part of his theory of speech acts. In his thinking, a performative utterance is neither true nor false, but can instead be deemed felicitous or infelicitous according to a set of conditions whose interpretation differs depending on whether the utterance in question is a declaration ("I sentence you to death"), a request ("I ask that you stop doing that") or a warning ("I warn you not to jump off the roof").
+
+
+== Felicity conditions for declarations ==
+Conventionality of procedure: the procedure (e.g. an oath) follows its conventional form
+Appropriate participants and circumstances: the participants are able to perform a felicitous speech act under the circumstances (e.g. a judge can sentence a criminal in court, but not on the street)
+Complete execution: the speaker completes the speech act without errors or interruptions
+
+
+== Felicity conditions for requests ==
+Propositional content condition: the requested act is a future act of the hearer
+Preparatory precondition: 1) the speaker believes the hearer can perform the requested act; 2) it is not obvious that the hearer would perform the requested act without being asked
+Sincerity condition: the speaker genuinely wants the hearer to perform the requested act
+Essential condition: the utterance counts as an attempt by the speaker to have the hearer do an act
+
+
+== Felicity conditions for warnings ==
+Propositional content condition: it is a future event
+Preparatory precondition: 1) the speaker believes the event will occur and be detrimental to the hearer; 2) the speaker believes that it is not obvious to the hearer that the event will occur
+Sincerity condition: the speaker genuinely believes that the event will be detrimental to the hearer
+Essential condition: the utterance counts as an attempt by the speaker to have the hearer recognize that a future event will be detrimental
+
+
+== See also ==
+John Searle
+Illocutionary act
+Pragmatics
+
+
+== References ==
+Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words. Oxford University Press.
+Searle, J. R. (1969) Speech acts. Cambridge University Press.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurae-0.md

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+---
+title: "Figurae"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurae"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:13.273468+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Figurae (singular, figura) are the non-signifying constituents of signifiers (signs). For example, letters of the alphabet are the figurae that comprise a written word (signifier).  In the semiotic language of Louis Hjelmslev, the coiner of this term, figurae serve only to distinguish elements (e.g. words) of the expression plane from each other, independently from the content plane.   That is, the letter B, in the written word expression "bat", distinguishes "bat" from the word  "sat", but neither B nor S bears meaning on its own.  On the other hand, the constituents "foot" and "ball" both bear their own individual meanings, such that in the word "football", they cannot be considered figurae, although their individual letters can.  Hjelmslev states that in a given language a "legion of signs" can be constructed with a "handful of figurae" through ever new arrangements of them. Linguists often use the terms phonemes and morphemes to refer, respectively, to the figurae and the signifiers of human languages.
+The division of the stream of speech into meaningful morphemes plus their further subdivision into meaningless elements is known as the double articulation.  This duality of patterning of language is one of the few facts of language which most schools of linguistics can agree on.   Occasionally, two morphemes can combine in an arbitrary way into a new morpheme, as in double names such as Mary-Alice, John-Paul, and Sarah-Jean, creating a kind of triple articulation.  English speakers recognize Mary and Alice as parts of the name Mary-Alice, yet they understand that a woman of that name is in no way a combination of two other women.   But neither are double given names typical of English, nor are surnames meaningless, since surnames usually identify a family relationship.   As far as the combination of meaningful elements is concerned, there is much less agreement on what constitutes a syntagm (e.g. foot-ball, I-am) and whether any such syntax is universal.
+In theory, any sign could be composed of figurae, but care must be taken in distinguishing between the control-number-like function of figurae (as in the individual digits of a telephone extension) and the syntax-like function of meaning constituents (as in the area code of a full telephone number).   For example, the symbols for the lines of the New York City subway system are composed of very elementary parts, e.g., letters or numbers and colors.   While the assignment of letters to trains is arbitrary, and colors are arbitrarily assigned to various avenues in Manhattan,  the combination of a letter or number and color is not arbitrary.  That is, the symbol for the A Train has to be blue, since it runs along Eighth Avenue and all other Eighth Avenue train symbols are blue.   Therefore, these colors cannot be considered figurae.   
+On the other hand, the flags of a dozen countries consist of three horizontal bars, distinguished by their colors.   It can be said that the colors and bars form a system of signifiers, consisting of the color figurae in a vertical order.  For example, the flag of Russia is made up of a white, a blue, and a red bar, from top to bottom, whereas the flag of Estonia consists of a blue, a black and a white bar.  From the point of view of a vexillologist, the colors have no meaning until they are grouped together and form the national symbol.   Although white, blue and red may be "national colors" of Russia, combined in a different order they form the flag of Luxembourg.
+In reality, most national flags do not conform to the three-horizontal-band pattern.  Furthermore, national flags vary somewhat in their horizontal and vertical proportions, and shades of colors can differ.  Nevertheless, this logical analysis of flags into horizontal-color-bar figurae, though not exact, would probably be arrived at by almost anyone comparing these 12 national symbols.  But it is also possible to over-analyze signs.  For example, a television picture of a flag would consist of thousands of meaningless pixels.   A recording of speech could be digitalized on a CD into millions of meaningless bits.  Neither of these mechanical divisions could be considered figurae.  It would seem, then, that since signs are defined as entities recognized by sentient beings (including many animal species), the constituents of signs, figurae, must also be easily recognizable as entities, even though they have no meaning in themselves.   It probably requires lot of specialization or intelligence to mentally process figurae, since it demands not only the disassociation of the characteristics of a symbol with those of its referent, but this disassociation has to be repeated for each figura that comprises the arbitrary symbol.   Figurae have not yet been recognized in any non-human natural communication system.  Although the honeybee waggle dance may involve some arbitrary symbols, they are combined with non-arbitrary ones, much like the subway line symbols.
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filled_pause-0.md

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+---
+title: "Filled pause"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filled_pause"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:14.462716+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+A filled pause is a non-silent pause in an otherwise fluent speech, where instead of a silent pause there is a filler. The filler can be non-lexical or semiarticulate utterances such as huh, uh, erm, um, or hmm. Fillers may also include words such as well, so, I mean, and like, when used in ways that don't change the meaning of the surrounding speech.
+This particular type of pause is one of several types of speech disfluencies, which also includes silent pauses, "false starts", phrases that are restarted or repeated, and repeated syllables.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-0.md

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+---
+title: "Filler (linguistics)"
+chunk: 1/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:15.763963+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics, a filler, filled pause, hesitation marker or planner is a sound or word that participants in a conversation use to signal that they are pausing to think but are not finished speaking. These are not to be confused with placeholder names, such as thingamajig. Fillers fall into the category of formulaic language, and different languages have different characteristic filler sounds. The term filler also has a separate use in the syntactic description of wh-movement constructions (see below).
+
+== Usage ==
+Every conversation involves turn-taking, and speakers need to signal whether they are yielding the turn or want to keep going.  Pauses are common in both cases, but to avoid confusion, speakers wanting to continue commonly use fillers, such as um, er, or uh.
+Beyond conveying "I still want to talk", fillers can also convey more: whether the speaker is just trying to find the right word or is struggling to formulate his/her thought at a deeper level.  "Uh" is more common in the former, and "um" in the latter. However fillers are often more complex, conveying many nuances of meaning and doing so through subtle variation, both prosodic and phonetic, such that many fillers are sound combinations, rather than words.
+Filler words may also provide clues to the listener about how they should interpret what the speaker has said. The actual words that people use may change (such as the increasing use of like), but the meaning and the reasons for using them do not change.
+
+== In English ==
+In American English, the most common filler sounds are uh , ah , and um . In British English, the equivalents are er  and erm . Among younger speakers, the fillers "like", "you know", "I mean", "okay", "so", "actually", "basically", and "right?" are among the more prevalent.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-over-final_constraint-0.md

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+---
+title: "Final-over-final constraint"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-over-final_constraint"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:16.969159+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics, the final-over-final constraint (or final-over-final condition; FOFC) is a proposed constraint in word-order variation in natural language concerning the hierarchical structure seen in extended projections, which asserts that a head-final phrase cannot immediately dominate a head-initial phrase if they are in the same extended projection. The FOFC has been suggested as a potential linguistic universal, following the Chomskyan research program in which the existence of linguistic universals is assumed to arise from an innate biological component of the language faculty that allows humans to learn language. Specifically, it is defined as:If 
+  
+    
+      
+        α
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha }
+  
+ and 
+  
+    
+      
+        β
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \beta }
+  
+ are members of the same extended projection, then a head-final 
+  
+    
+      
+        β
+        P
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \beta P}
+  
+ cannot immediately dominate a head-initial 
+  
+    
+      
+        α
+        P
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha P}
+  
+, as below:
+
+This effect was first noticed by Anders Holmberg in Finnish, when comparing it with the similarly disharmonic head-initial over head-final structure:    
+
+
+== Accounting for the FOFC with the Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA) ==
+Biberauer, Holmberg and Roberts (2014) propose an account of the FOFC derived from Kayne's Antisymmetry Theory and the Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), in which all maximal projections follow the 'specifier head-complement template' as below, and all variation in word-order arises due to movement.
+
+Biberaer et al. assume that all movement is triggered by the presence of a movement diacritic 
+  
+    
+      
+        ∧
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \wedge }
+  
+ with no semantic content such that movement to the specifier of a head 
+  
+    
+      
+        α
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha }
+  
+ is triggered by the presence of 
+  
+    
+      
+        ∧
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \wedge }
+  
+ on 
+  
+    
+      
+        α
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha }
+  
+. Functional heads cannot introduce 
+  
+    
+      
+        ∧
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \wedge }
+  
+, though they may inherit it from the head of their complement.  Then from this, the proposal is that the following more formally defined constraint holds. Final-over-Final Constraint: If a head 
+  
+    
+      
+        
+          α
+          
+            i
+          
+        
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha _{i}}
+  
+ in the extended projection EP of a lexical head L, EP(L), has 
+  
+    
+      
+        ∧
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \wedge }
+  
+ associated with its 
+  
+    
+      
+        [
+        ±
+        V
+        ]
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle [\pm V]}
+  
+-feature, then so does 
+  
+    
+      
+        
+          α
+          
+            i
+            +
+            1
+          
+        
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha _{i+1}}
+  
+, where 
+  
+    
+      
+        
+          α
+          
+            i
+            +
+            1
+          
+        
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha _{i+1}}
+  
+ is c-selected by 
+  
+    
+      
+        
+          α
+          
+            i
+          
+        
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha _{i}}
+  
+ in EP(L).
+
+
+== Other accounts of the FOFC ==
+There have been attempts, notably by Carlo Cecchetto and Hedde Zeijlstra, to account for the FOFC asymmetry without making use of the LCA, instead basing their accounts as coming from restrictions in parsing on rightward-dependencies.
+Cecchetto proposes that if backward dependencies cannot cross phrase structure boundaries, then the Right-roof constraint (a locality condition on rightward movement) and FOFC are 'two faces of the same coin', as they both constrain the generation of structures that involve backward localisation; a trace, in the case of the Right-roof constraint, or in regards to the selected head of a selecting head in the case of FOFC, and so the FOFC-violating configuration will only be possible if 
+  
+    
+      
+        β
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \beta }
+  
+ is a movement target for 
+  
+    
+      
+        α
+        P
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha P}
+  
+ rather than 
+  
+    
+      
+        α
+      
+    
+    {\displaystyle \alpha }
+  
+ as backward localisation is costly for the parser and will only be possible if it is very local.
+Zeijlstra's account, meanwhile, derives largely from Abels & Neeleman's account of Greenberg's Universal 20, which observes that head movement within an extended projection cannot be rightward unless the movement is string-vacuous, which not only circumvents the theoretical and empirical challenges to LCA, but also accounts for particles which often form counter-examples to FOFC.
+
+
+== Counterexamples and Challenges to the FOFC ==
+It seems to be the case that clause-final particles in VO languages form a natural class of counterexamples to the FOFC. Thus, it must be then investigated whether such counterexamples do indeed violate FOFC, and if so, then any account of FOFC must be revised to account for such counterexamples. For example, sentence-final Tense-Aspect-Mood particles appear in many East Asian and Central African languages (Examples from Mumuye; Shimizu 1983: 107 & 112)
+
+Notably, none of these particles exhibit inflectional morphology and as such do not exhibit any φ-agreement, and so it seems that a theory that concerns FOFC should account for the fact that particles that exhibit inflection seem to be pervasively FOFC-compliant, however non-inflected particles often are not.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Antisymmetry
+Syntactic movement
+Logical form (linguistics)
+Phonetic form
+Greenberg's linguistic universals
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+[1] M. Sheehan, T. Biberauer, I. Roberts, and A. Holmberg, The Final-Over-Final Condition: A Syntactic Universal. The MIT Press, 2017. doi: 10.7551/mitpress/8687.001.0001.
+[2] M. Sheehan, ‘Explaining the Final-over-Final Constraint: Formal and Functional Approaches*’, in Theoretical Approaches to Disharmonic Word Order, T. Biberauer and M. Sheehan, Eds., Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 407–444. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199684359.003.0015.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology-0.md

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+---
+title: "Folk etymology"
+chunk: 1/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:10.762222+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Folk etymology is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one through popular usage. The form or the meaning of an archaic, foreign, or otherwise unfamiliar word is reinterpreted as resembling more familiar words or morphemes.
+The term folk etymology is a loan translation from German Volksetymologie, coined by  Ernst Förstemann in 1852. Folk etymology is a productive process in historical linguistics, language change, and social interaction. Reanalysis of a word's history or original form can affect its spelling, pronunciation, or meaning. This is frequently seen in relation to loanwords or words that have become archaic or obsolete.
+Folk/popular etymology may also refer to a popular false belief about the etymology of a word or phrase that does not lead to a change in the form or meaning. To disambiguate the usage of the term "folk/popular etymology", Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposes a clear-cut distinction between the derivational-only popular etymology (DOPE) and the generative popular etymology (GPE): the DOPE refers to a popular false etymology involving no neologization, and the GPE refers to neologization generated by a popular false etymology.
+Examples of words created or changed through folk etymology include the English dialectal form sparrowgrass, originally from Greek ἀσπάραγος ("asparagus") remade by analogy to the more familiar words sparrow and grass. When the alteration of an unfamiliar word or phrase is spontaneously performed by an individual, it is known as an eggcorn.
+
+== Productive force ==
+The technical term "folk etymology" refers to a change in the form of a word caused by erroneous popular suppositions about its etymology. Until the academic development of comparative linguistics and description of laws underlying sound changes, the derivation of a word was mostly guess-work. Speculation about the original form of words in turn feeds back into the development of the word and thus becomes a part of a new etymology.
+Believing a word to have a certain origin, people begin to pronounce, spell, or otherwise use the word in a manner appropriate to that perceived origin.  This popular etymologizing has had a powerful influence on the forms which words take. Examples in English include crayfish or crawfish, which are not historically related to fish but come from Middle English crevis, cognate with French écrevisse. Likewise chaise lounge, from the original French chaise longue ("long chair"), has come to be associated with the word lounge.
+
+== Related phenomena ==
+
+Other types of language change caused by reanalysis of the structure of a word include rebracketing and back-formation.
+In rebracketing, users of the language change, misinterpret, or reinterpret the location of a boundary between words or morphemes. For example, the Old French word orenge 'orange tree' comes from Arabic النَّرَنْج an-naranj 'the orange tree', with the initial ⟨n⟩ of naranj understood as part of the article. Rebracketing in the opposite direction saw the Middle English a napron and a nadder become an apron and an adder.
+In back-formation, a new word is created by removing elements from an existing word that are interpreted as affixes. For example, Italian pronuncia 'pronunciation, accent' is derived from the verb pronunciare 'to pronounce, to utter' and English edit derives from editor. Some cases of back-formation are based on folk etymology.
+
+== Examples in English ==
+In linguistic change caused by folk etymology, the form of a word changes so that it better matches its popular rationalisation.  Typically this happens either to unanalysable foreign words or to compounds where the word underlying one part of the compound becomes obsolete.
+
+=== Loanwords ===
+There are many examples of words borrowed from foreign languages, and subsequently changed by folk etymology.
+The spelling of many borrowed words reflects folk etymology. For example, andiron borrowed from Old French was variously spelled aundyre or aundiren in Middle English, but was altered by association with iron. Other Old French loans altered in a similar manner include belfry (from berfrey) by association with bell, female (from femelle) by male, and penthouse (from apentis) by house. The variant spelling of licorice as liquorice comes from the supposition that it has something to do with liquid. Anglo-Norman licoris (influenced by licor 'liquor') and Late Latin liquirītia were respelled for similar reasons, though the ultimate origin of all three is Ancient Greek γλυκύρριζα glucúrrhiza 'sweet root'.
+Reanalysis of loan words can affect their spelling, pronunciation, or meaning. The word cockroach, for example, was borrowed from Spanish cucaracha but was assimilated to the existing English words cock and roach. The phrase forlorn hope originally meant "storming party, body of skirmishers" from Dutch verloren hoop "lost troop". But confusion with English hope has given the term an additional meaning of "hopeless venture".
+Sometimes imaginative stories are created to account for the link between a borrowed word and its popularly assumed sources. The names of the serviceberry, service tree, and related plants, for instance, come from the Latin name sorbus. The plants were called syrfe in Old English, which eventually became service. Fanciful stories suggest that the name comes from the fact that the trees bloom in spring, a time when circuit-riding preachers resume church services or when funeral services are carried out for people who died during the winter.
+A seemingly plausible but no less speculative etymology accounts for the form of Welsh rarebit, a dish made of cheese and toasted bread. The earliest known reference to the dish in 1725 called it Welsh rabbit. The origin of that name is unknown, but presumably humorous, since the dish contains no rabbit. In 1785 Francis Grose suggested in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue that the dish is "a Welch rare bit", though the word rarebit was not common prior to Grose's dictionary. Both versions of the name are in current use; individuals sometimes express strong opinions concerning which version is correct.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology-1.md

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+---
+title: "Folk etymology"
+chunk: 2/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:10.762222+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Obsolete forms ===
+When a word or other form becomes obsolete, words or phrases containing the obsolete portion may be reanalyzed and changed.
+Some compound words from Old English were reanalyzed in Middle or Modern English when one of the constituent words fell out of use. Examples include bridegroom from Old English brydguma 'bride-man'. The word gome 'man' from Old English guma fell out of use during the sixteenth century and the compound was eventually reanalyzed with the Modern English word groom 'male servant'. A similar reanalysis caused sandblind, from unattested Old English *sāmblind 'half-blind' with a once-common prefix sām- 'semi-', to be respelled as though it is related to sand. The word island derives from Old English igland. The modern spelling with the letter s is the result of comparison with the synonym isle from Old French and ultimately as a Latinist borrowing of insula, though the Old French and Old English words are not historically related. In a similar way, the spelling of wormwood was likely affected by comparison with wood.
+The phrase curry favour, meaning to flatter, comes from Middle English curry favel 'groom a chestnut horse'. This was an allusion to a fourteenth-century French morality poem, Roman de Fauvel, about a chestnut-coloured horse who corrupts men through duplicity. The phrase was reanalyzed in early Modern English by comparison to favour as early as 1510.
+Words need not completely disappear before their compounds are reanalyzed. The word shamefaced was originally shamefast. The original meaning of fast 'fixed in place' still exists, as in the compounded words steadfast and colorfast, but by itself mainly in frozen expressions such as stuck fast, hold fast, and play fast and loose. The songbird wheatear or white-ear is a back-formation from Middle English whit-ers 'white arse', referring to the prominent white rump found in most species. Although both white and arse are common in Modern English, the folk etymology may be euphemism.
+Reanalysis of archaic or obsolete forms can lead to changes in meaning as well. The original meaning of hangnail referred to a corn on the foot. The word comes from Old English ang- + nægel 'anguished nail, compressed spike', but the spelling and pronunciation were affected by folk etymology in the seventeenth century or earlier. Thereafter, the word came to be used for a tag of skin or torn cuticle near a fingernail or toenail.
+
+== Other languages ==
+Several words in Medieval Latin were subject to folk etymology. For example, the word widerdonum meaning 'reward' was borrowed from Old High German widarlōn 'repayment of a loan'. The l → d alteration is due to confusion with Latin donum 'gift'. Similarly, the word baceler or bacheler (related to modern English bachelor) referred to a junior knight. It is attested from the eleventh century, though its ultimate origin is uncertain. By the late Middle Ages its meaning was extended to the holder of a university degree inferior to master or doctor.  This was later re-spelled baccalaureus, probably reflecting a false derivation from bacca laurea 'laurel berry', alluding to the possible laurel crown of a poet or conqueror.
+Likewise in Greek myth, many religious terms are folk-etymologised to suit common vocabulary. In Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, the name of Zeus is folk-etymologised to connect it to Zoe (the word for "life" as a phenomenon; compare the doublet bios referring to a qualified life or lifespan, both of which are cognate to English "quick"), giving it the meaning "cause of life always to all things", because of puns between alternate titles of Zeus (Zen and Dia) with the Greek words for life and "because of"; in reality, his name is a reflex of *Dyēus, an PIE root meaning "bright/shining one".
+Diodorus Siculus wrote that Zeus was also called Zen, because the humans believed that he was the cause of life. Meanwhile, Lactantius wrote that he was called Zeus and Zen not because he is the giver of life, but because he was the first who lived of the children of Cronus, therefore making the meaning of his name "the one who lived". The name of Orion, likewise, is folk-etymologised as a polite alteration of "Urion", referring to his conception through the gods urinating on his mother's ashes; his name is speculated today to have been borrowed from Akkadian Uru-annak, meaning "Heaven's light".
+In the fourteenth or fifteenth century, French scholars began to spell the verb savoir 'to know' as sçavoir on the false belief it was derived from Latin scire 'to know'.  In fact it comes from sapere 'to be wise'.
+The Italian word liocorno, meaning 'unicorn' derives from 13th-century lunicorno (lo 'the' + unicorno 'unicorn'). Folk etymology based on lione 'lion' altered the spelling and pronunciation. Dialectal liofante 'elephant' was likewise altered from elefante by association with lione.
+The Dutch word for 'hammock' is hangmat. It was borrowed from Spanish hamaca (ultimately from Arawak amàca) and altered by comparison with hangen and mat 'hanging mat'. German Hängematte shares this folk etymology.
+Islambol, a folk etymology meaning 'Islam abounding', is one of the names of Istanbul used after the Ottoman conquest of 1453.
+An example from Persian is the word شطرنج shatranj 'chess', which is derived from the Sanskrit चतुरङ्ग chatur-anga ("four-army [game]"; 2nd century BCE), and after losing the u to syncope, became چترنگ chatrang in Middle Persian (6th century CE). Today it is sometimes factorized as sad 'hundred' + ranj 'worry, mood', or 'a hundred worries'.
+Some Indonesian feminists discourage usage of the term wanita ('woman') and replacing it with perempuan, since wanita itself has misogynistic roots. First, in Javanese, wanita is a portmanteau of wani ditata (dare to be controlled), also, wanita is taken from Sanskrit वनिता vanitā (someone desired by men).
+In Turkey, the political Democrat Party changed its logo in 2007 to a white horse in front of a red background because many voters folk-etymologized its Turkish name Demokrat as demir kırat 'iron white-horse'.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== References ==
+
+== Further reading ==
+Brunvand, Jan Harold (2012). Encyclopedia of Urban Legends, Volume 1. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO. pp. 242–44. ISBN 978-1-59-884720-8.
+Anatoly Liberman (2005). Word Origins ... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-516147-2.
+Adrian Room (1986). Dictionary of True Etymologies. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7102-0340-3.
+David Wilton (2004). Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517284-1.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_linguistics-0.md

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+---
+title: "Folk linguistics"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_linguistics"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:18.180028+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Folk linguistics consists of statements, beliefs, or practices concerning language which are based on uninformed speculation rather than based on the scientific method, which characterizes the modern field of linguistics. Folk linguistics sometimes arises when scientific conclusions about language come off as counterintuitive to native speakers. However, folk linguistics may also be motivated by confirmation bias, prejudice, ideology, or nationalism.
+
+
+== Examples ==
+
+Jackendoff (2003) cites the following statements as typical examples of folk-linguistic beliefs.
+
+Claim: "Parents teach their children to talk". Adults assume that children either learn language directly from their parents or via simple imitation.
+On the contrary, research in child language acquisition shows that a child acquires language more automatically, through a systematic pattern rarely noticed by adults. Although interaction with parents, adults, and other children is crucial, it is very difficult to "correct" a child. Instead, most children can learn to speak native languages (including those of their peers of the same age) through a process called "acquisition". Any errors noticed by a parent are often self-corrected by the child weeks or months later.
+Claim: "Children will get confused if they try to speak more than one language". Many parents are afraid a child cannot sort out input from multiple languages.
+In reality, children can easily become multilingual if they are exposed to more than one language. There may be a period of confusion, but most children are able to segregate many distinct grammars.
+Claim: "There is a proper, correct English".  Speakers generally value an educated form of the language, often its written form, and that other dialectal/spoken forms are considered structurally inferior or "sloppy", and speakers of these forms are often regarded as "stupid, lazy, sloppy, hick" or other pejorative terms.
+However, linguists generally agree that vernacular varieties such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have the same grammatical complexity as standard forms of English. Folk linguistic beliefs view these lects as inferior, and as a result speakers of non-standard forms often suffer forms of linguistic discrimination.
+Claim: "The modern language is going downhill". Purists opine that changes in the spoken language (e.g. new words, innovations in grammar, new pronunciation patterns) are detrimental rather than just change.
+In fact, living languages are not static. Their evolution is not just a modern phenomenon.
+Other beliefs may include:
+
+A belief that a language's grammar can negatively influence and restrict how people think. This is also known as the strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Although some linguists do advocate a form of this, many linguists reject this as being too simplistic. For instance, just because a language does not formally distinguish "he" vs. "she" in their personal pronouns does not mean that speakers do not distinguish and treat men and women differently. Similarly, just because English lacks a formal hodiernal tense does not mean that English speakers cannot distinguish events which occur "today" versus those on another day.
+Examples of folk etymology such as interpreting asparagus as "sparrow-grass". These are cases where speakers deduce an incorrect word origin. Another folk etymology is the assumption that the New York place name Fishkill (on Fishkill Creek) means a place to kill fish. In reality, -kill is from a Dutch word meaning "creek" (found also in river names such as Schuylkill, Pennsylvania and Wallkill, New Jersey). However, the folk etymology caused animal rights groups such as PETA to lobby that the town should be renamed.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Common English usage misconceptions
+Folk etymology
+Pseudo-etymology, sometimes also called "folk etymology"
+Perceptual dialectology
+Linguistic prescription
+Pseudoscientific language comparison
+Mythical origins of language
+Vseyasvetnaya Gramota
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Niedzielski, Nancy A.; Preston, Dennis R. (2000). Folk Linguistics. De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110803389. ISBN 978-3-11-016251-6.
+
+
+== External links ==
+Ask a Linguist with FAQs Archived 2016-09-04 at the Wayback Machine - linguists' answers to questions based on folk linguistic beliefs
+PBS, Language Prejudice & Myth: "They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City"
+Language Log - Prescriptivism and folk linguistics

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foregrounding-0.md

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+---
+title: "Foregrounding"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foregrounding"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:19.427848+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Foregrounding is a concept in literary studies that concerns making a linguistic utterance (word, clause, phrase, phoneme, etc.) stand out from the surrounding linguistic context, from given literary traditions, or from more urban knowledge. It is "the 'throwing into relief' of the linguistic sign against the background of the norms of ordinary language." There are two main types of foregrounding: parallelism and deviation. Parallelism can be described as unexpected regularity, while deviation can be seen as unexpected irregularity. As the definition of foregrounding indicates, these are relative concepts. Something can only be unexpectedly regular or irregular within a particular context. This context can be relatively narrow, such as the immediate textual surroundings (referred to as a 'secondary norm'), or wider such as an entire genre (referred to as a 'primary norm'). Foregrounding can occur on all levels of language (phonology, graphology, morphology, lexis, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics). It is generally used to highlight important parts of a text, aid memorability, and/or invite interpretation.
+
+
+== Origin ==
+The term originated in English through the translation by Paul Garvin of the Czech aktualisace (literally "to actualize"), borrowing the terms from Jan Mukařovský of the Prague school of the 1930s. The Prague Structuralists' work was a continuation of the ideas generated by the Russian Formalists, particularly their notion of Defamiliarization ('ostranenie'). Especially the 1917 essay 'Art as Technique' (Iskusstvo kak priem) by Viktor Shklovsky proved to be highly influential in laying the basis of an anthropological theory of literature. To quote from his essay: "And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."
+It took several decades before the Russian Formalists' work was discovered in the West, but in 1960 some British stylisticians, notably Geoffrey Leech and Roger Fowler, established the notion of 'foregrounding' in the linguistically oriented analysis of literature. Soon a plethora of studies investigated foregrounding features in a multitude of texts, demonstrating its ubiquity in a large variety of literary traditions. These analyses were seen as evidence that there was a special literary register, which was called, also after the Russian Formalists, 'literariness' (literaturnost').
+
+
+== Evidence Supporting Foregrounding Theory ==
+The attempt to support foregrounding theory, based on real reader responses, started with Willie Van Peer in 1986, and since then, many studies have validated foregrounding theory's predictions. In 1994 Miall and Kuiken had participants read three short stories one sentence after the other – and rank each sentence for strikingness and affect. Sentences that had more foregrounding devices were found to be judged by readers as more striking, more emotional, and they also lead to slower reading times. These findings were independent of the reader previous experience with reading literature, but other experiments found foregrounding effects that seem to be connected to experience. Some evidence suggest there is a difference between experienced and inexperienced readers in second readings of a literary text that is rich with foregrounding devices: For experienced readers there is an improvement in evaluation between first and second readings. This effect was initially found by Dixon, Bortolussi, Twilley and Leung in 1993 for the story Emma Zunz by Jorge Luis Borges, and was later found by Hakemulder and his colleagues for other texts as well. However, recent replication attempts by Kuijpers and Hakemulder did not get the same results. They found that the main reason for an improvement in evaluation between readings was a better understanding of the story. Another line of research suggests that experience affects the reader tendency to engage foregrounding. In an experiment that combines eye tracking and retrospective think aloud interviews Harash found that when inexperienced readers encounter a challenging stylistic device they are more prone to use shallow processing and not to start a foregrounding process, and that experienced readers have a higher tendency both to start a foregrounding process and to finish it successfully. Foregrounding also appears to play some role in increasing empathic understanding for people in similar situations as the characters in a story they just read. Koopman gave subjects to read 1 of 3 versions of an excerpt from a literary novel about the loss of a child, the original version, a manipulated version "without imagery" and a version "without foregrounding." Results showed that readers who had read the "original" version showed higher empathy for people who are grieving than those who had read the version "without foregrounding."
+
+
+== Example ==
+For example, the last line of a poem with a consistent metre may be foregrounded by changing the number of syllables it contains. This would be an example of a deviation from a secondary norm. In the following poem by E. E. Cummings, there are two types of deviation:
+
+light's lives lurch
+a once world quickly from rises
+army the gradual of unbeing fro
+on stiffening greenly air and to ghosts go
+drift slippery hands tease slim float twitter faces
+Only stand with me, love! against these its
+until you are, and until i am dreams...
+Firstly, most of the poem deviates from 'normal' language (primary deviation). In addition, there is secondary deviation in that the penultimate line is unexpectedly different from the rest of the poem. Nursery rhymes, adverts and slogans often exhibit parallelism in the form of repetition and rhyme, but parallelism can also occur over longer texts. For example, jokes are often built on a mixture of parallelism and deviation. They often consist of three parts or characters. The first two are very similar (parallelism) and the third one starts out as similar, but our expectations are thwarted when it turns out different in end (deviation).
+
+
+== See also ==
+Defamiliarization
+Glossary of rhetorical terms
+Rhetorical device
+Stylistics (linguistics)
+Effects of foregrounding - research coalition
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-0.md

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+---
+title: "Formulaic language"
+chunk: 1/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:20.760074+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Formulaic language (previously known as automatic speech or embolalia) is a linguistic term for verbal expressions that are fixed in form, often non-literal in meaning, with attitudinal nuances, and closely related to communicative-pragmatic context.
+Along with idioms, expletives, and proverbs, formulaic language includes pause fillers (e.g., "Like", "Er", or "Uhm") and conversational speech formulas (e.g., "You've got to be kidding", "Excuse me?", or "Hang on a minute").
+
+== Background ==
+The word embolalia comes from the Greek word embolos which means 'something thrown in', from the word emballo- meaning 'to throw in', and -lalia meaning 'speech, chattering and babbling; abnormal or disordered form of speech.
+Modern linguists led by Leonard Bloomfield in 1933 call these "hesitation forms", the sounds of stammering (uh), stuttering (um, um), throat-clearing (ahem!), stalling (well, um, that is), interjected when the speaker is groping for words or at a loss for the next thought.
+French psychiatrist Jules Séglas, on the other hand, defined the term embolalia as "the regular addition of prefixes or suffixes to words" and mentioned that the behavior is sometimes used by normal individuals to demonstrate to their interlocutor that they are paying attention to the conversation.
+Harry Levin and Irene Silverman called formulaic language "vocal segregates" in their 1965 paper on hesitation phenomena and found out from their experiments on children that these segregates seem to be less voluntary hesitation phenomena and may be signs of uncontrolled emotionality under stress.
+The Irish poet William Butler Yeats argued for formulaic language experiments with his wife, which provided him with symbols for his poetry as well as literary theories.
+
+== Characteristics ==
+
+=== Linguistic features ===
+
+==== Definition of formulaic sequences ====
+According to The Canadian Modern Language Review, formulaic sequences are "fixed combinations of words that ... can facilitate fluency in speech by making pauses shorter and less frequent, and allowing longer runs of speech between pauses".
+A formulaic sequence is "a sequence, continuous or discontinuous, of words or other elements, which is, or appears to be, prefabricated: that is, stored and retrieved whole from memory at the time of use, rather than being subject to generation or analysis by the language grammar."
+They can be found everywhere in language use and "make up a large proportion of any discourse". Formulaic sequences can be of any length and can be used to express messages, functions, social solidarity and process information very fast without communication misunderstanding.
+
+==== Morphology and phonology ====
+Filled pauses
+Filled pauses consist of repetitions of syllables and words, reformulation or false starts where speakers rephrase their speech to fit the representation they best perceive, grammatical repairs, and partial repeats that often involve searching for the right words in one's lexicon to carry across an intended meaning. There are basically three distinct forms for filled pauses: (i) an elongated central vowel only; (ii) a nasal murmur only; and (iii) a central vowel followed by a nasal murmur. Although a schwa-like quality [ə:] appears to be the most commonly used, some speakers consistently using the neutral vowel [ɨ:] instead, while others may use both vowels in the same sentence, depending on the quality of the previous word's last vowel. Filled pauses vocalizations may be built around central vowels and speakers may differ in their preferences, but they do not appear to behave as other words in the language. The lengthening of words ending in a coronal fricative, for instance, could be obtained by prolonging the entire rhyme and/or the fricative only. Most of the time, however, the neutral vowel [ɨ:] is appended to achieve the desired effect.
+Prolonged pauses
+Similarly to filled pauses, single occurrences of prolonged pauses occurring between stretches of fluent speech, may be preceded and followed by silent pauses, as they most often occur on function words with a CV or V structure. Even though they are not always central, the vowels of such syllables may be as long as the ones observed for filled pauses.
+Retraced and unretraced restarts
+Riggenbach's 1991 study of fluency development in Chinese learners of English had an analysis of repair phenomena, which included retraced restarts and unretraced restarts. Retraced restarts refer to the reformulations whereby a portion of the original utterance is duplicated. They can either involve repetition, that is, the precise adjacent duplication of a sound, syllable, word or phrase, or insertion, which refers to a retraced restart with the addition of new unretraced lexical items. Conversely, unretraced restarts refer to reformulations that reject the original utterance, similarly known as false starts.
+
+==== Semantics and pragmatics ====
+The semantics of formulaic language have often been debated on, and to date, there lacks a consensus on whether or not filler words are intentional in speech and whether or not they should be considered as words or if they are simply side effects of difficulties in the planning process of speech by speakers. Bailey & Ferriera's (2007) paper found that there is little evidence to suggest that the use of filler words are intentional in speech and that they should not be considered as words in the conventional sense.
+Filler words can be non-lexical or lexical. "Non-lexical fillers" are those recognized as not being words, "lexical fillers" as ones that are, but neither is thought to contain much semantic information. However, some filler words are used to express certain speech acts. "Yeah" (lexical) is used to give affirmation, introduce a new topic, show the speaker's perception and understanding, or when the speaker's continuing after a speech management problem flounders completely. Fillers like "Mmmm" (non-lexical) and "Well" (lexical) signal the listener's understanding of the information provided.
+Research has shown that people were less likely to use formulaic language in general topics and domains they were  better versed in because they were more adept at selecting the appropriate terms. To date, there is insufficient research to say whether fillers are a part of integral meaning or an aspect of performance, but we can say they are useful in directing the listener's attention.

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+---
+title: "Formulaic language"
+chunk: 2/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:20.760074+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+==== Syntax ====
+Formulaic language is more likely to occur at the beginning of utterance or phrase possibly because of greater demand on planning processes at these junctures. Features of formulaic language, like filled pauses or repetitions, are most likely to occur immediately prior to the onset of a complex syntactic constituent. Filled pauses are also likely after the initial word in a complex constituent, especially after function words. Therefore, listeners might be able to use the presence of a recent filled pause by resolving an ambiguous structure in favor of a more complex analysis.
+There are several different types of formulaic language. One type is relatively universal, often transcending differences in language and to some degree culture. Simple fillers like "Uhm", "Uh", or "Er" are used by many different people in many different settings. For the most part, these types of fillers are considered innocuous, and are often overlooked by listeners, as long as they are not utilized so often that they overshadow the remainder of the conversation.
+Other forms of formulaic language are ingrained within specific cultures, and in fact are sometimes considered an identifying characteristic of people who share a particular religion, or live in a specific geographical region. Along with accents, formulaic language of this type is sometimes considered colorful and somewhat entertaining. Writers often make use of this type of speech to give the characters in their writings additional personality, helping to make them unique.
+Fluency
+The study conducted by Dechert (1980) that investigated the speech performance of a German student of English revealed that there is a tendency for speech pauses to be situated at breaks that are consistent with "episodic units". Dechert (1980) found that the more fluent utterances exhibited more pauses at those junctures and lesser within the "episodic units", leading him to posit that the study subject was able to use the narrative structure to pace his own speech with natural breaks in order for him to scout for the words and phrases that are to follow subsequently.
+Through the comparison of the story retelling utterances collated of second language learners, Lennon (1984) discovered notable disparities in the distribution of pauses between recounting  in the research subjects' first and second languages respectively. The study found that, in their first language, all the pauses were found to be located either at clause breaks or following nonintegral components of the clause, without pauses within the clauses. On the other hand, the narrators who spoke using their second language exhibited different patterns, with a higher frequency of pauses occurring within the clauses, leading to the conclusion posited by Lennon to be that the speakers seem to be "planning within clauses as well as in suprasegmental units", and hence, the occurrence of pauses within clauses and not at the intersection of clauses could well be an indicator distinguishing fluent and confluent speech.
+
+=== Discourse features ===
+
+==== Cognitive load ====
+Cognitive load is an important predictor of formulaic language. More disfluency is found in longer utterances and when the topic is unfamiliar. In Wood's book, he suggested that when a high degree of cognitive load occurs, such as during expository speech or impromptu descriptions of complex interrelated topics, even native speakers can suffer from disfluency.
+
+==== Speech rate ====
+Formulaic phrases are uttered more quickly than comparable non-formulaic phrases. Speech rate is closely related to cognitive load. Depending on the cognitive load, the rates of a speaker's utterances are produced either faster or slower, in comparison to a fixed speaking rate which happens usually. For example, speech rate becomes slower when having to make choices that are not anticipated, and tend to accelerate when words are being repeated. In fast conditions, cognitive processes that result in a phonetic plan, fail to keep up with articulation, and thus, the articulation of the existing plan is restarted, resulting in the repetition of words which is more likely to happen but no more likely than fillers.
+
+==== Frequency of words ====
+In Beattie and Butterworth's (1979) study, low frequency content words and those rated as contextually improbable were preceded by hesitations such as fillers. Speakers, when choosing to use low frequency words in their speech, are aware, and are more likely to be disfluent. This is further supported by Schnadt and Corley where they found that prolongations and fillers increased in words just before multiple-named or low frequency items.
+
+==== Domain (addressor vs. addressee) ====
+Humans are found to be more disfluent overall when addressing other humans than when addressing machines. More instances of formulaic language is found in dialogues than in monologues. The different roles the addresser played (such as a sister, a daughter or a mother) greatly influences the numbers of disfluencies, particularly, fillers produced, regardless of length or complexity.
+
+== Functions ==

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+---
+title: "Formulaic language"
+chunk: 3/3
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:20.760074+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Comprehension cues ===
+There is a common agreement that disfluencies are accompanied by important modifications both at the segmental and prosodic levels and that speakers and listeners use such cues systematically and meaningfully. Thus they appear as linguistic universal devices that are similar to other devices and are controlled by the speaker and regulated by language specific constraints. In addition, speech disfluencies such as fillers can help listeners to identify upcoming words.
+While formulaic language can serve as a useful cue that more is to come, some people do develop an unconscious dependence on these filler words. When this is the case, it is necessary to correct the problem by making the speaker be aware of their over-reliance on formulaic language production and by training the person to make more efficient use of other verbal strategies. As the individual gains confidence and is less apt to have a need for filler words, the predilection toward formulaic language is then able to gradually diminish.
+A study done by Foxtree (2001) showed that both English and Dutch listeners were faster to identify words in a carrier sentence when it was preceded with an "Uh" instead of without an "Uh", which suggested that different fillers have different effects as they might be conveying different information.
+Fischer and Brandt-Pook also found out that discourse particles mark thematic breaks, signal the relatedness between the preceding and following utterance, indicate if the speaker has understood the content communicated, and support the formulation process by signalling possible problems in speech management.
+While fillers might give listeners cues about the information being conveyed, Bailey & Ferreira's study made a distinction between "Good Cues" and "Bad Cues" in facilitating listener's comprehension. A "Good Cue" leads the listener to correctly predict the onset of a new constituent (Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase), whereas a "Bad Cue" leads the listener to incorrectly predict the onset of a new constituent. "Good Cue" make it easier for listeners to process the information they have been presented while "Bad Cue" make it harder for listeners process the relevant information.
+There is strong empirical evidence that speakers use formulaic language in similar ways across languages and that formulaic language plays a fundamental role in the structuring of spontaneous speech, as they are used to achieve a better synchronization between interlocutors by announcing upcoming topic changes, delays related to planning load or preparedness problems, as well as speaker's intentions to take/give the floor or to revise/abandon an expression he/she had already presented.
+
+=== Communicative goals ===
+A study conducted by Clark and Foxtree (2002) mentioned that parts of formulaic language, such as fillers, serve a communicative function and are considered integral to the information the speaker tries to convey, although they do not add to the propositional content or the primary message. Instead, they are considered part of a collateral message where the speaker is commenting on her performance. Speakers produce filled pauses (e.g. "Uh" or "Um") for a variety of reasons, including the intention to discourage interruptions or to gain additional time to plan utterances.
+Another communicative goal includes the attention-impelling function, which explores another purpose of hesitation forms as being to dissociate oneself slightly from the harsh reality of what is to follow. With the use of a beat of time filled with a meaningless interjection, uncommitted people who are "into distancing" make use of such formulaic language to create a little distance between themselves and their words, as if it might lessen the impact of their words.
+However, not all forms of formulaic language are considered appropriate or harmless. There are examples of formulaic language production that lean towards being offensive, for instance, the use of anything considered to be profanity within a given culture.
+In this form, the speech is usually the insertion of swear words within the sentence structure used to convey various ideas. At times, this use of formulaic language comes about due to the individual being greatly distressed or angry. However, there are situations where swear words are inserted unconsciously even if the individual is extremely happy. When the use of swear words is called to the attention of the individual, he or she may not even have been aware of the usage of such formulaic language.
+
+== Neurological basis ==
+
+=== Medical cases ===
+
+==== Aphasia ====
+
+Many patients who suffer from aphasia retain the ability to produce formulaic language, including conversational speech formulas and swear words—in some cases, patients are unable to create words or sentences, but they are able to swear. Also, the ability to pronounce other words can change and evolve during the process of recovery, while pronunciation and use of swear words remain unchanged.
+Patients who are affected by transcortical sensory aphasia, a rare form of aphasia, have been found to exhibit formulaic language that is characterised by "lengthy chunks of memorized material".
+
+==== Apraxia of speech ====
+
+Apraxia of speech can also occur in conjunction with dysarthria (muscle weakness affecting speech production) or aphasia (language difficulties related to neurological damage).
+One of the articulatory characteristics of apraxia of speech found in adults includes speech behavior that "exhibits fewer errors with formulaic language than volitional speech". Developmental verbal dyspraxia has also been found to have more effect on volitional speech than on formulaic language.
+The characteristics of apraxia of speech include difficulties in imitating speech sounds, imitating no-speech movements, such as sticking out the tongue, groping for sounds, and in severe cases, the inability to produce any sounds, inconsistent errors and a slow rate of speech. However, patients who suffer from apraxia of speech may retain the ability to produce formulaic language, such as "thank you" or "how are you?". Apraxia of speech can also occur in conjunction with dysarthria, an illness which inflicts muscle weakness affecting speech production, or aphasia, which causes language difficulties related to neurological damage.
+
+==== Developmental coordination disorder ====
+
+Developmental coordination disorder is a chronic neurological disorder that affects the voluntary movements of speech.
+Children with developmental coordination disorder are unable to formulate certain kinds of voluntary speech; however, they may speak set words or phrases spontaneously, constituting formulaic language—although they may not be able to repeat them on request.
+
+== See also ==
+Automatic writing
+Glossolalia
+
+== References ==
+
+== External links ==
+Interview with authorial-Self 
+Connecting The Dots: Words Matter...Especially in Sales (The Dotted Line)

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech-0.md

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+---
+title: "Free indirect speech"
+chunk: 1/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:21.977793+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Free indirect speech is the literary technique of writing a character's first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator. It is a style using aspects of third-person narration conjoined with the essence of first-person direct speech. The technique is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, discours indirect libre.
+Free indirect speech has been described as a "technique of presenting a character's voice partly mediated by the voice of the author", with their voices effectively merged. Or, reversing the emphasis: "... the character speaks through the voice of the narrator", with their voices effectively merged. It has also been described as "the illusion by which third-person narrative comes to express ... the intimate subjectivity of fictional characters." The distinguisher term "free" in the phrase indicates the technique whereby the author—instead of being fixed with the narrator or with just one character—may "roam from viewpoint to viewpoint" among several different characters. Free indirect discourse differs from indirect discourse in not announcing what it is doing. Indirect discourse: "He feared that he would be late for the party." Free indirect discourse: "He rummaged through his closet, desperately looking for something suitable to wear. He would be late for the party."
+Goethe and Jane Austen were the first novelists to use this style consistently, according to British philologist Roy Pascal, and 19th-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert shows "sustained exploitation of free indirect discourse" in Madame Bovary, according to Roger Clark.
+
+== Distinguishing marks of free indirect speech ==
+Free indirect discourse can be described as a "technique of presenting a character's voice partly mediated by the voice of the author". In the words of the French narrative theorist Gérard Genette, "the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances then are merged". Randall Stevenson suggests that the term free  indirect discourse "is perhaps best reserved for instances where  words have actually been spoken aloud"; and those cases "where a character's voice is probably the silent inward one of thought" is better described as free indirect style.
+
+=== Description ===
+Following are modifications of text that compare direct, normal indirect, and free indirect speech.
+
+Quoted or direct speech or narrator's voice: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?" he asked. 
+Reported or normal indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world.
+Free indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world?
+Free indirect speech is characterized by the actions or features described below. Some text features referenced below are bolded italic in the panel above—which features are intentionally dropped from the Free indirect speech line of narrative.
+
+Drops quotation marks and 'introductory' expressions such as "he asked" or "she said". In effect, the subordinate clause carrying the content of the indirect speech is taken out of its main clause, and becomes the main clause itself.
+Conveys the character's words more directly than in normal indirect speech, using devices—such as interjections and psycho-ostensive expressions, including curses and swearwords—that normally aren't used within a subordinate clause. When adverbials or deictic pronouns are used, they refer to the coordinates not of the narrator, but to those of the character, i.e., the speaker or thinker.
+Uses linguistic features indicating a character's current perspective and voice stated within a third-person, past-tense narrative.
+Previous judgements, exclamations, opinions, etc, are backshifted, such as, "How differently did every thing now appear in which he was concerned", an example from Pride and Prejudice.
+Modals are not shifted, such as, "She must own that she was tired of great houses", also from Pride and Prejudice.
+Exclamatory questions, character-specific locutions, and syntactical informalities and fragments are used.
+
+=== Jane Austen experiments with free indirect speech ===
+In free indirect speech, the thoughts and speech of any one character can be written as interior thought (of the character) but with the voice of the narrator. Jane Austen also used it to provide summaries of conversations or to compress  a character's speech and thoughts—according to Austen scholars Anthony Mandal and Norman Page. In Sense and Sensibility (1811), her first-published novel, Austen first experimented with this technique.       
+For example,
+
+[1] Mrs John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her husband intended to do for his sisters. [2] To take three thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy, would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree. [3] She begged him to think again on the subject. [4] How could he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only child too, of so large a sum? [Numeration added]  Page explains that "the first [1st] sentence is straight narrative, in the 'voice' of the [narrator]; the third [3rd] sentence is normal indirect speech; but the second [2nd] and fourth [4th] are what is usually described as free indirect speech." In these two sentences, Austen presents the interior thoughts of the character [Mrs John Dashwood/Fanny Dashwood] and creates the illusion that the reader is entering the character's mind. She (Austen) used indirect speech for background characters in addition to the more obvious main characters. However, as Page writes: "for Jane Austen ... the supreme virtue of free indirect speech ... [is] that it offers the possibility of achieving something of the vividness of speech without the appearance ... of a total silencing of the authorial voice." [Numeration and italics added]
+
+== Use in literature ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech-1.md

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+---
+title: "Free indirect speech"
+chunk: 2/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:21.977793+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Roy Pascal cites Goethe and Jane Austen as the first novelists to use this style consistently, and writes that Gustave Flaubert was the first to be aware of it as a style. This style would be widely imitated by later authors, called in French discours indirect libre. It is also known as estilo indirecto libre in Spanish, and is often used by Latin American writer Horacio Quiroga.
+In German literature, the style, known as erlebte Rede (experienced speech), is perhaps most famous in the works of Franz Kafka, blurring the subject's first-person experiences with a grammatically third-person narrative perspective. Arthur Schnitzler's novella Leutnant Gustl first published in Neue Freie Presse newspaper in 1900 is considered the earliest book length example.
+In Danish literature, the style is attested since Leonora Christina (1621–1698) (and is, outside literature, even today common in colloquial Danish speech).
+Some of the first sustained examples of free indirect discourse in Western literature occur in Latin literature, where the phenomenon often takes the name of oratio obliqua. It is characteristic, for instance, of the style of Julius Caesar, but it is also found in the historical work of Livy.
+
+=== English, Irish and Scottish literature ===
+As stated above, Austen was one of its first practitioners. According to Austen scholar Tom Keymer, "It has been calculated that Pride and Prejudice filters its narrative, at different points, through no fewer than nineteen centres of consciousness, more than any other Austen novel (with Mansfield Park, at thirteen, the nearest competitor)."
+The American novelist Edith Wharton relies heavily on the technique in her 1905 novel The House of Mirth. And Zora Neale Hurston—the American author and anthropologist—conceived much of the development of her fictional characters around indirect speech and style. According to literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., Hurston, in her acclaimed novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, (1937), plotted the journey of her protagonist Janie Crawford "from object to subject" by shifting back and forth between her own (Hurston's) "literate narrator's voice and a highly idiomatic black voice found in wonderful passages of free indirect discourse". It also appears in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), where the words of various characters are filtered through the point of view of the young narrator, Scout Finch.
+Irish author James Joyce also used free indirect speech in works such as "The Dead" (in Dubliners), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. Scottish author James Kelman uses the style extensively, most notably in his Booker Prize winning novel How Late It Was, How Late, but also in many of his short stories and some of his novels, most of which are written in Glaswegian speech patterns. Virginia Woolf in her novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway frequently relies on free indirect discourse to take us into the minds of her characters. Another modernist, D. H. Lawrence, also makes frequent use of a free indirect style in "transcribing unspoken or even incompletely verbalized thoughts". Lawrence most often uses free indirect speech, a literary technique that describes the interior thoughts of the characters using third-person singular pronouns ('he' and 'she') in both The Rainbow and Women in Love. According to Charles Rzepka of Boston University, Elmore Leonard's mastery of free indirect discourse "is unsurpassed in our time, and among the surest of all time, even if we include Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Hemingway in the mix."
+Some argue that free indirect discourse was also used by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales. When the narrator says in "The General Prologue" that he agrees with the Monk's opinion dismissing criticism of his very unmonastic way of life, he is apparently paraphrasing the monk himself:
+
+And I seyde his opinion was good:
+What! Sholde he studie, and make himselven wood,
+Upon a book in cloistre alwey to poure?
+Or swinken with his handes, and laboure,
+As Austin bit? How shal the world be served?
+Lat Austin have his swink to him reserved!
+These rhetorical questions may be regarded as the monk's own casual way of waving off criticism of his aristocratic lifestyle. Similar examples can be found in the narrator's portrait of the friar.
+
+== See also ==
+Stream of consciousness (narrative mode)
+Metalepsis – Figure of speech
+
+== References ==
+
+== Further reading ==
+Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds
+Gingerich, Jon. "The Benefits of Free Indirect Discourse". LitReactor. Retrieved 3 April 2013.
+Haberland, Hartmut, Indirect speech in Danish. In: F. Coulmas ed. Direct and indirect speech. 219-254. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986
+Mey, Jacob L., When Voices Clash. A Study in Literary Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000.
+Prince, Gerald, Dictionary of Narratology
+Stevenson, Randall, Modernist Fiction. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1992.
+Wood, James, How Fiction Works. New York: Picador, 2009.
+Ron, Moshe, "Free Indirect Discourse, Mimetic Language Games and the Subject of Fiction", Poetics Today, Vol. 2, No. 2, Narratology III: Narration and Perspective in Fiction (Winter, 1981), pp. 17-39
+
+== External links ==
+The Literary Encyclopedia: Free Indirect Discourse
+What is Free Indirect Discourse?: Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_sentence_perspective-0.md

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+---
+title: "Functional sentence perspective"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_sentence_perspective"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:23.204384+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+In linguistics, functional sentence perspective (FSP) is a theory describing the information structure of the sentence and language communication in general. It has been developed in the tradition of the Prague School of Functional and Structural Linguistics together with its sister theory, Topic-Focus Articulation.
+The key concepts of FSP were laid down by Jan Firbas in the mid-1950s on the basis of the linguistic work of Vilém Mathesius, especially his idea of functional syntax in linguistic characterology of language.
+
+
+== Terminology ==
+The term 'functional sentence perspective' was created by Jan Firbas as a more convenient English equivalent of Mathesius’ Czech term aktuální členění větné:
+
+“It is not without interest to note that Mathesius, who knew Weil’s work, coined the felicitous term ‘aktuální členění větné. … As English 'actual' is not an exact equivalent of Czech ‘aktuální’, another term had to be found for English. I accepted Professor Josef Vachek’s suggestion and started using the term 'functional sentence perspective' (FSP; Firbas 1957). The term is based on Mathesius’ term ‘Satzperspektive’. Vachek’s suggestion has added the qualification ‘functional’. This is the way the term 'functional sentence perspective' (FSP) has found its way into the literature.”
+Within Czech linguistics the Czech calque of the English term Functional Sentence Perspective funkční větná perspektiva is nowadays used to refer to the approach stemming from the writings of Jan Firbas and his followers, while the original Mathesius’ Czech term aktuální členění větné tends to be associated with the group of linguists developing the Topic-Focus Articulation, i.e. Petr Sgall, Eva Hajičová, Jarmila Panevová and their disciples, despite the fact that both terms are still sometimes used interchangeably in some Czech contributions to the topic of information structure of language. (Cf.  Karlík - Nekula - Pleskalová (2002))
+
+
+=== Key terms ===
+communicative dynamism
+theme, theme proper, diatheme, hypertheme, thematic progressions
+transition, transition proper
+rheme, rheme proper, rhematizers
+communicative units, communicative fields
+
+
+==== FSP factors ====
+sentence linearity
+Firbasian dynamic semantic scales, dynamic semantic functions
+context
+prosody
+
+
+== Key researchers ==
+František Daneš
+Libuše Dušková
+Jan Firbas
+Vilém Mathesius
+Aleš Svoboda
+
+
+== See also ==
+Topic-comment
+Prague school (linguistics)
+Functional theories of grammar
+
+
+== References ==
+Firbas, J. (1957) "On the problem of non-thematic subjects in contemporary English", Časopis pro moderní filologii 39, pp. 171–3. (English summary of "K otázce nezákladových podmětů v současné angličtině", ib. pp. 22–42 and 165–73)
+Firbas, J. (1994) "Round table on functional linguistics, 1 April 1993, University of Vienna: Prof. J. Firbas", VIenna English Working paperS, Vol.3, No.1, pp. 4–5
+Karlík P., Nekula M., Pleskalová J. (ed.) (2002) Encyklopedický slovník češtiny, Prague: Nakl. Lidové noviny. ISBN 80-7106-484-X
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Martin Drápela (2015) "The FSP bibliography" IN Martin Drápela (Ed.): A Bibliography of Functional Sentence Perspective 1956-2011, Brno: Masaryk University, pp 33-186. ISBN 978-80-210-7111-7
+Libuše Dušková (2015) "Czech approaches to information structure: theory and applications" IN Martin Drápela (Ed.): A Bibliography of Functional Sentence Perspective 1956-2011, Brno: Masaryk University, pp 9-32. ISBN 978-80-210-7111-7
+Jan Firbas (1992) Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
+Jan Firbas (1999) "Communicative dynamism" IN Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen (Eds.): Handbook of Pragmatics - 1999 Installment,  Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 978-90-272-2573-3
+Vilém Mathesius (1939) "O tak zvaném aktuálním členění větném" [On the so-called functional sentence perspective], Slovo a slovesnost 5, pp. 171–4
+Vilém Mathesius (1975) A Functional analysis of present day English on a general linguistic basis, Prague: Academia
+Aleš Svoboda (1968) "The hierarchy of communicative units and fields as illustrated by English attributive constructions", Brno Studies in English 7, pp. 49–101. ISSN 1211-1791
+Aleš Svoboda (1981) Diatheme (A study in thematic elements, their contextual ties, thematic progressions and scene progressions based on a text from Ælfric), Brno: Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity
+Aleš Svoboda (1989) Kapitoly z funkční syntaxe [Chapters from functional syntax], Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství
+Henri Weil (1887) De l'ordre des mots dans les langues anciennes comparées aux langues modernes: question de grammaire générale. 1844. Published in English as The order of words in the ancient languages compared with that of the modern languages.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_school_(linguistics)-0.md

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+---
+title: "Geneva school (linguistics)"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_school_(linguistics)"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:24.477818+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Geneva School was a school of linguistics that emphasized the structural and functional aspects of language. It developed at the beginning of the 20th century. 
+
+
+== History ==
+The most prominent figure of the Geneva School was Ferdinand de Saussure. Other important colleagues and students of Saussure who comprise this school include Albert Sechehaye, Albert Riedlinger, Sergei Kartsevski and Charles Bally.
+
+
+=== Saussure ===
+
+The most significant linguistic book connected with this school is Cours de linguistique générale (1916), the main work of de Saussure, which was published by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sehechaye. The book was based on lectures with this title that de Saussure gave three times in Geneva from 1906 to 1912. Sehechaye and Bally did not themselves take part in these lecture classes, but they used notes from other students.  The most important of these students was Albert Riedlinger, who provided them with the most material. Furthermore, Bally and Sehechaye continued to develop de Saussure's theories, mainly focusing on the linguistic research of speech. Sehechaye also concentrated on syntactic problems.
+
+
+=== Bally ===
+
+In addition to his edition of de Saussure's lectures, Charles Bally also played an important role in linguistics. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parent were Jean Gabriel, a teacher and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store. Bally was married three times: first with Valentine Leirens, followed by Irma Baptistine Doutre, who was sent into a mental institution in 1915 and Alice Bellicot.
+From 1883 to 1885 he studied classic language and literature in Geneva. He continued his studies from 1886 to 1889 in Berlin where he was awarded a PhD. After his studies he worked as a private teacher for the royal family of Greece from 1889 to 1893. Bally returned to Geneva and taught at a business school from 1893 on and moved to the Progymnasium, a grammar school, from 1913 to 1939. At the same time, he worked as PD at the university from 1893 to 1913.  Finally from 1913 to 1939 he had a professorship for general linguistic and comparative Indo-German studies which he took over from Ferdinand de Saussure.
+Besides his works about subjectivity in the French Language he also wrote about the crisis in French language and language classes. Today Charles Bally is regarded as the founding-father of linguistic theories of style and much honored for his theories of phraseology.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Charles Bally, Traité de stylistique française, 1909
+Charles Bally, Le Langage et la Vie, 1913
+Charles Bally, Linguistique générale et linguistique française, 1932
+G. Redard, Bibliographie chronologique des publications de Charles Bally, in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 36, 1982, 25–41
+W. Hellmann, Charles Bally, 1988
+S. Durrer, Introduction à la linguistique de Charles Bally, 1998

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloss_(annotation)-0.md

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+---
+title: "Gloss (annotation)"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloss_(annotation)"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:25.720665+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+A gloss is a brief notation, especially a marginal or interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text. It may be in the language of the text or in the reader's language if that is different.
+A collection of glosses is a glossary. A collection of medieval legal glosses, made by glossators, is called an apparatus. The compilation of glosses into glossaries was the beginning of lexicography, and the glossaries so compiled were in fact the first dictionaries. In modern times a glossary, as opposed to a dictionary, is typically found in a text as an appendix of specialized terms that the typical reader may find unfamiliar. Also, satirical explanations of words and events are called glosses. The German Romantic movement used the expression of gloss for poems commenting on a given other piece of poetry, often in the Spanish Décima style.
+Glosses were originally notes made in the margin or between the lines of a text in a classical language; the meaning of a word or passage is explained by the gloss. As such, glosses vary in thoroughness and complexity, from simple marginal notations of words one reader found difficult or obscure, to interlinear translations of a text with cross-references to similar passages. Today parenthetical explanations in scientific writing and technical writing are also often called glosses. Hyperlinks to a glossary sometimes supersede them. In East Asian languages, ruby characters are glosses that indicate the pronunciation of logographic Chinese characters.
+
+
+== Etymology ==
+
+Starting in the 14th century, a gloze in the English language was a marginal note or explanation, borrowed from French glose, which comes from medieval Latin glōsa, classical glōssa, meaning an obsolete or foreign word that needs explanation. Later, it came to mean the explanation itself. The Latin word comes from Greek γλῶσσα 'tongue, language, obsolete or foreign word'. In the 16th century, the spelling was refashioned as gloss to reflect the original Greek form more closely.
+
+
+== In theology ==
+
+Glosses and other marginal notes were a primary format used in medieval Biblical theology and were studied and memorized for their own merit. Many Biblical passages came to be associated with a particular gloss, whose truth was taken to be scriptural. Indeed, in one case, it is generally reckoned that an early gloss explicating the doctrine of the Trinity made its way into the Scriptural text itself, in the passage known as the "three heavenly witnesses" or the Comma Johanneum, which is present in the Vulgate Latin and the third and later editions of the Greek Textus Receptus collated by Erasmus (the first two editions excluded it for lack of manuscript evidence), but is absent from all modern critical reconstructions of the New Testament text, such as Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf, and Nestle-Aland.
+
+
+== In law ==
+
+In the medieval legal tradition, the glosses on Roman law and Canon law created standards of reference, so-called sedes materiae 'seat of the matter'. In common law countries, the term "judicial gloss" refers to what is considered an authoritative or "official" interpretation of a statute or regulation by a judge. Judicial glosses are often very important in avoiding contradictions between statutes, and determining the constitutionality of various provisions of law.
+
+
+== In literature ==
+A gloss, or glosa, is a verse in traditional Iberian literature and music which follows and comments on a refrain (the "mote"). See also villancico.
+
+
+== In philology ==
+
+Glosses are of some importance in philology, especially if one language—usually, the language of the author of the gloss—has left few texts of its own. The Reichenau Glosses, for example, gloss the Latin Vulgate Bible in an early form of one of the Romance languages, and as such give insight into late Vulgar Latin at a time when that language was not often written down, but more importantly, the language of the glosses themselves give vital information on an early form and evolution of a Gallo-Romance with few extant documents. A series of glosses in the Old English language to Latin Bibles give us a running translation of Biblical texts in that language; see Old English Bible translations. Glosses of Christian religious texts are also important for our knowledge of Old Irish. Glosses frequently shed valuable light on the vocabulary of otherwise little-attested languages; they are less reliable for syntax, because many times the glosses follow the word order of the original text, and translate its idioms literally.
+
+
+== In linguistics ==
+In linguistics, a simple gloss in running text may be marked by quotation marks and follow the transcription of a foreign word to serve as a translation. Single quotes are a widely used convention.  For example:
+
+A Cossack longboat is called a chaika 'seagull'.
+The moose gains its name from the Algonquian mus or mooz ('twig eater').
+A longer or more complex transcription may rely upon an interlinear gloss.  Such a gloss may be placed between a text and its translation when it is important to understand the structure of the language being glossed, and not just the overall meaning of the passage.
+
+
+=== Glossing sign languages ===
+
+Sign languages are typically transcribed word-for-word by means of a gloss written in the predominant oral language in all capitals; for example, American Sign Language and Auslan would be written in English. Prosody is often glossed as superscript words, with its scope indicated by brackets.
+
+[I LIKE]NEGATIVE [WHAT?]RHETORICAL, GARLIC.
+"I don't like garlic."
+Pure fingerspelling is usually indicated by hyphenation.  Fingerspelled words that have been lexicalized (that is, fingerspelling sequences that have entered the sign language as linguistic units and that often have slight modifications) are indicated with a hash.  For example, W-I-K-I indicates a simple fingerspelled word, but #JOB indicates a lexicalized unit, produced like J-O-B, but faster, with a barely perceptible O and turning the "B" hand palm side in, unlike a regularly fingerspelled "B".
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Meinolf Schumacher: "…der kann den texst und och die gloß. Zum Wortgebrauch von 'Text' und 'Glosse' in deutschen Dichtungen des Spätmittelalters." In 'Textus' im Mittelalter. Komponenten und Situationen des Wortgebrauchs im schriftsemantischen Feld, edited by Ludolf Kuchenbuch and Uta Kleine, 207–27, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006 (PDF).
+
+
+== External links ==
+ The dictionary definition of gloss at Wiktionary

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+title: "History of women in linguistics"
+chunk: 1/5
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+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
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+
+While women have made considerable contributions to linguistics before it became an independent academic discipline, these early achievements have often fallen into oblivion. Their work has been lost or become untraceable and their authorship has been challenged. They have not been given recognition when collaborating with male scholars, or had to publish anonymously due to gender bias. While, at times, their contributions were left unpublished, the passing of time in other instances erased the memory of what they did publish. Moreover, in case the memory of these women has stood the test of time, it is often their academic, and particularly linguistic, achievements that do not live on.
+Meanwhile, those female linguistic contributions that have not fully slipped into obscurity should be regarded separately from a more general history of linguistics, so as not to measure their significance against male achievements. Additionally, the historical field of female linguistics should be demarcated with careful consideration of the intricate historical context in which women's linguistic achievements are couched, such as limited education opportunities or restriction to the private sphere. Consequently, it should include contributions outside of formal, institutionalised, and public structures, such as language teaching, translating, and even supporting male colleagues, alongside more traditional input, such as the publication of dictionaries and grammars, or engagement in language debates. Nonetheless, because the linguistic field has overall become more accepting towards women, female achievements have also increasingly aligned with the traditional idea of linguistics over time.
+
+== Aspasia (ca. 470 – 401 BCE) ==
+
+Aspasia was an Athenian woman who started out as a hetaira, but later married Pericles, Athen's political leader at the time. Though she lived in Athens, being foreign-born granted her more freedom than other women, which allowed her to distinguish herself in Sophist circles as a great rhetorician and to engage her rhetorical skills in political life. These actions not only held considerable linguistic significance but even gained her the titles of 'poetess' and 'mistress of eloquence'. Moreover, Aspasia was also associated with Plato's Academy and one of the only two women described as a philosopher in his dialogues. Plato himself considered her a poster child of the deceitful use of Sophistic rhetoric, which he was exceptionally critical of. Furthermore, his Menexus mentions that she wrote a funeral speech delivered by Pericles, and cites her as Socrates', as well as many other Athenians', teacher in rhetoric, which also ranks among her linguistic achievements. Nevertheless, the idea that she instructed Socrates in rhetoric cannot count on much support anymore in the 21st century. Conversely, Plutarch's account, which mentions that Socrates sporadically visited her with his pupils and that even his close friends allowed their wives to listen to her, is considered more plausible.
+
+== Hypatia (ca. 355 – ca. 415 CE) ==
+
+Hypatia of Alexandria, like other philosophers in the early centuries of the Empire, played an active role in the public life of Alexandria and became a prominent celebrity as a result. She succeeded her father as leader of the Academy, the most renowned philosophical school at that time. Given her position, she must have been well-versed in foundational ancient philosophical texts on linguistics and logic, like those by Aristotle or Plato, and their corresponding commentaries. Among the readings of the Neoplatonist curriculum, for instance, was Plato's Cratylus, a testimony to the importance held by linguistic topics in the philosophic framework of late antiquity. Additionally, Hypatia was also a private and public teacher of geometry, mathematics, and philosophy. According to Socrates of Constantinople she taught all who wanted to hear, not just exclusive groups of initiates. He also mentions how her knowledge awarded her with a certain freedom of speech and with the liberty to treat men as her equals.
+
+== Ban Zhao (44-116 CE) ==
+Ban Zhao was the daughter of Ban Biao and sister of Ban Gu, both historians during the Han dynasty. Whereas women did not have substantial influence over Chinese philology during this period, Ban Zhao is an exception. After her brother's execution, she secured her place in the male bastion of scholastic transmission by completing her father and brother's composition of the Book of Han by order of Emperor He. She also allegedly annotated a critical edition (now lost) of Liu Xiang's Biographies of Eminent Women. The linguistic character of this work lies in the fact that it contributes to the field of glossography, a prominent aspect of Chinese philology.
+Moreover, she wrote what is considered to be the earliest female metarhetorical work, entitled Admonitions for Women/Lessons for Women. Because its preface reveals the intended audience to be the young women in Ban Zhao's family, this text is also regarded as the earliest work exclusively designed to meet the needs of Chinese women's education. It served as inspiration for later female textbooks and was integrated in the Four Books for Women as well. In terms of its content, while the text intends to instruct women in respectable female behaviour and wifely submission, it also includes the earliest known argument for female literacy. In this way, Ban Zhao could successfully plead in favour of women's literacy without offending her male, more conservative readership. Besides her publications, Ban Zhao also presided over the schooling of Empress Deng and her court ladies during the reign of Emperor He, and afterwards during Empress Dowager Deng's own reign.

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+
+== Aisha bint Abi Bakr (613/14-678 CE) ==
+Aisha bint Abi Bakr is known as the favourite wife of Muhammad, the Prophet, and the daughter of Abu Bakr. Her linguistic importance is rooted in her impact on the stabilisation and codification of the Arabic language. Many Arabic linguistic contributions are linked to the Qur'an because they aim for a more accurate and authentic understanding of this sacred text. Consequently, as many believe to find an addition to this Qur'an in the Hadith, Aisha's prominent transmission of Hadith holds linguistic importance as well. Her understanding of medicine, astronomy, and, most importantly, poetry enabled her to formulate expressions with a certain subtlety, and her thorough knowledge of Arabic grammar shines through in her transmissions. Aisha's prestige lead others to embrace her phraseology and made her a great influence on the codification of Arabic. In this regard, her discourse can be considered a linguistic achievement in itself.
+Additionally, Aisha contributed to the codification of the Islamic legal language of Fiqh, because it builds upon that of Hadith. Besides, she issued fatwas during the caliphates of Umar and Uthman and held discussions with Companions of the Prophet about the correct way of formulating these judgements, which stimulated the adoption of an accurate grammar and vocabulary. Lastly, she is also valuable to the field of linguistics because she taught Arabic to her nephew Urwa ibn al-Zubayr, as well as to other prominent male jurists.
+
+== Paula Vicente (1519-1576 CE) ==
+Paula Vicente can be considered a linguist because of the grammar she wrote, entitled Arte da língua inglesa, e olandeza para instruçaõ dos seus naturaes (The Art of the English and Dutch Language for the Instruction of its Natives). She was also reportedly proficient in multiple languages and was a member of Maria of Portugal's renowned circle, which partook in literary sessions and held a unique cultural importance. Furthermore, because she was the daughter of Gil Vicente, Queen D. Catarina de Áustria gave her permission to both print and sell his collected works. Nonetheless, because of the lack of information about the grammar and several other works ascribed to her, some researchers believe these attributions to be part of a myth created around the figure of Paula Vicente.
+
+== Marie Le Jars de Gournay (1565-1645 CE) ==
+
+Marie Le Jars de Gournay, fille d'alliance (adopted daughter) of Michel de Montaigne and editor of his Essais (Essays), is best known for her feminist works. She took part in the Querelle des femmes by writing her Egalité des hommes et des femmes (The Equality of Men and Women), published in 1622. Besides feminist texts, her collected works also include essays concerning the French language. On top of that, de Gournay can also be considered a pioneering female linguist because she is the earliest known woman who wrote a French metalinguistic work. Her critical perspective on the French language was probably incited by her work as an editor, translator, as well as writer of novels and poetry. Moreover, even in her linguistic writings her feminist convictions shine through.
+She was a defender of the language usage and poetic style of the Pléiade poets, Ronsard in particular, and supported their use of archaisms, neologisms, diminutives, and metaphors. She also believed that the language of poetry should not be restricted by rules, and heavily criticised François de Malherbe's new school which regulated language by rejecting words considered too archaic, too new, or too lowly. Additionally, even though she strongly advocated for the equality between men and women, in her Deffence de la poësie et du langage des poëtes (Defence of Poetry and the Language of the Poets) she still disapproved of those who insincerely praised and flattered women by terming them the arbiters of good language usage.
+Furthermore, women in the French tradition had more influence on the linguistic debate through their work as translators, which was at the time considered a sort of applied grammar. De Gournay's partial translations of Virgil's Aeneid, published in 1626, in particular, are a great representation of the association between these two disciplines. Her translation of the second book includes passages from Jean Bertaut's version as comparisons and her translation of book four is actually a completion of the one started by Jacques Davy Duperron. De Gournay's 1626 essay De la façon d'escrire de Messieurs l'Eminentissime Cardinal Du Perron et Bertaut Illustrissime Evesque de Sées (On the Writing Style of the Most Eminent Cardinal Du Perron and the Most Illustrious Bishop Bertaut of Sées) also presents these men as late supporters of the Pléiade, whose language was characterised by Pléiade-like language features, such as diminutives and ablative absolutes. Besides, de Gournay's gender politics even permeate her translations. She underscored Dido's royal status and power by regularly referring to her with a royal title where the original Latin does not do so, and occasionally expanded the text to elaborate on Dido's romance, tragedy, and nobility.
+
+== Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678 CE) ==

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+Anna Maria van Schurman was a German-born woman of noble birth who received an excellent education. She mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and by corresponding in these languages she contributed to international scholarly communication. Furthermore, the publication of her 1641 Dissertatio de ingenii muliebris ad doctrinam et meliores litteras aptitudine (A Treatise on the Aptitude of the Female Spirit for Science and Arts) resulted in her acceptance into the University of Utrecht, making her the first female university student in the Netherlands. Integral to her accomplishments was the mentorship of the men in her life. Her father taught her Latin and Greek, and she was further supported by her brother Johan Godschalk as well as Jacob Cats and André Rivet. Most indispensable to her linguistic achievements, however, was Gisbertus Voetius, Professor of Oriental Languages in Utrecht. In addition to privately tutoring her in Greek, he also made his vast library available to her studies and research.
+Van Schurman made a significant contribution to the linguistic field by writing a grammar of Ethiopian. Her study of this Semitic language was motivated by her general interest in languages as well as her desire to better understand the Bible. At the time of her studies, however, resources for learning the language were limited. Victorinus' 1548 edition of the New Testament, for example, included a nonsensical Ethiopian grammar, while Jacobus Wemmers' 1638 dictionary of Ethiopian was a rather limited one. Moreover, Voetius' library was not sufficiently stocked with Ethiopian sources either.
+Because of this lack of available Ethiopian grammars, van Schurman decided to compose one in Latin herself, which she finished in 1648 but never published. The work certainly included a section called 'De Lectione' ('On Pronunciation'), as well as one entitled 'De Nomine' ('About the Nouns'). Because these segments only cover part of the grammar, it is assumed that they do not represent the work in its entirety. However, this cannot be verified, as the grammar itself has been lost. Consequently, it also remains unresolved how much of her work was incorporated in Job Ludolf's 1661 grammar of Ethiopian. Nevertheless, it is certain that he heard about van Schurman's Ethiopian studies at the outset of his research and, in turn, visited her to examine all materials she possessed. In this regard, van Schurman can be considered the mother of Ethiopian studies as well as a pioneer of non-western language studies.
+
+== Johanna Corleva (1698-1752 CE) ==
+Johanna Corleva attached great importance to the cultivation of the Dutch language, its correct usage, and its codification. Her efforts contributed to a wider movement that paved the way for the official codification of Dutch in the 19th century. She wrote her Nieuwe Nederduitsche spraakkonst (New Dutch Grammar), a Dutch rhyming dictionary, and a Dutch translation of Pierre Bayle's philosophical works. Moreover, in 1740, Corleva also composed her Algemeene en geredeneerde spraakkonst, a Dutch translation of the second edition of Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot's Grammaire générale et raisonnée (General and Rational Grammar). This translation at times adheres slightly too much to the French original, resulting in minor lapses in the Dutch version. Additionally, conforming to puristic tendencies, the work exclusively uses Dutch equivalents for Latin grammatical terms.
+Later, in 1741, she published her dictionary De schat der Nederduitsche wortel-woorden or Le Trésor des mots originaux, de la langue Flamande (The Treasure of Dutch Root Words). The work encompasses two sections of which one could be regarded as the main dictionary, dedicated to the root words, their derivations, and compounds, while the additional part presents once more these root words, but separately. It was influenced by other lexicographical works, such as François Halma's Woordenboek der Nederduitsche en Fransche taalen (Dictionary of the Dutch and French Languages) and Cornelius Schrevelius' Lexicon manuale Graeco Latinum et Latino-Graecum (Concise Greek–Latin and Latin–Greek Dictionary). While the former served as the foundation for Corleva's nomenclature, the latter supplied her with the idea that the Dutch language could be learned entirely with only a modest number of words and without using loanwords.
+
+== Émilie Du Châtelet (1706-1749 CE) ==

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+
+Émilie du Châtelet is well known for her liaison with Voltaire as well as for her scientific work and translations. Nonetheless, she is also the best known 18th-century female grammarian and one of the only two women featured in the Corpus of Fundamental Linguistic Texts because of her Grammaire raisonnée (Rational Grammar). This work was composed somewhere between 1736 and 1749, but regrettably, as Du Châtelet never published it, most of it has been lost. Only three chapters have survived, all put together resulting in around 90 pages: chapter six ('Des mots en général considérés selon leur signification grammaticale'), chapter seven ('Des mots qui représentent les objets de nos perceptions'), and chapter eight ('Des mots qui désignent les opérations de notre entendement sur les objets'). Additionally, the lost second chapter supposedly addressed the operations of the mind on objects ('Opérations de notre âme sur les objets').
+Overall, Du Châtelet's grammar conforms to prevalent linguistic notions of her time. It belongs to the tradition of French grammars established by the Grammaire générale et raisonnée (General and Rational Grammar) published in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, and is also especially influenced by Claude Buffier's 1709 grammar. The latter functioned as Du Châtelet's source on comprehensive language-usage observations, and the former supplied the general structure and composition of her grammar. Another one of her inspirations was Vaugelas. Nevertheless, she did not blindly take her predecessors as gospel, but at times criticised their theoretical perspectives as well. Additionally, Du Châtelet provided her grammar with her own comments, examples, and amusing remarks, which not only grant the work an enjoyable conversational tone, but also showcase her knowledge of the French language.
+Moreover, Du Châtelet's translations reflect a metalinguistic influence as well. Two of her translations stood the test of time, i.e. Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees and Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). The former was not solely intended as a translation, but was also meant to demonstrate that French could be effectively used as a scientific language. This complies with Voltaire's idea that French was more suitable to distribute new scientific knowledge than Latin, because it was equipped with essential modern expressions. Furthermore, whenever French lacked the term for a new concept, Du Châtelet devised a fitting neologism instead.
+
+== Francisca de Chantal Álvares (1742- post 1800 CE) ==
+Francisca de Chantal Álvares, also known as Ana Inácia do Coração de Jesus, was the sister of Manuel Álvares and a novice of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, a religious institution that played an important role in female education. Her importance as a linguist lies in the fact that she authored the first female Portuguese grammar dedicated to an exclusively female audience in 1786, entitled Breve compendio da grammatica portugueza para uso das meninas que se educaõ no Mosteiro da Vizitaçaõ de Lisboa (Brief Compendium of the Portuguese Grammar for the Use of Girls, Who Are Educated in the Visitation Monastery of Lisbon).
+The work was meant for use as a Visitande school manual and should be regarded as a semi-anonymous work. While the titlepage only alludes to a female author with the inscription: 'Por huma religioza do mesmo mosteiro' ('By a nun of the same monastery'), which is followed by the abbreviation 'F. C.', excerpts from the Historia da Fundação do Mosteiro da Vizitação em Lisboa (History of the Foundation of the Visitation Monastery in Lisbon) prove that this abbreviation refers to Francisca de Chantal Álvares. As earlier Portuguese grammars were solely geared towards a male audience, Álvares' work constituted the first Portuguese Grammaire des dames (Grammar Book for Ladies) and with it the foundation of female grammaticography in Portuguese. The female school setting of Álvares' work, then, is also reflected in her example sentences, which feature more women then those in other grammars, and these women are exclusively portrayed as involved in school activities.
+One of Álvares' grammatical sources was Lobato's 1770 Arte da Grammatica da Lingua Portuguesa (The Art of Portuguese Grammar), the first Portuguese grammar officially adopted by the male public school system. Like Lobato, the Breve compendio shows that in 18th-century Portugal learning the mother tongue was of great importance, as it supplied a foundation for learning other languages. Knowledge of French, in particular, was regarded as crucial, because it was a prestigious language that granted the Portuguese access to a broader European culture, including literature, fashion, and arts. The concise Breve compendio, then, with its 58 pages, does not aim to cover all of Portuguese grammar, but instead offers a brief outline of what is most relevant in order to prepare students for foreign language learning. While, because of the prominence of modern languages, Latin was no longer considered the main cornerstone of language teaching for the Visitandines, Álvares still adopted the Latin grammar tradition by emphasising syntax and morphology, but deprioritising orthography and prosody. Nonetheless, the order in which she discussed these four traditional parts was rather unconventional.
+
+== Yekaterina Vorontsova-Dashkova (1743-1810 CE) ==

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+
+According to Princess Dashkova's own memoirs, she was, together with Catherine the Great, responsible for the creation of the Imperial Russian Academy. The Empress appointed her President of this Academy, so that she could engage her lexicographical expertise in the normalisation project of the Russian language. In 1783, in light of the Academy's organisation, Dashkova also founded and edited the journal Sobesednik liubitelei rossiiskago slova (The Collocutor of the Lovers of the Russian Word). She envisioned it as a virtual salon that would bring together contemporary writings and imitations of foreign texts as well as linguistic and lexicographical works, such as reflections on code-switching or lexical borrowing. Dashkova herself also contributed articles to the journal.
+Among Dashkova's linguistic achievements is also the production of the Slovar' Akademii Rossiyskoy v shesti chastyakh (Dictionary of the Russian Academy in six parts), started in 1783. It was to support the Academy's aim of refining and enriching the Russian language and was modelled largely on the 1694 Dictionary of the French Academy. As the first Russian explanatory dictionary it played a role in the development of the language and can be regarded as the foundation of its modern standard. The work was not structured solely alphabetically in the traditional sense but also partially according to lexemes, adding a grammatical component. For the creation of this genre of dictionary, then, the Academy divided the undertaking into three separate sections: a grammatical, definitional, and editorial one. Dashkova took charge of the definition department.
+
+== Early Modern American women as cross-cultural translators ==
+In Early Modern America women primarily contributed to linguistics through their role as transcultural and translingual translators. As women were authorised to transfer between cultures and languages, they played a key role in the dialogue and interaction between indigenous societies on the one hand and European migrant populations on the other.
+
+=== Malinalli (ca. 1496-1529 CE) ===
+An early case was Malinalli, or la Malinche, a Nahua woman of noble birth, who spoke Nahuatl, Spanish, and Maya. As a child she was either sold or sent to different Mayan-speaking communities, but ultimately gifted to Hernán Cortés and his Spanish conquerors. For them, she served as a linguistic interpreter and translator and she even played a role in averting the trap against the Spanish set up by the Cholulan people.
+
+=== Pocahontas (ca. 1595–1617 CE) ===
+Similarly, Pocahontas, or Amonute, was a Powhatan noble who lived in Tidewater Virginia, when she was captured by English immigrants trying to establish a settlement at Jamestown. In captivity she took on the name 'Rebecca', converted to Christianity, and married John Rolfe, an Englishman with whom she later had a son, Thomas Rolfe. While the extent of her intermediary function between the Powhatan people and English speakers is unclear, her communication between the two cultures has been documented in various records.
+
+=== Sacajawea (1788–ca. 1812 CE) ===
+
+Another example of female cross-cultural translation is Sacajawea. She was a Shoshoni woman who knew both Shoshoni and Hidatsa because she had been kidnapped by the Hidatsa community as a child. At a young age, she, among other indigenous girls, had been taken into marriage by the French-Canadian fur trader Charbonneau. When he joined Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's Corps of Discovery expedition, she travelled with them as well. On this mission to discover the region northwest of the Mississippi River, Sacajawea's command of languages proved crucial and her identity as a native woman helped bypass the distrust of the communities Lewis and Clark encountered.
+
+=== Rebecca Kellogg (1695-1757 CE) ===
+Another, lesser-known, source of transcultural communication were female European children who were kidnapped by Native Americans and raised as adoptees. Rebecca Kellogg, for instance, was kidnapped in the Deerfield raid of 1708 and adopted into a Mohawk family at eight years old. She integrated into their culture and took on the name 'Wausania', but never lost her proficiency in English. She later married a white man and supported his work on behalf of white missionaries by translating between Mohawk and English. Because of the respect bestowed upon her by both the settler and Native American communities, Kellogg was able to hold a mediating position and facilitate communication between both groups. She only ended her linguistic mediation at the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1756.
+
+== See also ==
+History of linguistics
+List of women linguists
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Hockett's design features"
+chunk: 1/2
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+---
+
+Hockett's design features are a set of features that characterize human language and set it apart from animal communication. They were defined by the linguist Charles F. Hockett in the 1960s. He called these characteristics the design features of language. Hockett originally believed there to be 13 design features. While primate communication utilizes the first 9 features, Hockett believed that the final 4 features (displacement, productivity, cultural transmission, and duality) were reserved for humans. Hockett later added prevarication, reflexiveness, and learnability to the list as uniquely human characteristics. He asserted that even the most basic human languages possess these 16 features.
+
+== Design features of language ==
+
+=== Vocal-auditory channel ===
+
+Vocal-auditory channel refers to the idea that speaking/hearing is the mode humans use for language. When Hockett first defined this feature, it did not take sign language into account, which reflects the ideology of orality that was prevalent during the time. This feature has since been modified to include other channels of language, such as tactile-visual or chemical-olfactory.
+
+=== Broadcast transmission and directional reception ===
+When humans speak, sounds are transmitted in all directions; however, listeners perceive the direction from which the sounds are coming. Similarly, signers broadcast to potentially anyone within the line of sight, while those watching see who is signing. This is characteristic of most forms of human and animal communication.
+
+=== Transitoriness ===
+Also called rapid fading, transitoriness refers to the temporary quality of language. Language sounds exist for only a brief period of time, after which they are no longer perceived. Sound waves quickly disappear once a speaker stops speaking. This is also true of signs. In contrast, other forms of communication such as writing and Inka khipus (knot-tying) are more permanent.
+
+=== Interchangeability ===
+Interchangeability refers to the idea that humans can give and receive identical linguistic signals; humans are not limited in the types of messages they can say/hear. One can say "I am a boy" even if one is a girl. This is not to be confused with lying (prevarication): The importance is that a speaker can physically create any and all messages regardless of their truth or relation to the speaker. In other words, anything that one can hear, one can also say.
+Not all species possess this feature. For example, in order to communicate their status, queen ants produce chemical scents that no other ants can produce (see animal communication below).
+
+=== Complete Feedback ===
+
+Speakers of a language can hear their own speech and can control and modify what they are saying as they say it. Similarly, signers see, feel, and control their signing.
+
+=== Specialization ===
+The purpose of linguistic signals is communication and not some other biological function.  When humans speak or sign, it is generally intentional.
+An example of non-specialized communication is dog panting.  When a dog pants, it often communicates to its owner that it is hot or thirsty; however, the dog pants in order to cool itself off. This is a biological function, and the communication is a secondary matter.
+
+=== Semanticity ===
+
+Specific sound signals are directly tied to certain meanings.
+
+=== Arbitrariness ===
+
+Languages are generally made up of both arbitrary and iconic symbols. In spoken languages, iconicity takes the form of onomatopoeia (e.g., "murmur" in English, "māo" [cat] in Mandarin). For the vast majority of other symbols, there is no intrinsic or logical connection between a sound form (signal) and what it refers to. Almost all names a human language attributes an object are thus arbitrary: the word "car" is nothing like an actual car.  Spoken words are really nothing like the objects they represent. This is further demonstrated by the fact that different languages attribute very different names to the same object.
+Signed languages are transmitted visually and this allows for a certain degree of iconicity ("cup", "me," "up/down", etc. in ASL). For example, in the ASL sign HOUSE, the hands are flat and touch in a way that resembles the roof and walls of a house. However, many other signs are not iconic, and the relationship between form and meaning is arbitrary. Thus, while Hockett did not account for the possibility of non-arbitrary form-meaning relationships, the principle still generally applies.
+
+=== Discreteness ===
+
+Linguistic representations can be broken down into small discrete units which combine with each other in rule-governed ways. They are perceived categorically, not continuously. For example, English marks number with the plural morpheme /s/, which can be added to the end of nearly any noun. The plural morpheme is perceived categorically, not continuously: one cannot express smaller or larger quantities by varying how loudly one pronounces the /s/.  Loudness can be a discrete category, as a form of stress, while the more continuous and impressionistic variance in loudness expressed with words like whisper and shout are considered paralanguage.
+
+=== Displacement ===
+
+Displacement refers to the idea that humans can talk about things that are not physically present or that do not even exist. Speakers can talk about the past and the future, and can express hopes and dreams. A human's speech is not limited to here and now. Displacement is one of the features that separates human language from other forms of primate communication.
+
+=== Productivity ===
+
+Productivity refers to the idea that language-users can create and understand novel utterances. Humans are able to produce an unlimited amount of utterances. Also related to productivity is the concept of grammatical patterning, which facilitates the use and comprehension of language. Language is not stagnant, but is constantly changing. New idioms are created all the time and the meaning of signals can vary depending on the context and situation.
+
+=== Traditional transmission ===
+
+Also known as cultural transmission, traditional transmission is the idea that, while humans are born with innate language capabilities, the specifics of given language(s) are acquired or learned after birth in a social setting. Significantly, language and culture are woven together in this construct, functioning hand in hand for language acquisition.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett's_design_features-1.md

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+---
+title: "Hockett's design features"
+chunk: 2/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett's_design_features"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:28.193394+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== Duality of patterning ===
+
+Meaningful messages are made up of distinct smaller meaningful units (words and morphemes) which themselves are made up of distinct smaller, meaningless units (phonemes).
+
+=== Prevarication ===
+Prevarication is the ability to lie or deceive. When using language, humans can make false or meaningless statements. This is an important distinction made of human communication, i.e. language as compared to animal communication. While animal communication can display a few other design features as proposed by Hockett, animal communication is unable to lie or make up something that does not exist or have referents.
+
+=== Reflexiveness ===
+Humans can use language to talk about language. Also a very defining feature of human language, reflexiveness is a trait not shared by animal communication. With reflexiveness, humans can describe what language is, talk about the structure of language, and discuss the idea of language with others using language.
+
+=== Learnability ===
+
+Language is teachable and learnable. In the same way, as a speaker learns their first language, the speaker is able to learn other languages. It is worth noting that young children learn language with competence and ease; however, language acquisition is constrained by a critical period such that it becomes more difficult once children pass a certain age.
+
+== Design features in animal communication ==
+Hockett distinguished language from communication.  While almost all animals communicate in some way, a communication system is only considered language if it possesses all of the above characteristics.  Some animal communication systems are impressively sophisticated in the sense that they possess a significant number of the design features as proposed by Hockett.
+
+=== Ants ===
+Ants make use of the chemical-olfactory channel of communication. Ants produce chemicals called pheromones, which are released through body glands and received by the tips of the antenna.  Ants can produce up to twenty different pheromone scents, each a unique signal used to communicate things such as the location of food and danger, or even the need to defend or relocate the colony. When an ant is killed, it releases a pheromone that alerts others of potential danger. Pheromones also help ants distinguish family members from strangers. The queen ant has special pheromones which she uses to signal her status, orchestrate work, and let the colony know when they need to raise princesses or drones.
+Ants will even engage in warfare to protect the colony or a food source. This warfare involves tactics that resemble human warfare.  Marauder ants will capture and hold down an enemy while another ant crushes it. Ants are loyal to their colony to the death; however, the queen will kill her own in order to be the last one standing. This level of "planning" among an animal species requires an intricate communication.
+
+=== Birds ===
+Bird communication demonstrates many of the features: the vocal-auditory channel, broadcast transmission/directional reception, rapid fading, semanticity, and arbitrariness. Bird communication is divided into songs and calls. Songs are used primarily to attract mates, while calls are used to alert conspecifics of food and danger and coordinate movement with the flock.  Calls are acoustically simple, while songs are longer and more complex. Bird communication is both discrete and non-discrete. Birds use syntax to arrange their songs, where musical notes act as phonemes. The order of the notes is important to the meaning of the song, thus indicating that discreteness exists. Bird communication is also continuous in the sense that it utilizes duration and frequency. However, the fact that birds have "phonemes" does not necessarily mean that they can infinitely combine them. Birds have a limited number of songs that they can produce.  The male indigo bunting only has one song, while the brown thrasher can sing over 2000 songs. Birds even have unique dialects, depending on where they are from.
+Two different bird species, the Southern Pied Blabber and the Japanese Tit have been observed to be using the duality of patterning, which is another feature thought to only be used by humans.
+
+=== Honeybees ===
+Honeybee communication is distinct from other forms of animal communication. Rather than vocal-auditory, bees use the space-movement channel to communicate. Honeybees use dances to communicate—the round dance, the waggle dance, and the transitional dance. Depending on the species, the round dance is used to communicate that food is 20–30 m from the hive, the waggle dance that food is 40–90 m from the hive, and the transitional dance that food is at a distance in between.  To do the waggle dance, a bee moves in a zig-zag line and then loops back to the beginning of the line, forming a figure-eight. The direction of the line points to the food. The speed of the dance indicates the distance to the food. In this way, bee dancing is also continuous, rather than discrete. Their communication is also not arbitrary: They move in a direction and pattern that physically points out where food is located.
+Honeybee dancing demonstrates displacement, which is generally considered a human characteristic. Most animals will only give a "food-found" call in the physical presence of food, yet bees can talk about food that is over 100 m away.
+
+== Notes and references ==
+
+=== Footnotes ===
+
+==== Explanatory ====
+
+==== Citations ====
+
+=== References ===
+Christin, A.-M. L'Image écrite ou la déraison graphique, Paris, Flammarion, coll. « Idées et recherches », 1995
+Ottenhiemer, H. J., Pine, Judith M. S. (2018). The Anthropology of Language. (4 ed., pp. 257–263). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
+Hockett, Charles F. The Problem of Universals in Language in Joseph H. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Language, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 1–22.
+
+== Further reading ==
+Hockett, Charles F.  The Origin of Speech, Scientific American, 203, 1960.
+Human and non-human communication. (n.d.) Retrieved from http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2000/ling001/nonhuman.html
+Zuberbuhler, Klaus. Primate Communication, the Knowledge Project. Retrieved 12 May 2013 from http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/primate-communication-67560503

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-0.md

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+---
+title: "Hypotyposis"
+chunk: 1/6
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:29.493054+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Hypotyposis 
+/ˌhaɪpətaɪˈpoʊsɪs/ (from the ancient Greek ὑποτύπωσις/hupotúpôsis, "sketch, model") is a figure of speech consisting of a realistic, animated, and striking description of the scene of which one wants to give an imagined representation and as if experienced at the moment of its expression. The speech of the nurse in the Prologue of Euripides' Medea, Racine's "dream of Athalie" in the play of the same name, Cicero's portrait of Clodius in his Pro Milone, or Émile Zola's description of the alembic in his novel L'Assommoir are examples of hypotyposes.
+It can take the form of an enumeration of concrete details to such an extent that one can say that it crosses the conditions of form proper to a figure of speech. Indeed, the figure can easily go beyond the framework of the sentence to develop over several sentences or even several pages.
+For the Latin orator Quintilian, hypotyposis is "the image of things, so well represented by the word that the listener believes he sees it rather than hears it". It allows the composition of vast poetic tableaux "giving to see" a scene as if the limits of the sentence no longer existed. A figure based on the image, it has been, since the beginning of rhetoric, the preferred method for animating descriptions and striking the imagination of the interlocutor. It has several variants, depending on the object described. It is often confused with ekphrasis, which is a realistic and precise description of a work of art.
+
+== Definition of the figure ==
+
+=== Etymology ===
+The word "hypotyposis" comes from the ancient Greek τύπος/túpos (from which the word "type" is also descended), which refers to an "imprint in hollow or relief left by the striking of a die," specific to the vocabulary of typography. The hypotyposis, ὑποτύπωσις / hupotúpôsis, is thus a "draft, a model". Furetière sees the verb ὑποτυπόω/hupotupóô as the origin of the noun, which he paraphrases with the Latin phrase: "per figuram demonstro, designo" (i.e., "I represent, I make something see"). The seme kept in the definition of the figure is related to the spectacular side of the animation that it produces. By analogy with the matter to which it imprints a predetermined form, the imprint is indeed what marks the spirit and the imagination.
+In the literal sense of the term, the hypotyposis "gives to see" (according to the Latin expression ut cerni videantur), it engraves in the reader's memory an image or an impression. The meaning of "tableau", which is used synonymously, is quite common, notably by César Chesneau Dumarsais who explains that "Hypotypose is a Greek word which means "image", "tableau"; it is when, in descriptions, one paints the facts of which one speaks as if what one says were actually before the eyes".
+
+=== Definition and variants ===
+A "figure of presence" for Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Traité de l'argumentation, la nouvelle rhétorique, hypotyposis is, within a discourse (in writing but also to a certain extent in speech), the animated and vivid description of a subject, a scene, a real or fictitious character or an object of art. In Greek rhetoric, it is known as enargeia, or evidentia in Latin. For Jean-Jacques Robrieux, "hypotyposis (...) groups together the varied set of procedures that make a narrative or a description lively and realistic". The figure has had many names throughout history. The poet Nicolas Boileau called it "image", Fénelon "painting", Pierre Fontanier "tableau", Edmond de Goncourt "painted image" and Joachim du Bellay "energy".
+By its ambition, hypotyposis is a key figure of mimesis because the author uses it to go beyond, or at least to give the illusion of, the classical narrative and descriptive framework, by giving the impression that the scene is real.
+
+==== The prosopopeia ====
+
+Prosopopoeia can concern a fictional, dead or abstract character who, unlike allegory [ref. needed], has the faculty of speech; it is a figure in its own right, despite its proximity to hypotyposis (according to Jean-Jacques Robrieux, it is, indeed, a form of it). The "prosopopeia of the laws" (Crito, 50 a-c) is one of the oldest examples. The term "prosopography" (ancient Greek prosopon and graphein, "face, figure, character and writing") is also often used, synonymously with that of "prosopopoeia", and designates the description of the external appearance of a person. Often confused with allegory when it concerns a mythical or abstract character (such as Death, for example), prosopography, unlike portrait and ethopoeia (see below), vividly describes the subject in his or her environment and in action, in a fleeting manner, as in this Baudelairian poem:
+
+I am an author's pipe;
+You can tell by looking at my face, Abyssinian or Cafrine,
+
+That my master is a big smoker.
+
+==== The topography ====
+Topography concerns the description of a place, real or imaginary. The object described in topography (ancient Greek topos, "the place in the sense of geographical location") is a picturesque or simply striking landscape. Its primary function is rhetorical: it takes place during the narratio (phase of the exposition of facts in oratory) where it allows situating the places and circumstances and thus allows to expose to all the places of the action or to revive their memory. The topography is very much used in the novel, to fix the scene as in this passage from the short story La Nuit by Guy de Maupassant:
+
+I stopped under the Arc de Triomphe to look at the avenue, the long and admirable starry avenue, going towards Paris between two lines of lights, and the stars! The stars up there, the unknown stars thrown at random in the immensity where they draw these strange figures, which make one dream so much, which make one think so much.
+
+==== The ethopoeia ====

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+title: "Hypotyposis"
+chunk: 2/6
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:29.493054+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Ethopoeia is also a variant of hypotyposis. It consists in painting characters or assemblies of characters by also painting their morals and passions. Less visual than the hypotyposis, it constitutes very often elements of a portrait, as with the moralists, since Les Caractères du philosophe Theophrastus, taken again by Jean de La Bruyère in 1688 in his Caractères de Theophrastus, traduits du grec, avec les Caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle. For Marc Escola, La Bruyère's portraits achieve the excellence of ethopoeia, which he describes as "hermeneutics of the visible" as in the portrait of Drance, a character in the chapter Du Coeur of Les Caractères:
+
+Drance wants to pass for governing his Master, who believes nothing of it, nor does the public: to speak incessantly to a Great One whom one serves, in places and at times when it is least convenient, to speak to him in his ear or in mysterious terms, to laugh until one bursts in his presence, to cut off his speech, to put oneself between him and those who speak to him, to disdain those who come to make their court, or wait impatiently for them to withdraw, to place oneself close to him in a posture that is too free, to appear with him with one's back to a fireplace, to pull him by his habit, to walk on his heels, to act as a familiar, to take liberties, all of which are more indicative of a fat man than of a favorite.
+
+==== Diatyposis ====
+Diatyposis, from a Greek term meaning the action of shaping, of modelling, or evidentia in Latin, also known as "trait", consists of a "dynamic description of an animated scene that can give rise to an oratorical development", unlike hypotyposis which remains static.
+Some authors sometimes define diatyposis as a short hypotyposis. However, contrary to hypotyposis, diatyposis is a short narrative embedded in a discourse that encompasses it. In other words, the diatyposis is a digression of the gaze or of the diegesis which focuses, for a time, no longer on the unfolding of the action but on a small visualizable scene. It is often introduced by the narrator himself, by means of another figure of speech, the epiphrase, as opposed to the hypotyposis which is self-sufficient and seems closed and autonomous from the rest of the discourse (although it is a figure of speech).
+Michel Pougeoise's Dictionary of Rhetoric considers diatyposis as a form of reduced and condensed hypotyposis that is found especially in the narrative, in Homer's Iliad, for example:
+
+He struck him under the eyebrow, at the bottom of the eye, from which the pupil was torn out. And the spear, passing through the eye, passed behind the head, and Ilioneus, with his hands extended, fell. Then Penelos, drawing his sharp sword from the sheath, cut off the head, which rolled to the earth with the helmet, the strong spear still fixed in the eye.
+
+==== A similar figure of speech: the ekphrasis ====
+Historically, the figure of ekphrasis, which allows to describe in an animated way a work of art, is first in rhetoric. Indeed, the term "hypotyposis" is only attested as early as 1555 under the entry "Hipotipose" in Jacques Peletier du Mans' work, l'Art poétique, whereas ekphrasis has been known since Greek antiquity. The ekphrasis is evoked by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his Art rhétorique and in Sur la mimésis, but it is Aelius Theon who is the first, in the first century, to attempt a definition of it. He explains that this animated description, which he calls "ekphrasis", is "a discourse which presents in detail and puts before the eyes in an obvious way what it gives to know. There are descriptions of people, facts, places, and time (...) There are also descriptions of manner." In antiquity, ekphrasis is not limited to the evocation of works of art, but designates any vivid evocation capable of conjuring up images in the mind of the listener or the reader; it is only towards the end of the 19th century that the notion is used by scholars in a sense that restricts it to the description of works of art.
+
+== Two types of hypotyposes ==
+
+In spite of its numerous variants with blurred contours, Bernard Dupriez, in his Gradus, proposes to distinguish two types of hypotyposes, a distinction also attested by Jean-Jacques Robrieux:
+
+=== The "descriptive hypotyposis” ===
+The figure then merges with simple description, as an enumeration of details, as following the gaze of the observer. Bernard Dupriez takes as an example the descriptive passage in Gustave Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale: "People were arriving out of breath; barrels, cables, baskets of laundry were obstructing traffic; the sailors were not responding to anyone; we were bumping into each other". The hypotyposis presses on the details, resulting in seeing the scene instead of simply reading it. These verses of Racine thus suggest, in three movements, all the sadness of the character of Junia and the love of Nero which is expressed here:
+
+This night I saw her arrive in these places, Sad, raising to heaven his eyes wet with tears, That shone through the torches and weapons.
+Often the hypotyposis is revealed by the interruption of the narrative or by the creation of a digression. It is recognizable by the development of the subject it wants to show, a development that is sometimes long and typographically marked. For Dupriez, schematization is the opposition of descriptive hypotyposis. Hypotyposis consists mainly of episodes in indirect discourse, often bordering on cliché when it summarizes the action too quickly or too succinctly.
+In Et que dit ce silence?, Anne Surgers, Gilles Declercq, and Anne-Elisabeth Spica analyze the visual dimension of the figure, through three categories of hypotyposis: one that gives to see and feel, a second by empathy, and a third by the accentuation of the effect of presence, in literary texts, and in painting.

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+---
+title: "Hypotyposis"
+chunk: 3/6
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:29.493054+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== The "rhetorical hypotyposis" ===
+The rhetorical use of hypotheticals is based on the idea that they are "a device for representing the idea". In rhetoric, the visual perception is indeed first and is always privileged because it allows to strike the mind of the listener or the public, because it is linked to memory, explains Frances Yates. It thus aims at an effect or an emotion on the reader. Metonymy and metaphor are thus the fundamental figures of style composing it. As part of the rhetorical arsenal available to the orator, it intervenes in the rhetorical part of the narratio and allows the elements of the described object to be seen. It also makes it possible to situate the action, by the topography, or to make the physical portrait of an individual, by means of the prosopography. The orator then seeks to move and touch the pathos of the listeners, to convince without resorting to a logical argumentation or to evidence.
+Hypotyposis is also related to the part of the rhetorical system called memoria, memory. The ancient oratorical exercises (progymnasmata) consisted in particular in the making of hypotyposes, either of works of art, or of dialogues between two famous characters but whose meeting is fictitious, for the needs of the exercise. Hypotyposis (or ekphrasis, this second term being in use at the time) is based on the reuse of truism.
+
+== The confusion of hypotyposis with simple description ==
+The theoretical and stylistic distinction between hypotyposis and conventional description remains unclear. Nevertheless, for many authors, such as Georges Molinié, the two figures are equivalent macrostructural processes. Molinié cites this verse by Victor Hugo as an illustration of the suggestive power of hypotyposis on the one hand, and its brevity on the other:
+
+I will not look at the gold of the falling evening
+Nor the sails in the distance going down towards Harfleur
+The collusion of the two figures is such that the Encyclopedia's article Hypotypose gives an example of allegory, citing Nicolas Boileau's lines in Le Lutrin:
+
+Oppressed softness
+In his mouth at this word feels his icy tongue;
+And tired of talking, succumbing to the effort,
+
+Sighs, stretches her arms, closes her eyes and falls asleep.
+
+== Stylistics of hypotyposis ==
+
+=== Literary uses of the figure ===
+The hypotyposis allows to put under the eyes of the readers or spectators a picturesque scene, its effect is above all suggestive. It is indeed a question of addressing the imagination of the reader. The figure is based on what Roland Barthes calls the "effect of reality": the use of stylistic processes allows to imitate the observation of a real scene. Realist as well as romantic or even surrealist authors use it to evoke a scene and make it come alive.
+Moreover, the hypotyposis establishes a relation between the outside and the inside, the nature and the feelings of the one who contemplates it, which explains its use by the poets as Charles Baudelaire and by the romantic authors then surrealists. Psychoanalysis is interested in it, insofar as it informs on the analogical mechanism, through the concepts of "regressiveness" and "contiguity".
+Moreover, hypotyposis is above all a figure of speech, in that it has an argumentative aim. Olivier Reboul shows that "its persuasive force comes from the fact that it "makes see" the argument, associating pathos with logos".
+Literary critics speak of a "tableau" when the hypotyposis develops over several pages, composing a very detailed painting of a single subject, perceived from all angles and in an exhaustive manner.
+In stylistic technique, hypotyposis has become a notion used to identify fragmentary descriptions where only sensitive notations and striking descriptive information are rendered, in an aesthetic close to the kaleidoscope or impressionist style applied to literature. This meaning owes a lot to the cinematographic approach and to the constant mixtures between the two arts during the 20th century.
+Moreover, hypotyposis is above all a figure of speech, in that it has an argumentative aim. Olivier Reboul shows that "its persuasive force comes from the fact that it "makes see" the argument, associating pathos with logos".
+The modern linguist Henri Morier revives this original definition of hypotyposis as a vivid painting in his Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique. Morier thus distinguishes hypotyposis from allegory in that the former wants to do without discourse to be perceived in itself: "even if some formal features have been repeatedly emphasized, such as the possible use of the present tense in a past tense narrative, or the absence of any mention referring to the narrator's position with respect to the theme, the main emphasis has been rather on the picturesque force of a hypotyposis, going so far as to say that it makes one see the spectacle as if there were no screen of the discourse relating it (which is linguistically ridiculous)". Morier then indicates the technique that founds the figure, which is very particular: "in that in a narrative or, even more often, in a description, the narrator selects only a part of the information corresponding to the whole of the theme, keeping only particularly sensitive and strong, catchy notations, without giving the general view of what it is about, without even indicating the global subject of the discourse, or even presenting an aspect under false expressions or of pure appearance, always attached to the cinematographic recording of the unfolding or of the exterior manifestation of the object. This fragmentary, possibly descriptive, and strongly plastic side of the text constitutes the radical component of a hypotyposis".

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+title: "Hypotyposis"
+chunk: 4/6
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:29.493054+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== A figure of enunciation ===
+According to Jean-Jacques Robrieux, hypotyposis is a figure of speech whose aim is to "provoke emotion, laughter, through an effect of reality". The enunciative framework in which it develops means that the author or the narrator invests himself in the discourse, through enunciative procedures betraying his identity. Robrieux notes the revealing use of the historical present tense of narration (for example, in this line from Jean Racine's Phèdre: "The axle cries out and breaks ..."), which makes the scene lively and contemporary to the reading. The poetic rhythm and the versification are also employed to accelerate the action. But it is above all the enunciation of the "I" of the narrator that composes the figure. Robrieux thus cites the verse 1545 of the Phèdre: "Excuse my pain..." in which Théramène delivers his emotion about his vision of Hippolytus's tragic death. In other words, as a figure of speech, hypotyposis summons above all pathos, that is its main function.
+To do this, it uses a considerable number of linguistic means and stylistic or rhetorical devices: the thematic progression allows the syntagms to be linked together and makes the description more fluid, while the dislocation consists of highlighting an element (for example in: "This shield..."). The apostrophe allows the narrator to show his subjectivity by expressing his astonishment or amazement. Verbal and temporal devices such as emphasis allow the use of the imperfect tense and the simple past tense, giving an impression of vivid description. Combined with demonstrative adjectives and another deixis ("here you see...", "over there the trees were moving...") that anchor the narrative in the space-time frame, the reader thus has the illusion of seeing the object described before his eyes. The hypotyposes by the use of deixis are a specificity of Arthur Rimbaud's writing according to Dominique Combe. Stylistic processes are also used. The internal or omniscient focalisation gives an impression of almost cinematographic observation.
+Finally, figures of speech contribute to create the image. The ellipsis allows to pass under detail of the events and condenses the narrative on the fact to be described. The epithets (including the "Homeric epithets") participate in creating an effect of amplified reality. Numerous other figures form the hypotyposis: figures linked to the narrator such as palinody (the narrator pretends to go back on his statements to clarify them) and epiphrase (direct intervention of the author in the discourse) in particular, but above all figures of analogy such as simile (images allow identification with known or aesthetic things), allegory (the object or situation described becomes as if it were alive), metaphor (recourse to analogies makes it possible to put forward the fantastic dimension of what is being described), personification. Finally, we can cite figures of rhythm and sentence (or verse) construction such as: gradation (the description becomes more and more precise), hyperbole (the description goes beyond all realism), antithesis (contrast effect), alliteration and assonance (in the poems especially there can be a search for imitative harmony).
+
+== Genres concerned ==
+Being a macrostructural figure, holding the truism of the description, the hypotyposis and its variants are frequently met in literature. Georges Molinié enumerates, in a non-exhaustive way, the genres of "erotica, detective stories, fantasy, in novels and in the theater, in descriptive poetry, as well as in the pathetic parts of the narration".
+
+=== In the art of oratory ===
+Historically, hypotyposis is found in argumentative statements such as forensic rhetoric, in which the aim is to capture the imagination of the listeners. It then constitutes a rhetorical truism of the narratio.
+
+Voltaire, for example, uses its shocking resources to make the powerful aware of the condition of the Portuguese people affected by a devastating earthquake in 1756 in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne:
+
+Deceived philosophers who shout: "All is well"; 
+Come and contemplate these awful ruins,
+These debris, these shreds, these unfortunate ashes,
+These women and children piled on top of each other, 
+
+Under these broken marbles these scattered members;
+Political figures are also fond of hypotyposis. They mobilize in their political discourse these descriptions with numerous metaphors and a rich vocabulary with great capacities of evocation. Indeed, this figure of the pathos, by playing with the emotions of its audience, has an argumentative effect but is also a tendency to manipulate.
+
+=== At the theater ===
+Hypotyposis is also frequently used in the theater, in descriptions, striking monologues, and reported stories. In the Classic period, it was used to help the spectator to imagine the scene, often mythological or taking place in an exotic country, or to imagine scenes considered violent and contradicting the rule of propriety, as in the works of Racine, Corneille, or Robert Garnier in Les Juives.
+One of the most famous descriptive hypotyposes is that of the death of Hippolytus told by Théramène in Phèdre by Jean Racine. The one showing Ulysses relating to Clytemnestra what happened near the altar, in the presence of Calchas, in Jean Racine's Iphigénie is also often quoted. The story of Le Cid recounting the battle against the Moors uses some of the best known hypotyposes in the dramatic genre.
+The evocation of the sack of Troy by Andromache in the play of the same name, by Racine, is an example of a monologue presenting a hypotyposis. The passage known as "Athalie's dream" by Racine, in the play of the same name, is finally, by the stylistic effects which emerge from it, a model of the genre:

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+---
+title: "Hypotyposis"
+chunk: 5/6
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:29.493054+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+It was during the horror of a deep night, My mother Jezebel before me showed up,
+As on the day of her pompously adorned death. His misfortunes had not brought down his pride, Even she still had that borrowed glow,
+Of which she took care to paint & adorn her face, To repair the irreparable outrage of years.
+Tremble, she said to me, girl worthy of me,
+The cruel God of the Jews also prevails over you. I pity you for falling into his formidable hands,
+My daughter! As she finished these appalling words, His shadow towards my bed seemed to be dropping, And I held out my hands to kiss him;
+But all I found was a horrible mixture
+Of bruised bones and flesh dragged through the mire, Tatters full of blood, & dreadful limbs,
+
+That devouring dogs were fighting among themselves
+
+=== In the novel ===
+
+In the novel and in particular in the literary movements like realism and naturalism, the hypotyposes are common. Developing over many sentences, they allow to accentuate the effect of reality, an aesthetic ambition of these literary movements. The description of the alembic by Émile Zola in L'Assommoir, of the mine in Germinal; the descriptive stretches of Gustave Flaubert or Joris-Karl Huysmans, of Honoré de Balzac finally form types of hypotyposes anchored in the natural course of the narrative.
+Émile Zola in his Carnets ethnographiques (Ethnographic Notebooks) makes a topography of the caves of Lourdes: "[in the baths of the cave of Lourdes] there was everything, threads of blood, scraps of skin, scabs, pieces of lint and bandage, a dreadful consummate of all the evils, all the wounds, all the rottenness. It seemed a veritable culture of poisonous germs, an essence of the most dreadful contagions, and the miracle should be that one emerged alive from this human slime."
+Stendhal in particular knows not only how to constitute hypotyposes, but also how to play on their referential scope. In La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), Fabrice the hero contemplates the battle of Waterloo, which the author presents in great military detail and precise description: "a ploughed land that was stirred up in a singular way. The bottom of the furrows was full of water, and the very wet earth that formed the crest of these furrows flew in small black fragments thrown three or four feet high". Stendhal then presents his character as asking a passing soldier "but is this a real battle?", thereby criticizing the literary attempt to portray everything in a spectacular way, at the risk of no longer being able to identify the fictional from the real.
+
+In the 20th century, Alain Robbe-Grillet in Les Gommes uses modern hypotypositions to describe a tomato in an exhaustive way. Marguerite Duras' Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein is considered a hypotyposis on the scale of an entire novel. Annie Ernaux, who claims in La Place a "flat writing", devoid of any literary art, to "immerse herself in the vision and the limits of the world of [her] father" of peasant origin, uses the hypotyposis abundantly to "make the image of the father appear" in an "ethnological" writing, where the details are always chosen according to their social significance:
+
+"I will gather the words, the gestures, the tastes of my father, the highlights of his life, all the objective signs of an existence that I also shared."
+Surrealism also, by means of the splitting up of objects into fugitive details, has updated the hypotyposis while maintaining the classical use of scenographic tableaux, inherited notably from Lautréamont and his Les Chants de Maldoror.
+As a return to its phantasmatic and hallucinatory origin, the poets of modernity, with the use of drugs and practices of writing based on the de-construction, as Henri Michaux establishes hypotyposes delivered of any space of reference:
+
+Suddenly, but first preceded by a word in vanguard...
+Hymalayas suddenly appear...
+While I am still looking at these extraordinary mountains, here is that...
+
+Plowshares and again the big scythes that mow the nothingness from top to bottom...
+Paul Claudel composes mystical and pantheistic hypotyposes. The passage known as Place Monge in Claude Simon's novel Le Jardin des Plantes presents an original hypotyposis inspired by cinematographic techniques.
+
+=== In poetry ===
+Charles Baudelaire but also Arthur Rimbaud in his Illuminations animates their poems by hypotyposes establishing contemplative effects for this one. Baudelaire uses them to give substance to synesthesia, which he calls "correspondences". The Japanese haikus are also fast hypotyposes.
+
+Victor Hugo in his romantic poems uses many emphatic hypotyposes, signs of his energetic writing:
+
+The child was shot twice in the head. The house was clean, humble, peaceful, honest;
+A blessed branch was seen on a portrait.
+An old grandmother was there crying. 
+We undressed him in silence. His mouth,
+Pale, opened; death drowned his fierce eye;
+Her arms seemed to be hanging down, asking for support. 
+He had a boxwood top in his pocket.
+You could stick a finger in the holes of his wounds. 
+Have you seen the blackberry bleeding in the hedges? 
+His skull was open like wood splitting.
+The grandmother watched the child undress, Saying: – How white it is! bring the lamp closer. 
+
+God! her poor hair is stuck on her temple!

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+---
+title: "Hypotyposis"
+chunk: 6/6
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:29.493054+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+=== In the other arts ===
+Cinema often employs hypotyposes. Populated scenes, animated by sweeping camera movements, but also descriptions by the camera eye of artistic objects in the film, as in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, are called "tableaux vivants" in film. D. W. Griffith, for example, uses these tableaux vivants to highlight dramatic moments in the film A Corner in Wheat. Derek Jarman also uses this technique, as does Peter Greenaway. Jean-Luc Godard, in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin, in 1972, made a painting of a factory in his film Tout Va Bien.
+Painting, especially classical painting, has produced many hypotyposes, often inspired by dramatic or tragic plays such as Phèdre or Athalie.
+Realist painting also, in its aesthetic ambition to describe everything, was able to form detailed hypotyposes on popular scenes as in Gustave Courbet. Already Denis Diderot, art critic, examined the hypotyposes in the paintings of his time, and made them the condition of a good painting and of a mastered style.
+In music, hypotyposes constitute symphonies, vast musical tableaux attempting to portray scenes that are often mythological or dramatic, as in Richard Wagner's work. Wagner also defines his theory of "Gesamtkunstwerk" as an animated and dynamic description, made possible by the fusion of all the Arts on stage, linked by musical composition, close to the literary hypotyposis as an exhaustive representation of an aesthetic subject. Wagnerian operas such as Tristan and Isolde (Tristan und Isolde), often considered as his masterpiece, but also The Master Singers of Nuremberg (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg) and The Ring of the Nibelungs (Der Ring des Nibelungen), which is a set of four operas inspired by German and Scandinavian mythologies, and finally Parsifal, a contemplative work taken from the Christian legend of the Holy Grail, form living pictures.
+
+=== Related figures ===
+
+== References ==
+
+== Bibliography ==
+Quintilien (1989). Institutions oratoires. Bude Serie Latine (in French). Vol. 1. Translated by Cousin, Jean. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. ISBN 2-251-01202-8.
+Bacry, Patrick (1992). Les Figures de style et autres procédés stylistiques. Collection Sujets (in French). Paris: Armand Colin. ISBN 2-7011-1393-8.
+Barthes, Roland (1968). "L'Effet de réel". Communications (in French). 11 (11): 84–89. doi:10.3406/comm.1968.1158.
+Chesneau Dumarsais, César (1730). Des tropes ou Des différents sens dans lesquels on peut prendre un même mot dans une même langue. Paris.
+Dupriez, Bernard. Gradus, les procédés littéraires.
+Meyer, Michel (1999). Histoire de la Rhétorique des Grecs à nos jours. Biblio-Essais (in French). Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ISBN 978-2-253-94283-2.
+Molinié, Georges; Aquien, Michèle (1996). Dictionnaire de rhétorique et de poétique. Encyclopédies d'aujourd'hui. Paris: LGF - Livre de Poche. ISBN 2-253-13017-6.
+Morier, Henri (1998). Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique. Grands Dictionnaires (in French). Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises. ISBN 2-13-049310-6.
+Lamy, Bernard; Timmermans, Benoît (1998). La Rhétorique ou l'art de parler. Interrogation Philosophique (in French). Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises. ISBN 2-13-049541-9.
+Reboul, Olivier (2009). Introduction à la rhétorique. Premier cycle (in French). Vol. 4. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ISBN 978-2-13-043917-2.
+Robrieux, Jean-Jacques (1993). Éléments de rhétorique et d'argumentation (in French). Paris: Dunod. ISBN 2-10-001480-3.
+Delarue, F (1980). Suétone et l'hypotypose (in French). Paris: Revue Lalies. ISSN 0750-9170.
+Combel, V (1995). L'hypotypose dans la tragédie de Racine (in French). Vol. 188. xviie Siècle. ISBN 9782130555223.
+Masuy, Christine (1997). "Description et hypotypose dans l'écriture journalistique de l'ambiance". Pratiques. 94. Pratiques : théorie, pratique: 35–48. doi:10.3406/prati.1997.1802. ISSN 0338-2389.
+Le Bozec, Yves (2002). L'hypotypose : un essai de définition formelle. Vol. 92. L'information grammaticale. ISSN 0222-9838.
+Le Bozec, Yves (2004). Les frontières de l'hypotypose. Le songe d'Athalie et la prophétie de Joad (in French). Vol. 100. ISSN 0222-9838.
+Esteves, A (2001). Evidentia rhétorique et horreur infernale : le portrait de Tisiphone chez Stace, étude esthétique et stylistique, Thébaïde (in French). Paris: Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Budé. ISSN 0004-5527.