diff --git a/_index.db b/_index.db index 610bc298c..539453ea1 100644 Binary files a/_index.db and b/_index.db differ diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..697a063f9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Abstract and concrete labour" +chunk: 1/6 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:03.138517+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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 If all labour is withdrawn, the value of the capital assets worked with will normally deteriorate. In the end, if all labour is permanently withdrawn, nothing remains but a ghost town.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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b5149d02e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Abstract and concrete labour" +chunk: 2/6 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:03.138517+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..497878a80 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Abstract and concrete labour" +chunk: 3/6 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:03.138517+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c337fdacd --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Abstract and concrete labour" +chunk: 4/6 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:03.138517+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"...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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5a9f44745 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Abstract and concrete labour" +chunk: 5/6 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:03.138517+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d94b42cfe --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Abstract and concrete labour" +chunk: 6/6 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_and_concrete_labour" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:03.138517+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(linguistics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f0a18f2bb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Abstraction (linguistics)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(linguistics)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:30.370317+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_clitic-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_clitic-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1a9e6b4ea --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_clitic-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +--- +title: "Anaphoric clitic" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_clitic" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:32.777368+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation_(linguistics)-0.md index 47791404e..191701013 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation_(linguistics)-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation_(linguistics)" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:12:13.681858+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:34.077709+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antecedent-contained_deletion-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antecedent-contained_deletion-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d381880ff --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antecedent-contained_deletion-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek-0.md index e1dc8b6ad..494b2fef2 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T14:59:18.386784+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:36.718350+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek-1.md index e0ebdcfa3..ad823b483 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropos-Bibliothek" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T14:59:18.386784+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:36.718350+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4cdc62a5c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6f693ed55 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel_(linguistics)-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4780ce5af --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrowing_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrowing_(linguistics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6fded48e6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrowing_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Borrowing (linguistics)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borrowing_(linguistics)" +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fdcba7ac0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bfc1eb312 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..efc330db0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..43fb70544 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..053d0c138 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_constructions_in_sign_languages-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_hearing_science-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_hearing_science-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9299ebfae --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_hearing_science-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_dynamism-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_dynamism-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0c1b9a198 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicative_dynamism-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..25147d2ec --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,70 @@ +--- +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.) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..cf1d21a24 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_sentence-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..08359d50c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..12cb113c1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Constructed language" +chunk: 2/5 +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" +--- + +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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..22e904a72 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,93 @@ +--- +title: "Constructed language" +chunk: 3/5 +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" +--- + +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bf444fe0a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Constructed language" +chunk: 4/5 +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" +--- + +== 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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bd51f1f3f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "Constructed language" +chunk: 5/5 +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" +--- + +== 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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse-0.md index 398487d29..68ace4bba 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:47:12.320577+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:48.099439+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_set-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_set-0.md index f6209472e..e2cf9d2f6 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_set-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_set-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_set" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:00:11.744043+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:49.455973+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrastive_linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrastive_linguistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7cb2b2c72 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrastive_linguistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Contrastive linguistics" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrastive_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:50.688713+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_language-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..496589262 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_language-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Corpus language" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:51.851991+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_language_awareness-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_language_awareness-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a456e26ad --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_language_awareness-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a6f2e34a4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Dialect levelling" +chunk: 1/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling" +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 === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f81528b25 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Dialect levelling" +chunk: 2/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:54.369184+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..91a7e6f37 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Dialect levelling" +chunk: 3/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:54.369184+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +/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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..13c3ff4a8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +--- +title: "Dialect levelling" +chunk: 4/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:54.369184+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Standard German === +The emergence of Standard German was a complicated process because no German dialect had significantly more prestige than any other – partly due to political fractionation. Only relatively recently has a dialect attained sufficient prestige for it to be widely adopted. Old High German (OHG) is an umbrella term to encompass what are in reality numerous divergent dialects – sometimes with hardly any mutual intelligibility. While it was without a doubt *þiudisk, that is the language of common folk (*þiudisk is the origin of the modern words deutsch and Dutch), it was not a useful means of long distance communication. Few people could read and write, parchment was expensive and those who could write usually read enough Latin to bridge the dialect gap that way – similar to how Dutch and German people may communicate with one another in English to bridge the dialect gap nowadays. Nonetheless, some monasteries and the Carolingian court did produce some vernacular writing, most of which was lost, but the remains of which form almost the entirety of the OHG corpus. After 1022 little written material in the vernacular was produced for a century, so a significantly changed language would reemerge when vernacular writing resumed. Any even tentative hints of dialect leveling in the OHG period were in essence reset to zero. What is now called Middle High German was still clearly divided into dialects (e.g. the Niebelungenlied was written in a Bavarian dialect) but due to the prestige of the Hohenstaufen dynasty a certain convergence can be observed in the language used by authors enjoying imperial patronage. Court poetry, particularly Minnesang and epic poetry, enjoyed a particularly high prestige and Walter von der Vogelweide, Wolfram von Eschenbach (author of Parzival) and others while all but forgotten a few centuries after their death were "re-discovered" by 19th century romantic nationalists and have enjoyed enduring popularity ever since. However, with the end of the Hohenstaufen, centralizing tendencies in both politics and linguistics came to a halt in the Holy Roman Empire and there was no longer an imperial patronage for poetry. Interestingly, the Hohenstaufen era dialect leveling seemed to converge on a standard with some elements in common with modern Alemanic. Today the Alemanic-derived Swiss German is often deemed the most divergent dialect under the Standard German Dachsprache. There is today a clear distinction between "High German" dialects which had undergone the Second Germanic consonant shift and "Low German" dialects which had not. However, this dichotomy oversimplifies matters as it ignores the "Middle German" dialects which sit on the "Low German" side of some isoglosses and the "High German" side of others. The dialect continuum only started to break down, when standard languages started to replace the vernaculars, but to contemporary sources dialects in all parts of the continuum were "deutsch" which helps explain misleading names like Pennsylvania Dutch which descends from a Middle German dialect unrelated to the current day Netherlands. Standardization did not get fully underway until 13th-century Franciscans began a push to establish a literate public; however, at this time, 70% of the materials produced were in Medieval Latin, as opposed to German. 14th-century city-dwellers were far more parochial than their poetic forebears, but there were some linguistic links within the realm of commerce, as newer cities would look to established cities for law codes and the Hanseatic League, in the north of modern Germany, developed a form of German specifically for business. The lingua franca of much of the Baltic Sea Coast in the heyday of the Hanse was Middle Low German. However, as the Hanseatic League began to weaken by the 16th century, its potential to drive linguistic unity was reduced. During the 14th and 15th centuries, the language underwent a massive phonological shift, and these changes are still visible linguistic features today. Eastern Central Germany was at the center of the changes and became a linguistically uniform area, which set it apart from other parts of the German-speaking world that remained linguistically diverse. The Viennese imperial chancellery introduced influential spelling reforms, but most regions maintained their own systems, which resulted in five varieties of "printer's language" being used in publications. While administration in prior eras had been handled largely in Latin and produced orders of magnitude less written material, the inventing of movable type printing and the widespread availability of cheap paper enabled a "bureaucratic revolution". However, the question of standardization soon arose and so each state bureaucracy (then known as a chancery) set "house standards" for orthography which were based at least in part on the spoken language of locally recruited staff. Now at least those in the wider area of a chancery with a high prestige standard had a written koine language that would be understood by all literate people within the area. The spoken language, however, underwent virtually no standardization within that era. The largest influence in the 16th century was Martin Luther. Besides theological disagreements with the Vatican, his main contention was that every Christian should have access to theological texts in the vernacular. For this to succeed, two conditions had to be met: rapid distribution of the new translation at affordable prices (achievable thanks to printing) and a written vernacular that would be understood by as many people as possible. He did not create a new dialect for this task; most of his work was written in the language of Upper Saxony's chancellery based in Meißen, which was very close to his native dialect. Due to the prestige of that language, his work was more widely accepted. He was also able to influence the lexicon, both in choice of vocabulary and semantic selections. Since so many people read his work, orthography began to stabilize and with a canonical Standard German corpus of sorts being developed, although this was largely limited to the Protestant north. Despite the religious differences between the north and south of Germany, it was the existence of Eastern Central German that prevented the initial spread of Luther's linguistic forms. This divide was overcome in the Protestant parts of Central Germany as the prestige of Luther's dialect assured the acceptance of features from Eastern Central German. The differences were further reduced, as the need for coherent written communication became paramount and Eastern Central German, now highly identified with Luther, became the linguistic medium of the north. Low German, once the first language of the region and a subject of instruction, was displaced and restricted to use in comedic theater, and even there, it was used only by important figures. The first editions of Luther's bible translation still contained glosses for terms that might not be regionally understood — the effect of his work was so immense that those glosses were left out of later editions within Luther's lifetime as they were no longer deemed necessary. While Luther had started out from a high prestige variety developed for the bureaucratic needs of statecraft, he himself claimed to have "looked the common people on the mouth" in deciding which terms or turns of phrase to use — even if that meant significant divergence from the Greek and Hebrew original. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..cf8eddbf8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +--- +title: "Dialect levelling" +chunk: 5/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:54.369184+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9a98ed651 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +title: "Dialect levelling" +chunk: 6/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:54.369184+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== 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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6a6b71717 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +title: "Dialect levelling" +chunk: 7/7 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-0.md index 0122d1eae..cf2c274ca 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:13:45.219321+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:55.677545+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-1.md index b789b6984..c137cb261 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:13:45.219321+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:55.677545+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-2.md index ed899a63e..eb6a180b7 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_infinity" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:13:45.219321+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:55.677545+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_leisure_studies-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_leisure_studies-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0f4f5436e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_leisure_studies-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6412d4cef --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +title: "Displacement (linguistics)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(linguistics)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_language-0.md index b68d2e8ad..a9cf1752e 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_language-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_language-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_language" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:44:16.382213+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:58.336217+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_language-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..664cb27f6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_language-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Distributed language" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_articulation-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_articulation-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8d58063c2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_articulation-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Double articulation" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_articulation" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_language-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..394602315 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_language-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Economics of language" +chunk: 1/2 +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" +--- + +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_language-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_language-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6cbe49f1b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_language-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_(linguistics)-0.md index 2329054a5..05eb65401 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_(linguistics)-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_(linguistics)" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T14:57:01.948295+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:03.297988+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Library_and_Information_Sciences-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Library_and_Information_Sciences-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7dd7c3033 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Library_and_Information_Sciences-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Library_and_Information_Sciences" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:24.973450+00:00" +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..84373746c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d703489eb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..16b501bb0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epanadiplosis-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..062e9cd5c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fa62c8d6d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +--- +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": \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ba0b94796 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphrase-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language-0.md index 8b5360135..09976ef35 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:01:21.541753+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:07.058730+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language-1.md index 34e08d323..9edf54cbf 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_language" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:01:21.541753+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:07.058730+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanandum_and_explanans-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanandum_and_explanans-0.md index 646df8c78..67a58e874 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanandum_and_explanans-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanandum_and_explanans-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanandum_and_explanans" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T12:09:05.522512+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:08.374043+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extramural_English-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extramural_English-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fbfca1237 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extramural_English-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicity_(pragmatics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicity_(pragmatics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3136bb285 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicity_(pragmatics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurae-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurae-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..eaab5e97e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurae-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filled_pause-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filled_pause-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b03313132 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filled_pause-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3e39b1570 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..23ee3335d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,13 @@ +--- +title: "Filler (linguistics)" +chunk: 2/3 +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 other languages == +In Afrikaans, ah, um, and uh are common fillers (um, and uh being in common with English). In American Sign Language, UM can be signed with open-8 held at chin, palm in, eyebrows down (similar to FAVORITE); or bilateral symmetric bent-V, palm out, repeated axial rotation of wrist (similar to QUOTE). In Arabic, يعني yaʿni ("means") and وﷲ wallāh(i) ("by God") are common fillers. In Moroccan Arabic, زعمة z3ma ("like") is a common filler, as well as ewa (so). In Iraqi Arabic, shisma ("what's its name") is a filler. In Armenian, բան ban ("thing"), Միգուցե Miguts'e, ("maybe"), էլի ēli ("c'mon") and ոնց որ vonts' vor ("as if") are common fillers.* +In Asturian, some common fillers are bono (well..), ¿acuéi? (right?), eh, ho (shortening of home "man"), (y) hala/hale ([and] come on), pos (thus), asina que (so that), yá (already), nada (nothing), entós (then) and pos nada (thus, nothing). In Bengali, ইয়ে (yay and thuri ("..er..that is")) are common fillers. In Bislama, ah is the common filler. In Bulgarian, common fillers are ъ (uh), амии (amii, 'well'), тъй (tui, 'so'), така (taka, 'thus'), добре (dobre, 'well'), такова (takova, 'this') and значи (znachi, 'it means'), нали (nali, 'right'). In Cantonese, speakers often say 即係 zik1 hai6 ("that is to say"; "meaning") and 噉 gam2 ("so; then") as fillers. In Catalan, eh? /ɛ/, doncs ("so"), llavors ("therefore"), o sigui ("it means"), saps? ("you know"?) and diguem-ne ("say") are common fillers. In Croatian, the words ovaj (literally "this one", but the meaning is lost) and dakle ("so"), and znači ("meaning", "it means") are frequent. In Czech, fillers are called slovní vata, meaning "word cotton/padding", or parasitické výrazy, meaning "parasitic expressions". The most frequent fillers are čili, tak or takže ("so"), prostě ("simply"), jako ("like"). In Danish, øh and øhm are among the most common fillers. In Dhivehi, aney, mee, ehkala, dhen and alhey ("aww") are some common fillers. In Dutch, ehm, and dus ("thus") are some of the more common fillers. Also eigenlijk ("actually"), zo ("so"), allez ("come on") and zeg maar ("so to say") in Netherlandic Dutch, nou ("well") or (a)wel ("well") in Belgian Dutch, weet je? ("you know?") etc. In Esperanto, nu ("well") and do ("so") are the most common fillers. In Estonian, nii ("so") is one of the most common fillers. In Filipino, ah, eh, ay, and ano ("what"), parang ("like"), diba? ("isn't it right?"), ayun ("that's") are the most common fillers. In Finnish, niinku ("like"), tuota, and öö are the most common fillers. Swearing is also used as a filler often, especially among youth. The most common swear word for that is vittu, which is a word for female genitalia. In Metropolitan French, euh /ø/ is most common; other words used as fillers include quoi ("what"), bah, ben ("well"), tu vois ("you see"), t'vois c'que j'veux dire? ("you see what I mean?"), tu sais, t'sais ("you know"), eh bien (roughly "well", as in "Well, I'm not sure"), and du coup (roughly "suddenly"). Outside France other expressions are t'sais veux dire? ("y'know what I mean?"; Québec), or allez une fois ("go one time"; especially in Brussels, not in Wallonia). Additional filler words used by youngsters include genre ("kinda", "like"), comme ("like"), and style ("style"; "kind"). In German, traditional filler words include äh /ɛː/, hm, so /zoː/, tja, halt, and eigentlich ("actually"). So-called modal particles share some of the features of filler words, but they actually modify the sentence meaning. In Greek, ε (e), εμ (em), λοιπόν (lipon, "so") and καλά (kala, "good") are common fillers. In Hebrew, אֶה‎ (eh) is the most common filler. אֶם‎ (em) is also quite common. Millennials and the younger Generation X speakers commonly use כאילו‎ (ke'ilu, the Hebrew version of "like"). Additional filler words include זתומרת‎ (zt'omeret, short for זאת אומרת‎ zot omeret "that means"), אז‎ (az, "so") and בקיצור‎ (bekitsur, "in short"). Use of fillers of Arabic origin such as יענו‎ (yaʿanu, a mispronunciation of the Arabic يعني, yaʿani) is also common. In Hindi, मतलब (matlab, "it means"), क्या कहते हैं (kya kehte hain, "what do you say"), वो ना (woh na, "that") and ऐसा है। (aisā hai, "what it is") are some word fillers. Sound fillers include हूँ (hoon, [ɦuːm̩]), अ (a, [ə]),आ (aa, [äː]). In Hungarian, filler sound is ő, common filler words include hát, nos (well...) and asszongya (a variant of azt mondja, which means "it says here..."). Among intellectuals, ha úgy tetszik (if you like) is used as filler. In Icelandic, a common filler is hérna ("here"). Þúst, a contraction of þú veist ("you know"), is popular among younger speakers. In Indonesian, anu and apa sih are among the most common fillers. In Irish, abair /ˈabˠəɾʲ/ ("say"), bhoil /wɛlʲ/ ("well"), and era /ˈɛɾˠə/ are common fillers, along with emm as in Hiberno-English. In Italian, common fillers include ehm ("um", "uh"), allora ("well then", "so"), tipo ("like"), ecco ("there"), cioè ("actually", "that is to say", "rather"), and be' ("well", "so"; most likely a shortening of bene or ebbene, which are themselves often used as filler words). In Japanese, common fillers include ええと (ēto, or "um"), あの (ano, literally "that over there", used as "um"), ま (ma, or "well"), そう (sō, used as "hmmm"), and ええ (ē, used as "huh" as a response of surprise or confusion). In Kannada, matte for "also", enappa andre for "the matter is" are common fillers. In Korean, 응 (eung), 어 (eo), 그 (geu), and 음 (eum) are commonly used as fillers. In Kurdish, icar ("so, then") (ئینجا (inca in Sorani and Palewani, mostly pronounced as "ija"), as well as baš e ("well") (or خاس ە (xas e)) are common filler words. In Badinani, mn got ("I said") and ez d bêjm ("I say") (mostly shortened to "m'go'" and "e'd bê'm") are used similarly to "I mean". ueki ("like, such as") (وەکو (ueku) in others) is used similarly to "like". In Kyrgyz, анан (anan, "then", "so"), баягы (bayağı, "that"), жанагы (janağı, "that"), ушуреки (uşureki, "this"), эме (eme, "um"), are common fillers. In Lithuanian, nu, am, žinai ("you know"), ta prasme ("meaning"), tipo ("like") are some common fillers. In Malay, speakers often use words and phrases such as apa nama (literally, "what name") or itu ("that") as common fillers. In Malayalam, അതായതു (athayathu, "that means...") and ennu vechaal ("then...") are common. In Maltese and Maltese English, mela ("then"), or just la, is a common filler. In Mandarin Chinese, speakers often say 那個; 那个 (pronounced nàge/nèige), meaning 'that'. Other common fillers are 就; jiù; 'just' and 好像; hǎoxiàng; 'as if/kind of like'. In Mirandese, speakers often use pus (slang for puis, “right”), bá (interjection of multiple uses), bien (“well”), or for some speakers, bon, being a direct loan from Portuguese bom, meaning “well”, but only being loaned as the filler word and not its other uses, where the native buono is maintained (regional languages of Spain also suffered through this process, with the Castilian word bueno). In Mongolian, одоо (odoo, "now") and нөгөө (nögöö, "that") are common fillers. In Nepali, माने (maane, "meaning"), चैने (chaine), चैं (chai), हैन (haina, "No?") are commonly used as fillers. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..925fe1a5f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Filler (linguistics)" +chunk: 3/3 +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 Norwegian, common fillers are eh, altso/altså, på ein måte / på en måte ("in a way"), berre/bare ("just") ikkje sant / ikke sant (literally "not true?", meaning "don't you agree?", "right?", "no kidding" or "exactly")l, vel ("well"), liksom ("like") and er det ("is it", "it is"). In Bergen, sant ("true") is often used instead of ikkje/ikke sant. In the region of Trøndelag, /ʃø/ (comes from skjønner du which means "you see/understand)", "as you can see/understand") is also a common filler. In Persian, ببین (bebin, "look"), چیز (chiz, "thing"), and مثلا (masalan, "for instance") are commonly used filler words. As well as in Arabic and Urdu, يعني (yaʿni, "I mean") is also used in Persian. Also, اه eh is a common filler in Persian. In Portuguese, é, hum, então ("so"), tipo ("like") and bem ("well") are the most common fillers. In Polish, the most common filler sound is yyy /ɨ/ and also eee /ɛ/ (both like English um) and while common, its use is frowned upon. Other examples include, no /nɔ/ (like English well), wiesz /vjeʂ/ ("you know"). Among the younger generation new, often english-inspired, fillers are gaining popularity: generalnie/ogólnie ("generally"), jakby ("like"), w sensie ("in the sense that"), w sumie ("to sum it up"). In Punjabi, مطلب (मतलब, mat̤lab, "it means") is a common filler. In Romanian, deci /detʃʲ/ ("therefore") is common, especially in school, and ă /ə/ is also very common (can be lengthened according to the pause in speech, rendered in writing as ăăă), whereas păi /pəj/ is widely used by almost anyone. A modern filler has gained popularity among the youths – gen /dʒɛn/, analogous to the English "like", literally translated as "type". In Russian, fillers are called слова-паразиты (slova-parazity, "parasite words"); the most common are э-э (è-è, "eh"), вот (vot, "here it is"), это (èto, "this"), того (togo, "that kind, sort of"), (ну) такое ((nu) takoye, "some kind [of this]"), ну (nu, "well, so"), значит (značit, "I mean, kind of, like"), так (tak, "so"), как его (kak ego, "what's it [called]"), типа (tipa, "kinda"), как бы (kak by, "[just] like, sort of"), and понимаешь? (ponimayesh, "understand?, you know, you see"). In Serbian, значи (znači, "means"), па (pa, "so"), мислим (mislim, "i think") and овај (ovaj, "this") are common fillers. In Slovak, oné ("that"), tento ("this"), proste ("simply"), or akože ("it's like...") are used as fillers. The Hungarian izé (or izí in its Slovak pronunciation) can also be heard, especially in parts of the country with a large Hungarian population. Ta is a filler typical of Eastern Slovak and one of the most parodied features. In Slovene, pač ("indeed", "just", "merely"), a ne? ("right?"), no ("well"), v bistvu ("in fact"), and pravzaprav ("actually") are some of the most common fillers. In Spanish, fillers are called muletillas. Some of the most common in American Spanish are e, em, este (roughly equivalent to uhm, literally means "this"), and o sea (roughly equivalent to "I mean", literally means "or be it"). In Spain the previous fillers are also used, but ¿Vale? ("right?") and ¿no? are very common too and pues ("well") is also used. Younger speakers there often use en plan (meaning "as", "like" or "in [noun] mode"). The Argentine filler word che became the nickname of rebel Ernesto "Che" Guevara, by virtue of his frequent use of it. Other possible filled pauses in Spanish are: a, am, bueno, como, and others. In Swedish, fillers are called utfyllnadsord; some of the most common are öhm or öh, ja ("yes"), ehm or eh (for example eh jag vet inte) or ba (comes from bara, which means "only"), asså or alltså ("therefore", "thus"), va (comes from vad, which means "what"), and liksom and typ (both similar to the English "like"). In Tamil, paatheenga-na ("if you see...") and apparam ("then...") are common. In Telugu, ఇక్కడ ఏంటంటే (ikkada entante, "what's here is...") and తర్వాత (tarwatha, "then...") are common and there are numerous like this. In Turkish, yani ("meaning..."), şey ("thing"), işte ("that is"), and falan ("as such", "so on") are common fillers. In Ukrainian, е (e, similar to "um"), ну (nu, "well"), і (i, "and"), цей (tsey, "this"), той-во (toy-vo, "this one") are common fillers. In Urdu, یعنی (yani, "meaning..."), فلانا فلانا (flana flana, "this and that" or "blah blah"), ہاں ہاں (haan haan, "yeah yeah") and اچھا (acha, "ok") are also common fillers. In Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt), "ơ" or "à" (surprise); "ý là" (I mean); ... In Welsh (Cymraeg), 'dê or yndê, from onid e – 'Is it not so?' – is used as a filler, and in a similar way, especially in southern dialects t'mod and ch'mod (abbreviations of rwyt ti'n gwybod and rydych chi'n gwybod – the singular and plural/respectful forms of 'you know') along with t'wel(d) and ch'wel(d) (abbreviations of rwyt ti'n gweld and rydych chi'n gweld – 'you see'); 'lly (from felly – 'so/such/like/in that way', used in northern dialects); iawn ('alright/right') is used as a filler at the beginning, middle or end of sentences; Welsh: o'r gorau, lit. 'of the best' – used loosely to mean 'alright'; 'na ni, an abbreviation of dyna ni – 'there we are'; ym… and y… are used similarly to the English 'um…' and 'uh…'. + +== In syntax == + +The linguistic term "filler" has another, unrelated use in syntactic terminology. It refers to the pre-posed element that fills in the "gap" in a wh-movement construction. Wh-movement is said to create a long-distance or unbounded "filler-gap dependency". In the following example, there is an object gap associated with the transitive verb saw, and the filler is the wh-phrase how many angels: "I don't care [how many angels] she told you she saw." + +== See also == +Aizuchi +Interjection +Like: as a discourse particle +Phatic expression +So (word) +Speech disfluency + +== References == + +== External links == +Why do people say "um" and "er" when hesitating in their speech?, New Scientist, May 6, 1995 (subscription required) +Lotozo, Eils (September 4, 2002). "The way teens talk, like, serves a purpose". Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Archived from the original on December 13, 2008. Retrieved December 11, 2008. Citing Siegel, Muffy E. A. (2002). "Like: The Discourse Particle and Semantics". Journal of Semantics. 19 (1): 35–71. doi:10.1093/jos/19.1.35. +Nino Amiridze, Boyd H. Davis, and Margaret Maclagan Archived 2017-04-06 at the Wayback Machine, editors. Fillers, Pauses and Placeholders. Typological Studies in Language 93, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2010. Review \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-over-final_constraint-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-over-final_constraint-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8a2e02e7b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final-over-final_constraint-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,239 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..beb344fc8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d71495f10 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_linguistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..44867eada --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_linguistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foregrounding-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foregrounding-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f387e0f40 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foregrounding-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c133a5217 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7d0d5f0d2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..752614e50 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formulaic_language-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +--- +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) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..94f1409a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a003e18f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_sentence_perspective-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_sentence_perspective-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b176e02bf --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_sentence_perspective-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_school_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_school_(linguistics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3e2786a8a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_school_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloss_(annotation)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloss_(annotation)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8699c7d49 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloss_(annotation)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-0.md index 18ac66049..321f17454 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:51:04.073733+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:21.187774+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-1.md index 9fd8a71b1..4cec3809f 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:51:04.073733+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:21.187774+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-2.md index 272723c85..6f7f8676b 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_library_and_information_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:51:04.073733+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:21.187774+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..40c9059d0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "History of women in linguistics" +chunk: 1/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:26.966775+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f5d3b873d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "History of women in linguistics" +chunk: 2/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:26.966775+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== 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) == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e88d42e74 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +--- +title: "History of women in linguistics" +chunk: 3/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:26.966775+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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) == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..dc1e8b40b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "History of women in linguistics" +chunk: 4/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:26.966775+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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) == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6657b9f8c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "History of women in linguistics" +chunk: 5/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:26.966775+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +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 == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett's_design_features-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett's_design_features-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..75bf3ea1c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett's_design_features-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +--- +title: "Hockett's design features" +chunk: 1/2 +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" +--- + +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett's_design_features-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett's_design_features-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6648fce89 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett's_design_features-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +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 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..16cc04860 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +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 ==== \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e0471b96e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b984839a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +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". \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7dfa39f36 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +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: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..74d5ea71a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +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! \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6d48a65b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom_(language_structure)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom_(language_structure)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2a789e9a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom_(language_structure)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "Idiom (language structure)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom_(language_structure)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:30.691417+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +An idiom (the quality of it being known as idiomaticness or idiomaticity) is a syntactical, grammatical, or phonological structure peculiar to a language that is actually realized, as opposed to possible but unrealized structures that could have developed to serve the same semantic functions but did not. +The grammar of a language (its morphology, phonology, and syntax) is inherently arbitrary and peculiar to a specific language (or group of related languages). For example, although in English it is idiomatic (accepted as structurally correct) to say "cats are associated with agility", other forms could have developed, such as "cats associate toward agility" or "cats are associated of agility". Unidiomatic constructions sound wrong to fluent speakers, although they are often entirely comprehensible. For example, the title of the classic book English as She Is Spoke is easy to understand (its idiomatic counterpart is English as It Is Spoken), but it deviates from English idiom in the gender of the pronoun and the inflection of the verb. Lexical gaps are another key example of idiom. + + +== See also == +Bahuvrihi +Collocation +Cliché +Phraseme +Semantic equivalence (linguistics) +Usage +Programming idiom +Principle of compositionality +Arbitrariness + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaterial_labor-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaterial_labor-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c17f59ee3 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaterial_labor-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +--- +title: "Immaterial labor" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaterial_labor" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:05.718246+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Immaterial labor is a framework with origins in Marxist-based political economy, particularly Autonomist political philosophy, to describe how value is produced from affective and cognitive activities, which, in various ways, are commodified in capitalist economies. +The concept of immaterial labor was coined by Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato in his 1996 essay "Immaterial Labor", published as a contribution to Radical Thought in Italy and edited by Virno and Hardt. It was re-published in 1997 as: Lavoro immateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di soggettività. (Ombre corte). Lazzarato was a participant in the Years of Lead (Italy) group as a student in Padua in the 1970s, and is a member of the editorial group of the journal Multitudes. Post-Marxist scholars including Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Judith Revel, and Paolo Virno, among others have also employed the concept. + + +== Areas of application == + + +=== Digital capitalism === +Studies of immaterial labor have included analysis of high-technology industries, although immaterial labor is understood as a concept far pre-dating digital technologies, specifically in the performance of gender and domestic roles, and other aspects of affective and cognitive work. +Themes commonly associated with immaterial labor in the context of the internet include: digital labor, commons-based peer production, and user-generated content production, which might include open source, free software, crowdsourcing, and flexible licensing agreements, as well as the collapse of copyright amidst the ambiguities of sharing creative works in the digital age, digital care work, and other conditions produced by participation in social environments within the digital, knowledge economy. + + +=== Feminism === +Feminism adopted discussions of immaterial labor to describe the alienating conditions and labors pertaining to care work, the performance of gender and domestic labor. The social-wage campaign, Wages for housework, co-founded in 1972 in Italy, by Selma James called for a wage for domestic work amidst the uneven and gendered privatization of the labor of social production, where traditionally feminine roles like care work are undervalued. +Post-colonial feminist writer Lisa Nakamura, and others have described immaterial labor in the performance of online identity, and racial identity and identity performance, or "avatarization of the self". Nakamura concerns herself with the role of women of color integrated, and often undermined, into the circuit of production. In "Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture" Nakamura draws upon feminist theorist Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto to understand the role of the production chain and a commodification of Navajo women textile work. This relationship between craft and industrial labor ties into larger concepts of gender stereotypes, surveillance, and the identity politics of globalization. Her historical research lends itself to this broader discussion, "They were cited as evidence that digital work—the work of the hand and its digits—could be painlessly transferred from the indigenous cultural context into the world of technological commercial innovation, benefiting both in the process." +Consent agreements or contracts between social media and user-generated content platforms and their users have been proposed as a way of minimizing immaterial labor by allowing users to have more control over the use and circulation of the content, data, and metadata they produce. + + +=== Creative works === +The idea of "creative labor" has been analyzed in the context of immaterial labor. +It has also been argued that the ubiquitous sharing enabled by the digital age has made it harder for artists and creators to claim authorship of their works, creating an inevitable situation of immaterial labor in the participation in many online platforms. + + +== Criticism == + + +=== Material vs. immaterial labor debate === +The material effects of what immaterial labor claims are cognitive and affective activities, has been consistently used to discredit the idea of immaterial labor. Critics of the term have argued that, although labor might produce affective and cognitive commodities that can be defined as immaterial labors, it nonetheless is always embodied, maintaining correlates in the physical, material world. +Autonomist feminists have also taken issue with the use of the word "immaterial" to describe affective and care work, which necessarily maintains an affective and embodied component. + + +== See also == +Digital labor +Affective labor +Emotional labor +Microwork +Post-Fordism +Post-Marxism +Reproductive labor +Computer and network surveillance +Hyperreality +Wages for housework + + +== References == + + +== Bibliography == +Berardi, Franco. 2009. The soul at work: from alienation to autonomy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). +Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press. + + +== External links == +Art and immaterial labour. Panel with: Maurizio Lazzarato, Judith Revel, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Antonio Negri. MAZINE.WS \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_structure-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_structure-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..341d538b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_structure-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +--- +title: "Information structure" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_structure" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:31.866106+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In linguistics, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence. This generally includes only those aspects of information that "respond to the temporary state of the addressee's mind", and excludes other aspects of linguistic information such as references to background (encyclopedic/common) knowledge, choice of style, politeness, and so forth. For example, the difference between an active clause (e.g., the police want him) and a corresponding passive (e.g., he is wanted by police) is a syntactic difference, but one motivated by information structuring considerations. Other choices motivated by information structure include preposing (e.g., that one I don't like) and inversion (e.g., "the end", said the man). +The basic notions of information structure are focus, givenness, and topic, as well as their complementary notions of background, newness, and comment respectively. Focus "indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions", givenness indicates that "the denotation of an expression is present" in the immediate context of the utterance, and topic is "the entity that a speaker identifies, about which then information, the comment, is given". Additional notions in information structure may include contrast and exhaustivity, but there is no general agreement in the linguistic literature about extensions of the basic three notions. There are many different approaches, such as cognitive, generative or functional architectures, to information structure. The concept has also been used in studies measuring information density in cognitive linguistics. + + +== Terminology == +The term information structure is due to Halliday (1967). In 1976, Chafe introduced the term information packaging. + + +== Mechanisms in various languages == +Information structure can be realized through a wide variety of linguistic mechanisms. In the spoken form of English, one of the primary methods of indicating information structure is through intonation, whereby pitch is modified from some default pattern. Other languages use syntactic mechanisms like dislocation, anaphora, and gapping; morphological mechanisms like specialized focus or topic-marking affixes; and specialized discourse particles. +Cross-linguistically, word order variation (the so-called "inverted sentences") is one of the main syntactic devices used to convey specific information structure configurations, namely the presentational focus. +English in fact uses more than intonation for expressing information structure, so that clefts are used for exhaustive focus, and grammatical particles like only also induce contrastive focus readings. +Cross-linguistically, there are clear tendencies that relate notions of information structure to particular linguistic phenomena. For instance, focus tends to be prosodically prominent, and there do not seem to be any languages that express focus by deaccenting or destressing. +The following German sentences exhibit three different kinds of syntactic 'fronting' that correlate with topic. + +a. _Diesen Mann_ habe ich noch nie gesehen. +'This man have I yet not seen.' (movement) +b. _Diesen Mann_, den habe ich noch nie gesehen. +'This man, that I have yet not seen.' (left dislocation) +c. _Diesen Mann_, ich habe ihn noch nie gesehen. +'This man, I have him yet not seen.' (hanging topic) +It is often assumed that answers to questions are focused elements. Question and answer pairs are often used as diagnostics for focus, as in the following English examples. + +Q: What did John do with the book yesterday? +A: He SOLD the book yesterday. +A: *He sold the book YESTERDAY. +Q: When did Jane sell the book? +A: She sold the book YESTERDAY. +A: *She SOLD the book yesterday. + + +== Concepts == + + +=== Focus and background === + +Focus is a grammatical category or attribute that determines indicating that part of an utterance contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. Some theories (in line with work by Mats Rooth) link focus to the presence of alternatives (see Focus (linguistics) § Alternative semantics). An alternative theory of focus would account for the stress pattern in the example from the previous section (When did Jane sell the book? She sold the book YESTERDAY), saying that YESTERDAY receives focus because it could be substituted with alternative time periods (TODAY or LAST WEEK) and still serve to answer the question the first speaker asked. +Background is a more difficult concept to define; it's not simply the complement of focus. Daniel P. Hole gives the following framework: "'Focus' is a relational notion, and the entity a focus relates to is called its background, or presupposition." + + +=== Topic and comment === + +The topic (or theme) of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (or rheme, or sometimes focus) is what is being said about the topic. That the information structure of a clause is divided in this way is generally agreed on, but the boundary between topic/theme depends on grammatical theory. Topic is grammaticalized in languages like Japanese and Korean, which have a designated topic-marker morpheme affixed to the topic. +Some diagnostics have been proposed for languages that lack grammatical topic-markers, like English; they attempt to distinguish between different kinds of topics (such as "aboutness" topics and "contrastive" topics). The diagnostics consist of judging how felicitous it is to follow a discourse with either questions (What about x?) or sentences beginning with certain phrases (About x, ... Speaking of x, ... As for x, ...) to determine how "topical" x is in that context. + + +=== Given and new === +Intuitively, givenness classifies words and information in a discourse that are already known (or given) by virtue of being common knowledge, or by having been discussed previously in the same discourse ("anaphorically recoverable"). Certain theories (such as Roger Schwarzschild's GIVENness Constraint) require all non-focus-marked constituents to be given. +Words/information that are not given, or are "textually and situationally non-derivable" are by definition new. + + +== See also == +Succinctness + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b210472f6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +--- +title: "Interlinear gloss" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:33.187814+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In linguistics and pedagogy, an interlinear gloss is a gloss (series of brief explanations, such as definitions or pronunciations) placed between lines, such as between a line of original text and its translation into another language. When glossed, each line of the original text acquires one or more corresponding lines of transcription known as an interlinear text or interlinear glossed text (IGT) – an interlinear for short. Such glosses help the reader follow the relationship between the source text and its translation, and the structure of the original language. In its simplest form, an interlinear gloss is a literal, word-for-word translation of the source text. + +== History == + +Interlinear glosses have been used for a variety of purposes over a long period of time. One common usage has been to annotate bilingual textbooks for language education. This sort of interlinearization serves to help make the meaning of a source text explicit without attempting to formally model the structural characteristics of the source language. +Such annotations have occasionally been expressed not through interlinear layout, but rather through enumeration of words in the object and meta language. One such example is Wilhelm von Humboldt's annotation of Classical Nahuatl: + +This "inline" style allows examples to be included within the flow of text, and for the word order of the target language to be written in an order which approximates the target language syntax. (In the gloss here, mache es is reordered from the corresponding source order to approximate German syntax more naturally.) Even so, this approach requires the readers to "re-align" the correspondences between source and target forms. +More modern 19th- and 20th-century approaches took to glossing vertically, aligning the same sort of word-by-word content in such a way that the metalanguage terms were placed vertically below the source language terms. In this style, the given example might be rendered thus (here English gloss): + +Here word ordering is determined by the syntax of the object language. +Finally, modern linguists have adopted the practice of using abbreviated grammatical category labels. A 2008 publication which repeats this example labels it as follows: + +This approach is denser and also requires effort to read, but it is less reliant on the grammatical structure of the metalanguage for expressing the semantics of the target forms. +In computing, special text markers are provided in the Specials Unicode block to indicate the start and end of interlinear glosses. + +== Structure == +Though there is no formal specification for the IGT format, the Leipzig Glossing Rules are a set of guidelines that aim to standardize the format as much as possible. +An interlinear text for linguistics will commonly consist of some or all of the following, usually in this order, from top to bottom: + +The original orthography (typically in italic or bold italic), +a conventional transliteration into the Latin alphabet, +a phonetic transcription, +a morphophonemic transliteration, +a word-by-word or morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, where morphemes within a word are separated by hyphens or other punctuation, +and finally + +a free translation, which may be placed in a separate paragraph or on the facing page if the structures of the languages are too different for it to follow the text line by line. +As an example, the following Taiwanese Minnan clause has been transcribed with five lines of text: + +1. the standard pe̍h-ōe-jī transliteration, +2. a gloss using tone numbers for the surface tones, +3. a gloss showing the underlying tones in citation form (before undergoing tone sandhi), +4. a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss in English, and +5. an English translation: + +Word-by-word alignment. According to the Leipzig Glossing Rules, it is standard to left-align the words in the object language with the corresponding words in the metalanguage; this alignment can be seen between lines (1-3) and line (4). +Morpheme-by-morpheme correspondence. At the sub-word level, segmentable morphemes are separated by hyphens, both in the example and in the gloss. There should be the same number of hyphens in the example and in the gloss, as shown in the following example: + +Grammatical category labels. In amuqʼ-da-č, the stem (amuq) is translated into the corresponding English lexeme (stay) while the inflectional affixes (da) and (č) are inflectional affixes representing future tense and negation. These inflectional affixes are glossed as FUT and NEG; a list of standard abbreviations for grammatical categories that are widely used in linguistics can be found in the Leipzig Glossing Rules. +One-to-many correspondences. When a single object-language element corresponds to several metalanguage elements, they are separated by periods. E.g., + +Non-overt elements. if the morpheme-by-morpheme gloss (middle line) contains an element that does not correspond to an overt element in the example, a standard strategy is to include an overt "ø" in the object-language text, which is separated by a hyphen like an overt element would be: + +Reduplication is treated similarly to affixation but with a tilde (instead of the standard hyphen) that connects the copied element to the stem: + +== Punctuation == +In interlinear morphological glosses, various forms of punctuation separate the glosses. Typically, the words are aligned with their glosses; within words, a hyphen is used when a boundary is marked in both the text and its gloss, a period when a boundary appears in only one. That is, there should be the same number of words separated with spaces in the text and its gloss, as well as the same number of hyphenated morphemes within a word and its gloss. This is the basic system, and can be applied universally. For example: + +An underscore may be used instead of a period, as in go_out-PFV, when a single word in the source language happens to correspond to a phrase in the glossing language, though a period would still be used for other situations, such as Greek oikíais house.FEM.PL.DAT 'to the houses'. +However, sometimes finer distinctions may be made. For example, clitics may be separated with a double hyphen (or, for ease of typing, an equal sign) rather than a hyphen. A French example: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..20bac5966 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,69 @@ +--- +title: "Interlinear gloss" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlinear_gloss" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:33.187814+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Affixes which cause discontinuity (infixes, circumfixes, transfixes, etc.) may be set off by angle brackets, and reduplication with tildes, rather than with hyphens: + +(See affix for other examples.) +Morphemes which cannot be easily separated out, such as umlaut, may be marked with a backslash rather than a period: + +A few other conventions which are sometimes seen are illustrated in the Leipzig Glossing Rules. + +== Interlinear gloss resources == +Efforts have been undertaken to digitize IGT for hundreds of the world's languages. + +=== Online Database of Interlinear Text === +The Online Database of Interlinear Text (ODIN) is a database of over 200,000 instances of interlinear glosses for more than 1,500 languages extracted from scholarly linguistic research. The database was constructed in two phases: automatic construction followed by manual correction. The automatic construction stage itself was completed in three steps: + +First, search engines (e.g., Google, Bing) were queried to retrieve scholarly documents that were likely to contain interlinear glosses. The queries comprised terms relevant to linguistic research such as grammatical morphemes (e.g., "NOM", short for nominative; "3SG", short for 3rd person singular). +Second, each line in an extracted document was tagged for whether it was a line belonging to an interlinear gloss or not using sequence-labeling methods from Machine Learning. +Third, each interlinear gloss instance was assigned a language name (e.g., Tagalog) and an ISO 693-3 language ID. Language names and IDs were automatically assigned to interlinear glosses using Coreference Resolution models from Natural Language Processing, where the interlinear gloss instance was tagged with the language name (and ID) that appears in the scholarly document the interlinear gloss instance was extracted from. +In the manual correction phase, the database creators manually corrected the boundaries of the interlinear gloss instances discovered by the sequence-labelling method in Step 2 of the automatic construction phase. The creators then verified the language names and language codes in a second and third pass over the data, respectively. + +== Automatic processing of interlinear gloss instances == +Natural Language Processing models leveraging interlinear gloss resources, such as the Online Database of Interlinear Text, have been developed. + +=== Automatic glossing === +Natural Language Processing systems, for example, have been developed to automatically produce interlinear glosses.: + +Given the morpheme segmented line (first line above) and the free translation line (third line above), the task is to produce the middle glossed line comprising stem translations (e.g., mi:you) and the grammatical category labels corresponding to affixes (e.g., a:ERG.1.PL). Sequence prediction models from Natural Language Processing have been used to perform this task. Two factors contribute to the difficulty of this task: + +The translation is not necessarily in alignment with the morpheme segmented line (e.g., camel is the last word in the translation but the second word in the morpheme segmented line). +Some words in the morpheme segmented line have multiple correspondences in the gloss (e.g., anu:be.NEG). +Some constructed languages like Ithkuil and Lojban have automated tools that (in theory) will always result in accurate glossing due to the regularized and logical nature of these languages. Here are examples of glosses of Ithkuil and Lojban respectively: + +=== Automatic discovery of morphological structure from glosses === +Researchers have used interlinear glosses to obtain the morphological paradigms of the object language (i.e., the language being glossed). To automatically create morphological paradigms from interlinear glosses, researchers have created tables for every stem in the gloss and a (possibly empty) slot for every grammatical category (e.g., ERG) in the gloss. For instance, given the glossed sentence below: + +There would be a paradigm for the stem pobeja with slots for PFV.PST.SG.FEM and PFV.PST.SG.MASC: + +The slot for PFV.PST.SG.FEM would be filled (since it was observed in the interlinear gloss data) but the slot for PFV.PST.SG.MASC would be empty (assuming that no other interlinear gloss instance contains pobeja inflected for the PFV.PST.SG.MASC grammatical category). A statistical machine learning model for morphological inflection can be used to fill in the missing entries. + +== See also == +Kanbun – Japanese tradition of glossing Classical Chinese texts +Ruby text – a gloss sometimes used with Chinese or Japanese to show the pronunciation +Part-of-speech tagging, often displayed as interlinear glosses under the tagged words, sometimes at the same time as an interlinear word-by-word translation +Treebanks, often displayed as a gloss or annotation to the original text. +James Hamilton, nineteenth-century composer and promoter of interlinear texts for language learning +Metaphrase +List of glossing abbreviations + +== References == + +== External links == +The Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses +Interlinear Glossed Text Standards (E-MELD) +Interlinear Glossed Text Levels (E-MELD) +Towards a General Model of Interlinear Text (E-MELD) +Interlinear Morphemic Glosses +Glossing Ancient Languages and Texts. A forum for recommendations on the Interlinar Morphemic Glossing of ancient languages as attested in ancient manuscripts. +Online Interlinear of Biblical Greek Scriptures (New Testament) text +ODIN - The Online Database of INterlinear text +Latinum Interlinear Method page Listing of older interlinear and construed texts, mostly from Latin or Ancient Greek and mostly to English +Ernest Blum, "The New Old Way of Learning Languages", The American Scholar, Autumn 2008. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocutor_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocutor_(linguistics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bcc67fafb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocutor_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "Interlocutor (linguistics)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocutor_(linguistics)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:34.438413+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In linguistics, discourse analysis, and related fields, an interlocutor is a person involved in a conversation or dialogue. Two or more people speaking to one another are each other's interlocutors. The terms conversation partner, hearer, or addressee are often used interchangeably with interlocutor. + + +== Linguistic alignment == +Linguistic alignment is the idea that interlocutors involved in a conversation will re-use their partners' phrases for ease of understanding. This is a form of unconscious mimicry in order to facilitate communication. In task-oriented conversations, lexical alignment increased performance most when the interlocutors' shared vocabulary most directly related to the task at hand. +In situations where a participant is primed by a recording, rather than a human interlocutor, they are less likely to exhibit linguistic alignment. This suggests that linguistic choices are influenced by the interlocutor's communicative intent. + + +== Interlocutor interaction == +According to Paul Grice, the behavior of interlocutors in ordinary conversation is governed by the cooperative principle. + + +=== Interlocutors with different native languages === + +Research has shown that interlocutors will match their language's complexity to their partner interlocutor's language ability. Furthermore, when one interlocutor is a native speaker and another is a learner of a particular language, interlocutors will modify their communication strategies. +Studies have also shown that language-related misunderstandings in a conversation between a native interlocutor and a learner interlocutor are more likely to be resolved than between two non-native interlocutors. + + +=== Interlocutors with different dialects of the same language === +When using dialectically ambiguous words, participants will take into account the dialect their interlocutor is using in order to deduce the most likely meaning. For instance, if a British English interlocutor says "flat," the addressee will likely assume they mean "apartment." + + +== See also == + +Addressee honorific +Clusivity +Common ground (linguistics) +Conversation analysis +Discourse + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_slavica-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_slavica-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..676346c3b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_slavica-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +title: "Interpretatio slavica" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_slavica" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:35.613878+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Interpretatio slavica is the practice by the Slavic peoples to identify the gods of neighboring peoples and the names of Christian saints with the names of Slavic deities. + + +== Identification with related pagan deities == + +Perun is a god of thunder, in functions very similar to the Germanic-Scandinavian Thor, the Baltic Perkūnas and Karelian-Finnish Ukko (the latter is of Baltic origin). Both in Germanic and in Finnish mythologies, "hatchets" were also an attribute of the Thunderer. It is noteworthy that both Thor and Perun were often linked by the symbol "yarga" (the Slavic name for the four-pointed swastika), recorded by Hilda Davidson. To the Vikings the swastika could have come from the Goths or through the Baltic medium. +Stribog — resembles Latvian Žaltys, Indian god of chaos Vritra (it is noteworthy that both deities are represented in the form of chronic snake like entities or ordinary snakes). The Slavic word stryj is derived from Proto-Indo-European *stru-io- and is cognate with Lithuanian: strujus "uncle, old man" and Old Irish: sruith "old, honorable" +Veles — considered a variant of Velnias and Germanic Frey. From the treaties of Russia with Byzantium, it is known that for the Varangian-Rus in the squad of Igor, Perun and Veles were "their own gods". It is likely that these two deities replaced the Scandinavians with their Thor and Freyr, similar in function to the Slavic deities. +Simargl — according to some scientists, it is an analog of the Iranian Simurgh, although today it is widely believed that the name Simargl is a distorted phrase of "sema yerila". Some researchers draw attention to the similarities between the Simargl and the fire dog Sköll, who represents the sun. The legend of eating the sun is also present from Baltic mythology. +Diu is a variant of the name of the ancient Zeus in the Old Russian teachings against paganism. The Russian version of the name "Zeus", according to one of the hypotheses, formed from its basis Diw. +Mokosh is an analogue of the Finno-Ugric Moksha. According to Boris Rybakov, the name of the Finnish people of the Mokshas originated from the latter. + + +== Identification with Christian saints == +Elijah the Prophet — after the baptism of Russia, he replaced Perun +Paraskeva Friday — gradually replaced Mokosh +Saint Blaise — replaced Volos (not to be confused with Veles, the god of wisdom and knowledge) + + +== Identification with Christian holidays == + +According to a number of scientists, some native Slavic deities can be reconstructed by the names of religious (Christian) holidays which have features of paganism. Such holidays include: + +Maslenitsa +Jarilo +Kostroma +Kostrubonka +Koliada +Kupala +According to Vladimir Toporov, it is impossible to reconstruct the Slavic gods from the names of rites and holidays, and even more so their functions. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6de63e331 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ +--- +title: "Kinesics" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:36.819902+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Kinesics is the interpretation of body communication such as facial expressions and gestures, nonverbal behavior related to movement of any part of the body or the body as a whole. The equivalent popular culture term is body language, a term Ray Birdwhistell, considered the founder of this area of study, neither used nor liked (on the grounds that what can be conveyed with the body does not meet the linguist's definition of language). + + +== Birdwhistell's work == +Kinesics was first used in 1952 by an anthropologist named Ray Birdwhistell. Birdwhistell wished to study how people communicate through posture, gesture, stance and movement. His ideas over several decades were synthesized and resulted in the book Kinesics and Context. Interest in kinesics specifically and nonverbal behaviour generally was popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s by such popular mass-market (nonacademic) publications as How to Read a Person Like a Book. Part of Birdwhistell's work involved filming people in social situations and analyzing them to show elements of communication that were not seen otherwise. One of his most important projects was The Natural History of an Interview, a long-term interdisciplinary collaboration including Gregory Bateson, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Norman A. McQuown, Henry W. Brosin and others. +Drawing heavily on descriptive linguistics, Birdwhistell argued that all movements of the body have meaning and that nonverbal behaviour has a grammar that can be analyzed in similar terms to spoken language. Thus, a "kineme" is "similar to a phoneme because it consists of a group of movements which are not identical, but which may be used interchangeably without affecting social meaning." +Birdwhistell estimated that no more than 30 to 35 percent of the social meaning of a conversation or an interaction is carried by the words. He also concluded that there were no universals in these kinesic displays, a claim that was disputed by Paul Ekman, who was interested in analysis of universals, especially in facial expression. + + +== Modern applications == +In a current application, kinesic behavior is sometimes used as signs of deception by interviewers looking for clusters of movements to determine the veracity of the statement being uttered, although kinesics can be equally applied in any context and type of setting to construe innocuous messages whose carriers are indolent or unable to express verbally. +Relevant concepts include: + +Emblems - Body movements or gestures that are directly translatable into a word or phrase +Illustrators - Accompany or reinforce verbal messages +Batons - Temporally accent or emphasize words or phrases +Ideographs - Trace the paths of mental journeys +Deictic movements - Point to a present object +Kinetographs - Depict a bodily action +Spatial movements - Depict a spatial relationship +Pictographs - Draw a picture of their referent +Rhythmic movements - Depict the rhythm or pacing of an event +Affect Displays - Show emotion +Regulators - Control the flow and pace of communication +Manipulators - Release physical or emotional tension +Kinesic behaviors are an important part of nonverbal communication. Body movements convey information, but interpretations vary by culture. As many movements are carried out at a subconscious or at least a low-awareness level, kinesic movements carry a significant risk of being misinterpreted in an intercultural communication situation. + + +== See also == +Intercultural competence +Metacommunicative competence +Nonverbal communication +Body language +Cold reading +Eye contact +Facial expression +Gesture +Posture +Proxemics +Paralanguage + + +== References == + + +== External links == + +Report on kinesics by David B. Givens for the Center for Nonverbal Studies. +On the Origin of Language by Andrej Poleev. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..433fb3e53 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "LGBTQ linguistics" +chunk: 1/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:45.372125+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +LGBTQ linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBTQ communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass[es] a wide range of everyday language practices" in LGBTQ communities, and queer linguistics, which refers to the linguistic analysis concerning the effect of heteronormativity on expressing sexual identity through language. The former term derives from the longtime association of the color lavender with LGBTQ communities. "Language", in this context, may refer to any aspect of spoken or written linguistic practices, including speech patterns and pronunciation, use of certain vocabulary, and, in a few cases, an elaborate alternative lexicon such as Polari. + +== History == +Early studies in the field of LGBTQ linguistics were dominated by the concept of distinct "lavender lexicons" such as that recorded by Gershon Legman in 1941. In 1995, William Leap, whose work incorporates LGBTQ culture studies, cultural theory, and linguistics, called for scholarship to move toward a fuller and more nuanced study of LGBTQ language use, especially through the foundation of the Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference. Anna Livia and Kira Hall have noted that while research in the 1960s and 1970s on the difference between men's and women's speech made the implicit assumption that gender was the relevant way to divide the social space, there is still considerable room for linguistic research based on sexual orientation, rather than gender. + +== Accents of English == + +=== Gay men === + +Linguistics research, particularly within North American English, has revealed a number of phonetically salient features used by many gay men, some of which adhere to stereotypes. Studies have repeatedly confirmed that male American English speakers are recognized as gay by their speech at rates above chance. Relevant features include what is popularly known as a gay lisp: in fact, the articulation of and with a higher frequency and longer duration than average speakers. Also, gay men may tend to lower the TRAP and DRESS front vowels, especially in "fun" or casual social situations. Many gay speech characteristics match those that other speakers use when trying to speak especially clearly or carefully, including (over-)enunciating and widening the vowel spaces in the mouth. The notion that some gay male speech entirely imitates women's speech is inaccurate, though certain vocal qualities are certainly shared between the two speech styles. Research has also shown unique speech of gay men in other languages, such as Puerto Rican Spanish and Flemish Dutch. + +=== Lesbians === +Speech scientist Benjamin Munson confirmed such features among lesbians as the use of lower pitch and more direct communication styles found in previous studies, plus more backed variants of back vowels, but he noted too that differences between lesbians and straight women are "even more subtle" than differences between gay and straight men. In one English-language experiment, listeners were unable to identify female speakers as either lesbian or straight based solely on voice. At the same time, lesbian speech studies have long been neglected, making introductory research difficult. Another study showed that speakers' self-assessed "familiarity with queer culture" had a statistically significant correlation with phonetic variation like lower median pitch and faster rate of speech, though mostly for straight women, somewhat for bisexual women, and not at all for lesbians. The study's author theorized that the straight women, aware of the study's purpose, may have been attempting to express their affinity with lesbians by adopting their stereotype of a lower pitch. Another experiment found that listeners indeed were able to accurately judge female speakers on a scale from "least" to "most likely to be a lesbian" (the slight lesbian and bisexual differences approaching statistical significance), perceiving the straight women as significantly more feminine, bisexual speakers as only slightly more, and lesbians as correlated with lower median pitch, wider pitch range, lower second formant, and more use of creaky voice. However, no direct correlations between these phonetic variables and sexual orientation were found, perhaps with listeners identifying other features that were not tested. +Linguist Robin Queen argues that analyses have been too simplistic and that a uniquely lesbian language is constructed through the combination of sometimes-conflicting stylistic tropes: stereotypical women's language (e.g. hypercorrect grammar), stereotypical nonstandard forms associated with the (male) working class (e.g. contractions), stereotypical gay male lexical items, and stereotypical lesbian language (e.g. flat intonation, cursing). Sometimes lesbians deliberately avoid stereotypical female speech, according to Queen, in order to distance themselves from "normative" heterosexual female speech patterns. Because femininity is a marked style, adopting it is more noticeable than avoiding it, which may add to the lack of socially salient styles for lesbians in contrast with socially identifiable stereotypically gay male speech. However, lesbians may have more slang than gay males, with one article listing nearly eighty common lesbian slang words for sexual acts and organs. + +== Transgender linguistics == +Linguistic research on the language of transgender communities has explored the gendered phonetic aspects of the voice, specific gendered lexical items (pronouns, identity labels, terms of address), as well as specific discursive practices within trans communities (pronoun introductions, coming out stories, linguistic activism). A trans linguistic framework has been developed and advocated for by linguist Lal Zimman. This framework not only seeks to research the linguistic features and practices of transgender people, but to foreground the knowledge and experiences of trans communities and researchers. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3cc79c5dc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "LGBTQ linguistics" +chunk: 2/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:45.372125+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Phonetics === +Phonetics research has shown that the physical voices of trans men (and transmasculine) and trans women (and transfeminine) individuals are often but not always affected by social and medical transition, including through voice training, laryngoplasties, feminizing hormones, masculinizing hormones, or other drugs, all of which can alter sociolinguistic characteristics. A 2006 study noted that, after undergoing five oral resonance sessions targeted at lip spreading and forward tongue carriage, ten transfeminine individuals demonstrated a general increase in the formant frequency values F1, F2, and F3 as well as the fundamental frequency value F0, meaning an overall higher vocal pitch, thus more closely approximating the desired vocal frequency of cisgender women. Lal Zimman's 2012 doctorate dissertation followed fifteen transmasculine individuals from the San Francisco Bay Area in a long-term study focused on formant and fundamental frequency, for one to two years after the start of masculinizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT), concluding that all ten underwent a drop in fundamental frequency in the early stages of HRT but that social factors also affected many of the changes in voice and mannerisms. + +=== Lexicon and pronouns === +Some research has focused on language change over time in the terminology used to talk about transgender people and communities. In the early twentieth century, the work of German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld introduced two terms that were popularly used for transgender people throughout the Twentieth Century: transsexual and transvestite. In the 1990s, the term transgender became more widely used to refer to people who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Histories of the word transgender often attribute the coining of the term to Virginia Prince, an activist from Southern California, but note the term's rise in popularity with its use in Leslie Feinberg's book, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come. In the decades following the move to "transgender" as the most widely used community label, terminology used to refer to gender diverse communities has continued to expand, especially given the rapid pace of language shift in online trans communities. +Research on the lexicon of transgender people shows that they often use creative tactics to avoid specific physical or gender-specific characteristics of genital terms, including using certain words for specific genitalia. They also use certain pronouns as singular they or neopronouns and use different morphology in cases where the morphology is traditionally linked to grammatical gender, e.g. in Spanish and Portuguese. + +=== Discursive practices === +Discursive practices that are relevant to transgender communities are also major topics of research within trans linguistics. Research on inclusive language reforms and linguistic activism has addressed ways that transgender communities have advocated for language change that recognizes the range of gender diversity. Some changes that trans advocates promote include using inclusive gender labels (e.g., 'hello everyone' as opposed to 'hello ladies and gentlemen' or 'students' as opposed to 'boys and girls') and respecting the linguistic choices of transgender people. Related to research on advocating for inclusive forms is research that explores the process of discursive self determination for transgender people, what Zimman calls "linguistic self-identification". +Other discursive practices that have been studied in trans communities are coming out stories, pronoun introductions, relationship to medical discourses, discourses of the voice and masculinity, and media representations of trans identities. + +== Non-binary people == +Non-binary people may perform gender in a unique way through language. While a majority of research on nonbinary people has focused on lexical issues, there is growing research on phonetic features of nonbinary voices as well as discursive and language ideological issues related to nonbinary language. + +=== Pronouns === +They may reject being referred to by gendered pronouns like English he or she, and use they, it, or neopronouns which are not gendered or which indicate a nonbinary gender. English examples of neopronouns go back to the 1800s with thon and e; newer pronouns include ey, em, xe, and ve. Nonbinary people may also use different words for traditionally gender-expressing relationships (e.g. partner instead of boyfriend). +The English singular they has several functions. Besides referencing to an unspecific person as in "the ideal student never forgets their homework", it is also used for specific people as in "Jayden forgot their homework". Singular they can vary in meaning, indicating either someone whose pronouns the speaker or writer does not know, or someone who is known to use they as their pronoun. +Non-binary–inclusive language includes terms besides pronouns, and depending on the language, other aspects of the language such as suffixes are also used differently. In Romance languages like French and Spanish, for example, affixes of nouns, adjectives and participles with gender agreement are changed, as well as pronouns and articles. Depending on the language and sociolinguistic factors, there are different approaches to undo the grammatical binary when speaking about people. For Spanish, the morphemes -x and -e are used, and can be seen in terms like Latinx and pronouns like elle, while in French, non-binary pronouns include iel (singular; plural: iels). Some Portuguese speakers use the pronoun elu. Research shows a wide variety of different forms used to avoid the binary. Kris Knisely states that using a comprehensible non-binary inclusive form has advantages in foreign language education. +For more gender neutral forms in different languages, see Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns. + +=== Phonetics === +Building off work in trans linguistics that has explored the social construction of gender through different phonetic features, some sociophonetic work has looked at the voices of nonbinary people specifically. Gratton (2016) looked at (ING) production and how nonbinary participants used variations of the feature to index nonbinary identities. Additionally, Rechsteiner and Sneller found that nonbinary speakers produce (ING) at rates unlike either male or female speakers; however, nonbinary speakers used (ING) at rates similar to other nonbinary speakers, suggesting the presence of a distinct nonbinary linguistic community. + +== Slang == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e05440f28 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "LGBTQ linguistics" +chunk: 3/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:45.372125+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Specialized dictionaries that record gay and lesbian slang tend to revolve heavily around sexual matters, which may reflect the publications' methodological assumptions about the hyper-sexuality of conversations among LGBTQ people. +One study showed gay pornographic imagery to men and asked them to discuss the imagery, finding that conversations between gay men used more slang and fewer commonly-known terms about sexual behavior than conversations where both participants were heterosexual males or where the pair consisted of one heterosexual and one homosexual male. Methodological issues of this study may include that the findings reflect homophobia among the heterosexual participants. +Studies have also been done into whether words used within the gay community are understood by heterosexuals. A study of Deaf American Sign Language users showed that all the gay male participants understood the sign for a bathhouse and that 83% of lesbians knew the sign. This compared to zero heterosexual men and only one out of eleven heterosexual women knowing the sign. + +=== "Dyke" === + +One prominent example of LGBTQ slang is the rising reappropriation among lesbians of the word "dyke". Though still in many contexts considered pejorative, "dyke" has become a symbol for increasing acceptance of the lesbian movement and identity. Lesbians themselves use it to further solidarity and unity among their community. Examples include dyke marches (female-exclusive pride parades), "dykes with tykes" (describing lesbian motherhood), Dykes to Watch Out For (a comic strip that ran for 25 years), and Dykes on Bikes (a motorcycle group that traditionally leads the San Francisco Pride parade). Like other minorities, lesbians are slowly reclaiming a word that was once used to hurt them in the past. This even had legal repercussions, in that the "Dykes on Bikes" group was formally known as the "Women's Motorcycle Contingent" since they were refused the right to register under their preferred name by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, until 2006 when they finally were able to trademark the name, having persuaded the Office that "dyke" was not an offensive word. + +=== "Faggot" === + +Faggot, often shortened to fag, is a usually pejorative term used chiefly in North America primarily to refer to a gay man or boy. Some gay men have reclaimed the term as a neutral or positive term of self-description. Alongside its use to refer to gay men in particular, it may also be used as a pejorative term for a "repellent male" or to refer to women who are lesbian. Its use has spread from the United States to varying extents elsewhere in the English-speaking world through mass culture, including film, music, and the Internet. + +== Spanish Slang == +LGBTQ+ Latinxs make up a significant portion of the LGBTQ+ population in the US, reportedly making up 21% of the US population in 2019. Through the blend of Latin American languages, dialects, and cultural influences alongside US queer culture, queer Latinxs have cultivated their own vernacular of queer expression as a form of community and resilience. Academic research on Latinx queer slang and linguistics examines how these linguistics differ regionally. The regional differences which separate different Latinx cultures in the US are a reflection of migration paths taken from different Latin American countries into the US. + +=== Cuban gay slang in Miami === +Author Susana Peña describes the use of Cuban Spanish gay slang in Miami as a practice that illustrates the speaker as both Spanish-speaking and Cuban or Caribbean and gay. The term "perra" is one of the most used Cuban gay slang expressions, directly translated to "female dog" in English. Within the Cuban gay community the term is used to describe praise, most frequently within the drag setting. Peña explains how this term has traveled from the gay scene in Cuba to the Cuban gay scene in Miami, highlighting the linguistic migration that occurs alongside physical migration. Additionally, Cuban gay men in Miami reveal that slang expressions with Cuban roots are more relatable than those used in English speaking gay scenes. Other prominent Cuban gay slang terms include "mariquita" which is used to describe effeminate gay men, and "cantar 'La Bayamesa'" which refers to self acceptance of ones sexuality, similar to the English phrase "coming out". + +=== Latinx lesbian slang in the Midwest === +Scholar Taralee Morgan conducted a study among Latina lesbians in the Midwest, noting that lesbian Latinx slang and speech is contingent on its use of feminine and masculine connotations. Though this community breaks from traditional machista values, the gendering of terms that is found in the Spanish language has crossed over into lesbian Latinx vernacular. Although numerous indigenous languages persist throughout Latin America, the colonial imposition of Spanish remains an important linguistic feature of Latin America and its diasporas. In Morgan's study lesbian Spanish speakers were asked to list common slang terms used in their Spanish speaking circles. These words included “bucha, buchona, butcha, bollera, tortillera, marimacho/a, macho/a, papi, femenina, and hombruna”. It is interesting to note that though these terms have gendered endings, many of them are used to describe both feminine and masculine presenting lesbians, underscoring gender fluidity in Latinx queer linguistics. + +=== Spanglish and code-switching === +La Fountain-Stokes argues Spanglish's "messiness", the fact that there are no grammatical rights or wrongs, embodies queer transgression, distinguishing Latinx from English slang. Spanglish and code-switching is central for Latinx queer communities in the US. Switching between languages in Spanglish parallels challenges within the queer community to adhere to strict sexuality and gender categories. Spanglish’s lack of rules allows for queer Latinxs to freely express their intersectional identities with smaller fears of judgment or exclusion. The use of Spanish and Spanglish among Latinx queer communities fosters a sense of culture as well as the rejection of white queer linguistics. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..726856f04 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +title: "LGBTQ linguistics" +chunk: 4/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:45.372125+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Language as a form of resistance === +Much of mainstream culture views queer language and terms as “cool”, silencing the fact that much of queer slang and linguistics was created by Black and Latinx queer communities as a form of survival. Differences in region, country of origin, and queer cultural expression create a range of slang used by queer Latinx individuals to feel seen among one another in a world where others exclude them. Latinx scholars reflect on the safe communities and environments built in places of constant change and transformation like the US-Mexico border. Researcher Edgard Alexis Amaro Martínez connects this to the duality of community and a constant need for survival that is found in urban hubs among queer Latinx communities. This community building birthed new ideas, new forms of expression, and new vocabulary through slang. + +=== The effects of machismo === +Traditional toxic masculinity prevails in the Latinx community due to a society that operates through patriarchal norms and expectations. Scholars connect Latinx queer slang to machismo present in Latinx cultures, illustrating how certain terms challenge traditional gender structures. Thus, Spanglish and Spanish slang among the queer community serves as a form of expression, but also breaks cultural and political norms that are deeply rooted for Latinxs. + +== Theories == +Traditionally it was believed that one's way of speaking is a result of one's identity, but the postmodernist approach reversed this theory to suggest that the way we talk is a part of identity formation, specifically suggesting that gender identity is variable and not fixed. In the early 20th century sexuality-related theories about language were common (for example, Freud and his theories of psychoanalysis), using a quite different basis from that used by modern studies on this topic. One of these early views was that homosexuality was a pathology. In the 1980s, however the LGBTQ community was increasingly viewed as an oppressed minority group, and scholars began to investigate the possibility of characterizing gay language use in a different way, influenced in part by studies of African-American Vernacular English. There was a shift in beliefs from language being a result of identity to language being employed to reflect a shared social identity and even to create sexual or gender identities. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b88975830 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "LGBTQ linguistics" +chunk: 5/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:45.372125+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Language use as performance === +Shared ways of speaking can be used to create a single, cohesive identity that in turn help organize political struggle. Sexuality is one form of social identity, discursively constructed and represented. This shared identity can in some cases be strengthened through shared forms of language use and used for political organizing. Language can be used to negotiate relations and contradictions of gender and sexual identities, and can index identity in various ways, even if there is no specific gay or lesbian code of speaking. +Gay men and lesbians may, through the use of language, form speech communities. A speech community is a community that shares linguistic traits and tends to have community boundaries that coincide with social units. Membership in speech communities is often assumed based on stereotypes about the community as defined by non-linguistic factors. Speakers may resist culturally dominant language and oppose cultural authority by maintaining their own varieties of speech. +Gender performativity relates to speech in that people may consciously or unconsciously modify their speech styles to conform with their gender role, which men often pick speech styles that reflect the culturally defined standards of masculinity. Gay men may be associated with "femininity" in their speech styles because others perceive that their speech performance does not conform with their gender. +For example, in the west, parodies of gay styles employ resources that are heard as hyper-feminine, supporting that gay speech is feminine. However, because many speech varieties associated with 'masculinity' are learned and not biological, certain gay men may be using a wider variety of speech than a stereotypical 'masculine' male. +These stylistic innovations are made possible by the iterability of speech, and are used to index elements of identity that often do not conform with the gender binary. Conversely, lesbian women already have a wider variety of speech available, yet refrain from using a distinctive style of speech. Masculinity, and speech associated with a heterosexual male, is constrained by cultural expectations for men to avoid 'abjection' (as further elaborated in Gender Trouble); power differences amongst the genders may lead to speakers adopting different speech styles that conform with their identities, or expected gender performances (e.g. adolescent males often use the term 'fag' to police one another, which challenges their sexual orientation through gender performance, and reinforces the avoidance of the 'abject' or femininity). 'Masculine' speech is associated with non-feminine sounding speech and because some gay men may not wish to identify with straight masculine speech in some contexts, they may access other speech styles to convey their identity (because the possibilities have two options, 'masculine' or 'feminine,' to be not-'masculine' is often associated with 'feminine'). The boundary between 'masculine' and 'feminine' is maintained by cultural norms and societal orders, that do not permit masculinity to include femininity, the abject. +Language use can also mimic culturally dominant forms or stereotypes. Performing identity can only work as long as the indexes used are conventional and socially recognized, which is why stereotypes are sometimes adopted. Community members can establish their affiliation with the group through shared ways of speaking, acting, and thinking. Such discourses may in turn reproduce or modify social relationships. Sometimes, however, such a code may fall out of use when it becomes widely known and therefore no longer exclusive, as occurred with Polari after it was used on the BBC. +In a particular example of how this process of language community formation happens in a specific LGBTQ community, transgender people and transvestites may use vocabulary that includes members and excludes non-members to establish social identity and solidarity and to exclude outsiders. As these social groups are particularly likely to be viewed negatively by outsiders, the use of a private language can serve to keep membership in the group a secret to outsiders while allowing group members to recognize their own. +Some members of a community may use stylistic and pragmatic devices to index and exaggerate orientations and identities, but others may deliberately avoid stereotypical speech. Gender is frequently indexed indirectly, through traits that are associated with certain gender identities. In this way, for example, speaking forcefully is associated with masculinity but also with confidence and authority. Similarly, LGBTQ speech has a relationship with the speaker's community of practice. Speakers may have a shared interest, and respond to a mutual situation, and through communicating regularly they may develop certain speech norms. The innovative speech norms that LGBTQ people may use within their communities of practice can be spread through institutions like schools where person of many classes, races, and genders come together. These particular speech traits may be spread through the adoption of use by people with association to LGBTQ identities. + +=== Goals of distinctive language use among gay men === +People often are members of multiple communities, and which community they want to be most closely associated with may vary. For some gay men, the primary self-categorization is their identity as gay men. To achieve recognition as such, gay men may recognize and imitate forms of language that reflect the social identity of gay men, or which are stereotypically considered to be characteristic to gay men. For example, the use of female pronouns dissociates gay men from heterosexual norms and designates them in opposition to heterosexual masculinity. The reason for using female pronouns and the frequency of use may vary, however. For example, they may be used only in jest, or may be used more seriously to stabilize a group of gay men and bond its members together. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..07ea31ddb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "LGBTQ linguistics" +chunk: 6/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:45.372125+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Goals of distinctive language use among lesbians and heterosexual women === +The development of gay identity may differ for men and women. For many women, regardless of orientation, female identity is more important than sexual identity. Where gay men feel a need to assert themselves against male heterosexual norms, lesbians may be more concerned about sexism than about lesbian identity. +Most studies of lesbian speech patterns focus on conversational patterns, as in Coates and Jordan (1997) and Morrish and Saunton (2007). Women draw on a variety of discourses, particularly feminist discourses, to establish themselves as not submissive to heteropatriarchy by using cooperative all-female talk, which is marked by less distinct turns and a more collaborative conversational environment. Often the conversational bond between women overrides their sexual identities. However, the content of lesbian discourse can separate those who use it from heteronormativity and the values of dominant cultures. Collaborative discourse involves resisting dominant gender norms through more subtle creation of solidarity, and not necessarily resisting "gender-typical" linguistic behavior. +An example of a distinctive way of speaking for a female community is that of female bikers. Dykes on Bikes, a mostly lesbian group, and Ladies of Harley, a mostly heterosexual group, have demonstrated shared experiences. Though the two cultures differ, both have a focus on female bonding and motorcycles and have a shared female biker language. Their shared language helps to establish their shared identity in a largely male-dominated domain and to mark boundaries between them and traditional femininity. + +=== Changing styles of speech === +Changing speech styles can indicate which identity individuals want to put forward as primary at a given time. Code-switching is often used to describe the switching of languages or language styles, within a sentence or conversation. Raciolinguistic scholars discuss code switching in terms of race, but as discussed, language also forms gender & sex through systemic designs that influence social concepts. Choices of slang use among gay men depend on the audience and context, and shift depending on situational needs such as the need to demonstrate or conceal gay identity in a particular environment. Likewise, lesbians may foreground lesbian identity in some contexts but not in others. Podesva discusses an example of code-switching where a gay lawyer is being interviewed about anti-gay discrimination on the radio, so he balances the need to sound recognizably gay and the need to sound recognizably educated, since "gay speech" tends to be associated with frivolity and lack of education. +"Exploratory switching" can be used to determine whether an interlocutor shares the speaker's identity. For example, a gay man might use certain key words and mannerisms generally known by the community as a test to see whether they are recognized by the interlocutor. This allows the gay man to establish solidarity with a community member previously unknown to him without having to disclose his orientation to a heterosexual and potentially hostile person. However, inconsistency of language use between different sub-groups of the LGBTQ community, along with the existence of non-members who may be familiar with a gay mode of speech, can make such exploratory switching unreliable. +People may also use code-switching to comment on society or for entertainment. Black drag performers often use stereotypical "female white English" to disrupt societal assumptions about gender and ethnicity and to express criticisms of these assumptions. Imitations do not necessarily represent actual language use of a group, but rather the generally recognized stereotypical speech of that group. In the language of drag performers, language play is also marked by juxtaposition of contradictory aspects such as very proper language mixed with obscenities, adding to the queens' and kings' deliberate disruption of cultural and linguistic norms. + +=== Issues with studying speech patterns in relation to sexuality and sexual identity === +Don Kulick argues that the search for a link between sexual identity categories and language is misplaced, since studies have failed to show that the language gay men and lesbians use is unique. Kulick argues that though some researchers may be politically motivated to imagine an LGBTQ community that is a unified whole and identifiable through linguistic means, this speech community does not necessarily exist as such. Kulick points out that the LGBTQ community is not homogeneous, nor is its language use. Features of "gay speech" are not used consistently by gay individuals, nor are they consistently absent from the speech of all heterosexual individuals. Further, Kulick takes issue with frequently circular definitions of queer speech. He argues that speech patterns cannot be labelled LGBTQ language simply because they are used by LGBTQ people. +Studies of a speech community that presuppose the existence of that community may reproduce stereotypes that fail to accurately depict the social reality of variance among subgroups within a community and overlapping identities for individuals. Furthermore, studies of gay male language use often look at middle class European Americans who are out as gay to the exclusion of other subgroups of the LGBTQ community, and hence may draw misleading conclusions about the community as a whole. +Rusty Barrett suggests that the idea of the homogeneous speech community could perhaps be more accurately replaced by one of a queer community based on community spirit or a queer cultural system, since language use varies so greatly. Kulick proposes, instead of studying speech communities that he concludes "do not and cannot exist" because of methodological problems, researchers should study "language and desire" through examining repression in the context of linguistics, considering both what is said and what is not or cannot be said. Kulick addresses the need for consideration of the role of sexuality in sexual identity, unlike some lavender linguists who neglect sexuality in favor of linguistic features that might be more likely than sexuality to legitimize gay identity. + +== Issues with over-generalizations about sexual identities and linguistic styles == + +=== Inaccuracy of metonymic models === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e4499e0a6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "LGBTQ linguistics" +chunk: 7/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:45.372125+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +George Lakoff explained the inaccuracy of metonymic models, through which people jump to conclusions without sufficient elaboration, giving rise to prototype effects, in his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. First of all, we commonly consider typical examples as the better examples of a category. For instance, in the category of fruits, apples and oranges are typical examples. It is common practice that we engage in reasoning by making inferences from typical to non-typical examples. As a matter of fact, an enormous amount of our knowledge about categories of things is organized in terms of typical cases. We constantly draw inferences on the basis of that kind of knowledge. Second, salient examples, which are familiar and memorable, are unconsciously used in our understanding of things. For instance, if one's best friend is a vegetarian and they do not know any others well, they will tend to generalize from their best friend to other vegetarians. This is what Tversky and Kahneman referred to as the "conjunction fallacy". To understand this notion via probability theory, think of two mutually unrelated events. The theory assumes that the likelihood of the co-occurrence of the two events is lower than that of the occurrence of either, ignoring the fact that the two events are actually unrelated to one another. To understand this with regards to lavender linguistics, just because two individuals are both self-identified bisexual males does not necessarily mean that they must engage in the same linguistic patterns and social styles. The failure to capture this asymmetry between prototypical and non-prototypical cases results in ineffective study of lavender linguistics. Typical and salient examples are just two kinds of metonymic models. Others include social stereotypes, ideal cases, paragons, generators, and submodels. + +=== Presence of overlaps === +A significant multitude of scholastic studies have shown that the linguistic styles of LGBTQ and straight people are not mutually exclusive. Munson et al. (2006), for instance, examined the gradient nature of perceived sexual orientation by having 40 listeners rate 44 talkers' sexual orientation on a five-point equally appearing interval scale. The 44 talkers included equal number of LGBTQ and straight people. When averaged across the 40 listeners, ratings for individual talkers showed some overlap between LGBTQ and straight people. For example, the two men who were tied with the most-gay average ratings included one self-identified straight man, and one self-identified gay man. While there are group level differences between LGBTQ and straight people in the gay soundness of their voices, overlap does exist, providing a serious challenge to a simple model in which speech differences were the inevitable consequence of sexual orientation. The fact that there is no clean cut between the linguistic patterns of LGBTQ and straight people suggests that too many generalizations in the study of language and gender can be dangerous. + +=== Multiplicity of social identity === + +Contemporary sociolinguistic studies suggest that styles are learned, rather than assigned at the time of birth. With that said, identities emerge in a time series of social practice, through the combined effects of structure and agency. Because social identities are not static, the speech community model, which was traditionally employed as a sociolinguistic framework in the study of language and gender, is not as reliable as the community of practice model, the new framework emerged from practice theory. Also, because social identities are not static, speech styles are actively subject to change, such that one's speech styles have different social meanings across time. Similarly, it is possible for an individual to engage in multiple identity practices simultaneously, and move from one identity to another unconsciously and automatically, and thus the term polyphonous identity. Podesva (2004) is a paper that studies recordings of a gay medical student, whom he called "Heath", as he moved through different situations in the course of his everyday life. The fact that Heath's pronunciation of the voiceless alveolar stop, /t/, varies when he deals with different groups of people suggest not only some of gay people's speech features, but also the multiplicity of a person's social identity. Furthermore, Podesva also examined the relationship between the California Vowel Shift (CVS) and the gay identity, again by investigating intra-speaker patterns in a single individual, Regan, as opposed to inter-speaker variation, and found that Regan, who is a self-identified gay Asian American, realized CVS differently depending on the context, whether it be a "boys' night out", "dinner with friend", or "meeting with supervisor". This cross-situational patterns are critical in the sense that an individual's speech styles can change not only across time, but also across space, depending on which social identity the individual is attempting to engage in under a given situation. Overgeneralizations of social identity, however, overlook this intra-speaker variability. + +=== Examples of non-Western sexual identities and their language use === +According to many language scholars, it is misleading to assume that all sex and gender roles are the same as those that are salient within Western society or that the linguistic styles associated with given groups will be like the styles associated with similarly identified Western groups. + +==== Bakla ==== \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-7.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-7.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f633e37e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics-7.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "LGBTQ linguistics" +chunk: 8/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:45.372125+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Baklas are homosexual Filipino men, but the concept of bakla identity does not map cleanly to Western male homosexuality. With baklas, as with other non-Western sexual minority groups, sexual identity is very closely related to gender identity. Baklas often assume female attributes and dress like women. They also use female terms for themselves and occasionally for their body parts, and are sometimes referred to and refer to themselves as not being "real men". +Although they have contact with other gay cultures through technology, bakla culture remains fairly distinct. They have their own rapidly shifting linguistic code called Swardspeak, which is influenced by Spanish and English loan words. This code mostly consists of lexical items, but also includes sound changes such as [p] to [f]. Some baklas who move to the United States continue to use this code, but others abandon it, regarding it as a Filipino custom that is out of place abroad and replacing it with aspects of American gay culture. + +==== Hijras ==== + +Hijras are Indians who refer to themselves as neither man nor woman. Some describe hijras as a "third sex". Their identity is distinct from a Western gay or transgender identity, though many hijras have male sexual partners. There is a distinctive mode of speech often attributed to hijras, but it is stereotypical, and frequently derogatory. It is often the standard for Hijras to adopt feminine mannerisms, feminine gender agreement when addressing the self or other Hijaras, and pronouns, depending on context and their interlocutors, to create solidarity or distance. They also use stereotypically male elements of speech, such as vulgarity. Hijras often refer to themselves as masculine in the past tense and females in the present. Their combined use of masculine and feminine speech styles can be seen as reflecting their ambiguous sexual identities and challenging dominant sexuality and gender ideologies. Thus, hijras use grammar as a form of resistance against gender roles. + +== See also == + +== References == + +== External links == +Annual Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference Archived 2021-03-13 at the Wayback Machine \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_geography-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_geography-0.md index bb589536c..d30a881cf 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_geography-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_geography-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_geography" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:36:58.859776+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:04.453305+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6969da8b2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 1/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning. +Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, writing, whistling, signing, or braille. In other words, human language is modality-independent, but written or signed language is the way to inscribe or encode the natural human speech or gestures. +Depending on philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual and tactile languages contain a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are combined to form phrases and utterances. +The scientific study of language is called linguistics. Critical examinations of languages, such as philosophy of language, the relationships between language and thought, how words represent experience, etc., have been debated at least since Gorgias and Plato in ancient Greek civilization. Thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) have argued that language originated from emotions, while others like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) have argued that languages originated from rational and logical thought. Twentieth century philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) argued that philosophy is really the study of language itself. Major figures in contemporary linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky. +Language is thought to have gradually diverged from earlier primate communication systems when early hominins acquired the ability to form a theory of mind and shared intentionality. This development is sometimes thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social functions. Language is processed in many different locations in the human brain, but especially in Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Humans acquire language through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently by approximately three years old. Language and culture are codependent. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language has social uses such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as use for social grooming and entertainment. +Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family; in contrast, a language that has been demonstrated not to have any living or non-living relationship with another language is called a language isolate. There are also many unclassified languages whose relationships have not been established, and spurious languages may have not existed at all. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year 2100. + +== Definitions == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e09772034 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 2/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The English word language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s "tongue, speech, language" through Latin lingua, "language; tongue", and Old French language. The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers, and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as formally defined computer languages used for computer programming. Unlike conventional human languages, a formal language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of natural human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics. +As an object of linguistic study, "language" has two primary meanings: an abstract concept, and a specific linguistic system, e.g. "French". The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly formulated the distinction using the French word langage for language as a concept, langue as a specific instance of a language system, and parole for the concrete use of speech in a particular language. +When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress different aspects of the phenomenon. These definitions also entail different approaches and understandings of language, and they also inform different and often incompatible schools of linguistic theory. Debates about the nature and origin of language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgias and Plato debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias argued that language could represent neither the objective experience nor human experience, and that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that communication is possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist independently of, and prior to, language. +During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable to speculate about the origin of language. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that it was originally closer to music and poetry than to the logical expression of rational thought. Rationalist philosophers such as Kant and René Descartes held the opposite view. Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to wonder about the role of language in shaping our experiences of the world – asking whether language simply reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that in turn impose structure on our experience of the objective world. This led to the question of whether philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic problems. The resurgence of the view that language plays a significant role in the creation and circulation of concepts, and that the study of philosophy is essentially the study of language, is associated with what has been called the linguistic turn and philosophers such as Wittgenstein in 20th-century philosophy. These debates about language in relation to meaning and reference, cognition and consciousness remain active today. + +=== Mental faculty, organ or instinct === +One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and to produce and understand utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it emphasizes the biological basis for the human capacity for language as a unique development of the human brain. Proponents of the view that the drive to language acquisition is innate in humans argue that this is supported by the fact that all cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even develop spontaneously in environments where people live or grow up together without a common language; for example, creole languages and spontaneously developed sign languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view, which can be traced back to the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to be largely innate, for example, in Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, or American philosopher Jerry Fodor's extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in studies of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics. + +=== Formal symbolic system === +Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and his structuralism remains foundational for many approaches to language. +Some proponents of Saussure's view of language have advocated a formal approach that studies language structure by identifying its basic elements and then by presenting a formal account of the rules according to which the elements combine in order to form words and sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who has defined language as the construction of sentences that can be generated using transformational grammars. Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human mind and to constitute the rudiments of what language is. By way of contrast, such transformational grammars are also commonly used in formal logic, in formal linguistics, and in applied computational linguistics. In the philosophy of language, the view of linguistic meaning as residing in the logical relations between propositions and reality was developed by philosophers such as Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and other formal logicians. + +=== Tool for communication === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-10.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-10.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8f5bbd0e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-10.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 11/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Another way in which languages convey meaning is through the order of words within a sentence. The grammatical rules for how to produce new sentences from words that are already known is called syntax. The syntactical rules of a language determine why a sentence in English such as "I love you" is meaningful, but "*love you I" is not. Syntactical rules determine how word order and sentence structure is constrained, and how those constraints contribute to meaning. For example, in English, the two sentences "the slaves were cursing the master" and "the master was cursing the slaves" mean different things, because the role of the grammatical subject is encoded by the noun being in front of the verb, and the role of object is encoded by the noun appearing after the verb. Conversely, in Latin, both Dominus servos vituperabat and Servos vituperabat dominus mean "the master was reprimanding the slaves", because servos, or "slaves", is in the accusative case, showing that they are the grammatical object of the sentence, and dominus, or "master", is in the nominative case, showing that he is the subject. +Latin uses morphology to express the distinction between subject and object, whereas English uses word order. Another example of how syntactic rules contribute to meaning is the rule of inverse word order in questions, which exists in many languages. This rule explains why when in English, the phrase "John is talking to Lucy" is turned into a question, it becomes "Who is John talking to?", and not "John is talking to who?". The latter example may be used as a way of placing special emphasis on "who", thereby slightly altering the meaning of the question. Syntax also includes the rules for how complex sentences are structured by grouping words together in units, called phrases, that can occupy different places in a larger syntactic structure. Sentences can be described as consisting of phrases connected in a tree structure, connecting the phrases to each other at different levels. To the right is a graphic representation of the syntactic analysis of the English sentence "the cat sat on the mat". The sentence is analyzed as being constituted by a noun phrase, a verb, and a prepositional phrase; the prepositional phrase is further divided into a preposition and a noun phrase, and the noun phrases consist of an article and a noun. +The reason sentences can be seen as being composed of phrases is because each phrase would be moved around as a single element if syntactic operations were carried out. For example, "the cat" is one phrase, and "on the mat" is another, because they would be treated as single units if a decision was made to emphasize the location by moving forward the prepositional phrase: "[And] on the mat, the cat sat". There are many different formalist and functionalist frameworks that propose theories for describing syntactic structures, based on different assumptions about what language is and how it should be described. Each of them would analyze a sentence such as this in a different manner. + +=== Typology and universals === + +Languages can be classified in relation to their grammatical types. Languages that belong to different families nonetheless often have features in common, and these shared features tend to correlate. For example, languages can be classified on the basis of their basic word order, the relative order of the verb, and its constituents in a normal indicative sentence. In English, the basic order is SVO (subject–verb–object): "The snake(S) bit(V) the man(O)", whereas for example, the corresponding sentence in the Australian language Gamilaraay would be d̪uyugu n̪ama d̪ayn yiːy (snake man bit), SOV. Word order type is relevant as a typological parameter, because basic word order type corresponds with other syntactic parameters, such as the relative order of nouns and adjectives, or of the use of prepositions or postpositions. Such correlations are called implicational universals. For example, most (but not all) languages that are of the SOV type have postpositions rather than prepositions, and have adjectives before nouns. +All languages structure sentences into Subject, Verb, and Object, but languages differ in the way they classify the relations between actors and actions. English uses the nominative-accusative word typology: in English transitive clauses, the subjects of both intransitive sentences ("I run") and transitive sentences ("I love you") are treated in the same way, shown here by the nominative pronoun I. Some languages, called ergative, Gamilaraay among them, distinguish instead between Agents and Patients. In ergative languages, the single participant in an intransitive sentence, such as "I run", is treated the same as the patient in a transitive sentence, giving the equivalent of "me run". Only in transitive sentences would the equivalent of the pronoun "I" be used. In this way the semantic roles can map onto the grammatical relations in different ways, grouping an intransitive subject either with Agents (accusative type) or Patients (ergative type) or even making each of the three roles differently, which is called the tripartite type. +The shared features of languages which belong to the same typological class type may have arisen completely independently. Their co-occurrence might be due to universal laws governing the structure of natural languages, "language universals", or they might be the result of languages evolving convergent solutions to the recurring communicative problems that humans use language to solve. + +== Social contexts of use and transmission == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-11.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-11.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..479ede2d6 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-11.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 12/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +While humans have the ability to learn any language, they only do so if they grow up in an environment in which language exists and is used by others. Language is therefore dependent on communities of speakers in which children learn language from their elders and peers and themselves transmit language to their own children. Languages are used by those who speak them to communicate and to solve a plethora of social tasks. Many aspects of language use can be seen to be adapted specifically to these purposes. Owing to the way in which language is transmitted between generations and within communities, language perpetually changes, diversifying into new languages or converging due to language contact. The process is similar to the process of evolution, where the process of descent with modification leads to the formation of a phylogenetic tree. +However, languages differ from biological organisms in that they readily incorporate elements from other languages through the process of diffusion, as speakers of different languages come into contact. Humans also frequently speak more than one language, acquiring their first language or languages as children, or learning new languages as they grow up. Because of the increased language contact in the globalizing world, many small languages are becoming endangered as their speakers shift to other languages that afford the possibility to participate in larger and more influential speech communities. + +=== Usage and meaning === + +When studying the way in which words and signs are used, it is often the case that words have different meanings, depending on the social context of use. An important example of this is the process called deixis, which describes the way in which certain words refer to entities through their relation between a specific point in time and space when the word is uttered. Such words are, for example, the word, "I" (which designates the person speaking), "now" (which designates the moment of speaking), and "here" (which designates the position of speaking). Signs also change their meanings over time, as the conventions governing their usage gradually change. The study of how the meaning of linguistic expressions changes depending on context is called pragmatics. Deixis is an important part of the way that we use language to point out entities in the world. Pragmatics is concerned with the ways in which language use is patterned and how these patterns contribute to meaning. For example, in all languages, linguistic expressions can be used not just to transmit information, but to perform actions. Certain actions are made only through language, but nonetheless have tangible effects, e.g. the act of "naming", which creates a new name for some entity, or the act of "pronouncing someone man and wife", which creates a social contract of marriage. These types of acts are called speech acts, although they can also be carried out through writing or hand signing. +The form of linguistic expression often does not correspond to the meaning that it actually has in a social context. For example, if at a dinner table a person asks, "Can you reach the salt?", that is, in fact, not a question about the length of the arms of the one being addressed, but a request to pass the salt across the table. This meaning is implied by the context in which it is spoken; these kinds of effects of meaning are called conversational implicatures. These social rules for which ways of using language are considered appropriate in certain situations and how utterances are to be understood in relation to their context vary between communities, and learning them is a large part of acquiring communicative competence in a language. + +=== Acquisition === + +All healthy, normally developing human beings learn to use language. Children acquire the language or languages used around them: whichever languages they receive sufficient exposure to during childhood. The development is essentially the same for children acquiring sign or oral languages. This learning process is referred to as first-language acquisition, since unlike many other kinds of learning, it requires no direct teaching or specialized study. In The Descent of Man, naturalist Charles Darwin called this process "an instinctive tendency to acquire an art". + +First language acquisition proceeds in a fairly regular sequence, though there is a wide degree of variation in the timing of particular stages among normally developing infants. Studies published in 2013 have indicated that unborn fetuses are capable of language acquisition to some degree. From birth, newborns respond more readily to human speech than to other sounds. Around one month of age, babies appear to be able to distinguish between different speech sounds. Around six months of age, a child will begin babbling, producing the speech sounds or handshapes of the languages used around them. Words appear around the age of 12 to 18 months; the average vocabulary of an eighteen-month-old child is around 50 words. A child's first utterances are holophrases (literally "whole-sentences"), utterances that use just one word to communicate some idea. Several months after a child begins producing words, the child will produce two-word utterances, and within a few more months will begin to produce telegraphic speech, or short sentences that are less grammatically complex than adult speech, but that do show regular syntactic structure. From roughly the age of three to five years, a child's ability to speak or sign is refined to the point that it resembles adult language. +Acquisition of second and additional languages can come at any age, through exposure in daily life or courses. Children learning a second language are more likely to achieve native-like fluency than adults, but in general, it is very rare for someone speaking a second language to pass completely for a native speaker. An important difference between first language acquisition and additional language acquisition is that the process of additional language acquisition is influenced by languages that the learner already knows. + +=== Culture === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-12.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-12.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2fe70e740 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-12.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 13/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Languages, understood as the particular set of speech norms of a particular community, are also a part of the larger culture of the community that speaks them. Languages differ not only in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, but also through having different "cultures of speaking." Humans use language as a way of signalling identity with one cultural group as well as difference from others. Even among speakers of one language, several different ways of using the language exist, and each is used to signal affiliation with particular subgroups within a larger culture. Linguists and anthropologists, particularly sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, and linguistic anthropologists have specialized in studying how ways of speaking vary between speech communities. +Linguists use the term "varieties" to refer to the different ways of speaking a language. This term includes geographically or socioculturally defined dialects as well as the jargons or styles of subcultures. Linguistic anthropologists and sociologists of language define communicative style as the ways that language is used and understood within a particular culture. +Because norms for language use are shared by members of a specific group, communicative style also becomes a way of displaying and constructing group identity. Linguistic differences may become salient markers of divisions between social groups, for example, speaking a language with a particular accent may imply membership of an ethnic minority or social class, one's area of origin, or status as a second language speaker. These kinds of differences are not part of the linguistic system, but are an important part of how people use language as a social tool for constructing groups. +However, many languages also have grammatical conventions that signal the social position of the speaker in relation to others through the use of registers that are related to social hierarchies or divisions. In many languages, there are stylistic or even grammatical differences between the ways men and women speak, between age groups, or between social classes, just as some languages employ different words depending on who is listening. For example, in the Australian language Dyirbal, a married man must use a special set of words to refer to everyday items when speaking in the presence of his mother-in-law. Some cultures, for example, have elaborate systems of "social deixis", or systems of signalling social distance through linguistic means. In English, social deixis is shown mostly through distinguishing between addressing some people by first name and others by surname, and in titles such as "Mrs.", "boy", "Doctor", or "Your Honor", but in other languages, such systems may be highly complex and codified in the entire grammar and vocabulary of the language. For instance, in languages of east Asia such as Thai, Burmese, and Javanese, different words are used according to whether a speaker is addressing someone of higher or lower rank than oneself in a ranking system with animals and children ranking the lowest and gods and members of royalty as the highest. + +=== Writing, literacy and technology === + +Throughout history a number of different ways of representing language in graphic media have been invented. These are called writing systems. +The use of writing has made language even more useful to humans. It makes it possible to store large amounts of information outside of the human body and retrieve it again, and it allows communication across physical distances and timespans that would otherwise be impossible. Many languages conventionally employ different genres, styles, and registers in written and spoken language, and in some communities, writing traditionally takes place in an entirely different language than the one spoken. There is some evidence that the use of writing also has effects on the cognitive development of humans, perhaps because acquiring literacy generally requires explicit and formal education. +The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late 4th millennium BC. The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered to be the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BC with the earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BC. It is generally agreed that Sumerian writing was an independent invention; however, it is debated whether Egyptian writing was developed completely independently of Sumerian, or was a case of cultural diffusion. A similar debate exists for the Chinese script, which developed around 1200 BC. The pre-Columbian Mesoamerican writing systems (including among others Olmec and Maya scripts) are generally believed to have had independent origins. + +=== Change === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-13.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-13.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a6de80912 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-13.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 14/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +All languages change as speakers adopt or invent new ways of speaking and pass them on to other members of their speech community. Language change happens at all levels from the phonological level to the levels of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and discourse. Even though language change is often initially evaluated negatively by speakers of the language who often consider changes to be "decay" or a sign of slipping norms of language usage, it is natural and inevitable. +Changes may affect specific sounds or the entire phonological system. Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound or phonetic feature by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound in a place where there had been none. Sound changes can be conditioned in which case a sound is changed only if it occurs in the vicinity of certain other sounds. Sound change is usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors. On the other hand, sound changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity. Sometimes a simple change triggers a chain shift in which the entire phonological system is affected. This happened in the Germanic languages when the sound change known as Grimm's law affected all the stop consonants in the system. The original consonant *bʰ became /b/ in the Germanic languages, the previous *b in turn became /p/, and the previous *p became /f/. The same process applied to all stop consonants and explains why Italic languages such as Latin have p in words like pater and pisces, whereas Germanic languages, like English, have father and fish. +Another example is the Great Vowel Shift in English, which is the reason that the spelling of English vowels do not correspond well to their current pronunciation. This is because the vowel shift brought the already established orthography out of synchronization with pronunciation. Another source of sound change is the erosion of words as pronunciation gradually becomes increasingly indistinct and shortens words, leaving out syllables or sounds. This kind of change caused Latin mea domina to eventually become the French madame and American English ma'am. +Change also happens in the grammar of languages as discourse patterns such as idioms or particular constructions become grammaticalized. This frequently happens when words or morphemes erode and the grammatical system is unconsciously rearranged to compensate for the lost element. For example, in some varieties of Caribbean Spanish the final /s/ has eroded away. Since Standard Spanish uses final /s/ in the morpheme marking the second person subject "you" in verbs, the Caribbean varieties now have to express the second person using the pronoun tú. This means that the sentence "what's your name" is ¿como te llamas? [ˈkomo te ˈjamas] in Standard Spanish, but [ˈkomo ˈtu te ˈjama] in Caribbean Spanish. The simple sound change has affected both morphology and syntax. Another common cause of grammatical change is the gradual petrification of idioms into new grammatical forms, for example, the way the English "going to" construction lost its aspect of movement and in some varieties of English has almost become a full-fledged future tense (e.g. I'm gonna). +Language change may be motivated by "language internal" factors, such as changes in pronunciation motivated by certain sounds being difficult to distinguish aurally or to produce, or through patterns of change that cause some rare types of constructions to drift towards more common types. Other causes of language change are social, such as when certain pronunciations become emblematic of membership in certain groups, such as social classes, or with ideologies, and therefore are adopted by those who wish to identify with those groups or ideas. In this way, issues of identity and politics can have profound effects on language structure. + +=== Contact === + +One source of language change is contact and the resulting diffusion of linguistic traits between languages. Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact on a regular basis. Multilingualism is likely to have been the norm throughout human history and most people in the modern world are multilingual. Before the rise of the concept of the ethno-national state, monolingualism was characteristic mainly of populations inhabiting small islands. But with the ideology that made one people, one state, and one language the most desirable political arrangement, monolingualism started to spread throughout the world. There are only 250 countries in the world corresponding to some 6,000 languages, which means that most countries are multilingual and most languages therefore exist in close contact with other languages. +When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. Through sustained language contact over long periods, linguistic traits diffuse between languages, and languages belonging to different families may converge to become more similar. In areas where many languages are in close contact, this may lead to the formation of language areas in which unrelated languages share a number of linguistic features. A number of such language areas have been documented, among them, the Balkan language area, the Mesoamerican language area, and the Ethiopian language area. Also, larger areas such as South Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia have sometimes been considered language areas because of the widespread diffusion of specific areal features. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-14.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-14.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..40c04830d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-14.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 15/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Language contact may also lead to a variety of other linguistic phenomena, including language convergence, borrowing, and relexification (the replacement of much of the native vocabulary with that of another language). In situations of extreme and sustained language contact, it may lead to the formation of new mixed languages that cannot be considered to belong to a single language family. One type of mixed language called pidgins occurs when adult speakers of two different languages interact on a regular basis, but in a situation where neither group learns to speak the language of the other group fluently. In such a case, they will often construct a communication form that has traits of both languages, and that has a simplified grammatical and phonological structure. The language comes to contain mostly the grammatical and phonological categories that exist in both languages. Pidgin languages are defined by not having any native speakers, but only being spoken by people who have another language as their first language. But if the Pidgin language becomes the main language of a speech community, then eventually children will grow up learning the Pidgin language as their first language. As the generation of child learners grows up, the pidgin will often be seen to change its structure and acquire a greater degree of complexity. This type of language is generally called a creole language. An example of such mixed languages is Tok Pisin, the official language of Papua New Guinea, which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen, the French-based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French. + +== Linguistic diversity == + +SIL Ethnologue defines a "living language" as "one that has at least one speaker for whom it is their first language". The exact number of known living languages varies from 6,000 to 7,000, depending on the precision of one's definition of "language", and in particular, on how one defines the distinction between a "language" and a "dialect". As of 2026, Ethnologue cataloged 7,170 living human languages. The Ethnologue establishes linguistic groups based on studies of mutual intelligibility, and therefore often includes more categories than more conservative classifications. For example, the Danish language that most scholars consider a single language with several dialects is classified as two distinct languages (Danish and Jutish) by the Ethnologue. +According to the Ethnologue, 389 languages (nearly 6%) have more than a million speakers. These languages together account for 94% of the world's population, whereas 94% of the world's languages account for the remaining 6% of the global population. + +=== Languages and dialects === + +There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy". For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects. Hakka, Cantonese and Mandarin are, for example, often classified as "dialects" of Chinese, even though they are more different from each other than Swedish is from Norwegian. Before the Yugoslav Wars, Serbo-Croatian was generally considered a single language with two normative variants, but due to sociopolitical reasons, Croatian and Serbian are now often treated as separate languages and employ different writing systems. In other words, the distinction may hinge on political considerations as much as on cultural differences as on distinctive writing systems or the degree of mutual intelligibility. The latter is, in fact, a rather unreliable criterion to discriminate languages and dialects. Pluricentric languages, which are languages with more than one standard variety, are a case in point. Standard American English and Standard RP (English) English, for instance, may in some areas be more different than languages with names, e.g. Swedish and Norwegian. A complex social process of "language making" underlies these assignments of status and in some cases even linguistic experts may not agree (e.g. the One Standard German Axiom). The language making process is dynamic and subject to change over time. + +=== Language families of the world === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-15.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-15.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9cac071f2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-15.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 16/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The world's languages can be grouped into language families consisting of languages that can be shown to have common ancestry. Linguists recognize many hundreds of language families, although some of them can possibly be grouped into larger units as more evidence becomes available and in-depth studies are carried out. At present, there are also dozens of language isolates: languages that cannot be shown to be related to any other languages in the world. Among them are Basque, spoken in Europe, Zuni of New Mexico, Purépecha of Mexico, Ainu of Japan, Burushaski of Pakistan, and many others. +The language family of the world that has the most speakers is the Indo-European languages, spoken by 46% of the world's population. This family includes major world languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu). The Indo-European family spread first through hypothesized Indo-European migrations that would have taken place some time in the period c. 8000–1500 BCE, and subsequently through much later European colonial expansion, which brought the Indo-European languages to a politically and often numerically dominant position in the Americas and much of Africa. The Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by 20% of the world's population and include many of the languages of East Asia, including Hakka, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and hundreds of smaller languages. +Africa is home to a large number of language families, the largest of which is the Niger-Congo language family, which includes such languages as Swahili, Shona, and Yoruba. Speakers of the Niger-Congo languages account for 6.9% of the world's population. A similar number of people speak the Afroasiatic languages, which include the populous Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew language, and the languages of the Sahara region, such as the Berber languages and Hausa. +The Austronesian languages are spoken by 5.5% of the world's population and stretch from Madagascar to maritime Southeast Asia all the way to Oceania. It includes such languages as Malagasy, Māori, Samoan, and many of the indigenous languages of Indonesia and Taiwan. The Austronesian languages are considered to have originated in Taiwan around 3000 BC and spread through the Oceanic region through island-hopping, based on an advanced nautical technology. Other populous language families are the Dravidian languages of South Asia (among them Kannada, Tamil, and Telugu), the Turkic languages of Central Asia (such as Turkish), the Austroasiatic (among them Khmer), and Tai–Kadai languages of Southeast Asia (including Thai). +The areas of the world in which there is the greatest linguistic diversity, such as the Americas, Papua New Guinea, West Africa, and South-Asia, contain hundreds of small language families. These areas together account for the majority of the world's languages, though not the majority of speakers. In the Americas, some of the largest language families include the Quechua, Arawak, and Tupi-Guarani families of South America, the Uto-Aztecan, Oto-Manguean, and Mayan of Mesoamerica, and the Na-Dene, Iroquoian, and Algonquian language families of North America. In Australia, most indigenous languages belong to the Pama-Nyungan family, whereas New Guinea is home to a large number of small families and isolates, as well as a number of Austronesian languages. Due to its remoteness and geographical fragmentation, Papua New Guinea emerges in fact as the leading location worldwide for both species (8% of world total) and linguistic richness – with 830 living tongues (12% of world total). + +=== Language endangerment === + +Language endangerment occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift to speaking another language. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an extinct language. While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages. +The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. Of the between 6,000 and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, between 50 and 90% of those are expected to have become extinct by the year 2100. The top 20 languages, those spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by smaller communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-16.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-16.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..dbbeccefb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-16.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 17/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: "safe", "vulnerable" (not spoken by children outside the home), "definitely endangered" (not spoken by children), "severely endangered" (only spoken by the oldest generations), and "critically endangered" (spoken by a few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers). Despite claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common lingua franca, such as English or Esperanto, there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world. It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic diversity causes political conflict, but many of the world's major episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic diversity, such as the Yugoslav and American Civil War, or the genocide of Rwanda. +Many projects aim to prevent or slow this loss by revitalizing endangered languages and promoting education and literacy in minority languages. Across the world, many countries have enacted specific legislation to protect and stabilize the language of indigenous speech communities. A minority of linguists have argued that language loss is a natural process that should not be counteracted and that documenting endangered languages for posterity is sufficient. +The University of Waikato is using the Welsh language as a model for their Māori language revitalisation programme, as they deem Welsh to be the world's leading example for the survival of languages. In 2019, Hawaiian TV company Oiwi visited a Welsh language centre in Nant Gwrtheyrn, North Wales, to help find ways of preserving their Ōlelo Hawaiʻi language. + +== See also == + +== Notes == + +== References == + +=== Works cited === + +== Further reading == +Crystal, David (1997). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. +Cysouw, Michael; Good, Jeff (2013). "Languoid, doculect and glossonym: Formalizing the notion 'language'". Language Documentation and Conservation. 7: 331–359. hdl:10125/4606. +Allison Parshall, "Pain Language: The sound of 'ow' transcends borders", Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 2 (February 2025), pp. 16–18. "Many languages have an interjection word for expressing pain. [Katarzyna Pisanski et al., writing in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, have] found that pain interjections tend to contain the vowel sound 'ah' (written as [a] in the International Phonetic Alphabet) and letter combinations that incorporate it, such as 'ow' and 'ai.' These patterns may point back to the origins of human language itself." (p. 16.) "Researchers are continually discovering cases of symbolism, or sound iconicity, in which a word's intrinsic nature has some connection to its meaning. These cases run counter to decades of linguistic theory, which had regarded language as fundamentally arbitrary... [Many words onomatopoeically imitate a sound. Also] there's the 'bouba-kiki' effect, whereby people from varying cultures are more likely to associate the nonsense word 'bouba' with a rounded shape and 'kiki' with a spiked one.... [S]omehow we all have a feeling about this,' says Aleksandra Ćwiek... [She and her colleagues have] show[n] that people associate the trilled 'R' sound with roughness and the 'L' sound with smoothness. Mark Dingemanse... in 2013 found [that] the conversational 'Huh?' and similar words in other languages may be universal." (p. 18.) +Stix, Gary, "Thinking without Words: Cognition doesn't require language, it turns out" (interview with Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Scientific American, vol. 332, no. 3 (March 2025), pp. 86–88. "[I]n the tradition of linguist Noam Chomsky... we use language for thinking: to think is why language evolved in our species. [However, evidence that thought and language are separate systems is found, for example, by] looking at deficits in different abilities – for instance, in people with brain damage... who have impairments in language – some form of aphasia [ – yet are clearly able to think]." (p. 87.) Conversely, "large language models such as GPT-2... do language very well [but t]hey're not so good at thinking, which... nicely align[s] with the idea that the language system by itself is not what makes you think." (p. 88.) +Swadesh, Morris (1934). "The phonemic principle". Language. 10 (2): 117–129. doi:10.2307/409603. JSTOR 409603. + +== External links == + +World Atlas of Language Structures: a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages +Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a comprehensive catalog of all of the world's known living languages \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..321483730 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 3/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. This definition stresses the social functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves and to manipulate objects in their environment. Functional theories of grammar explain grammatical structures by their communicative functions, and understand the grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which grammar was "tailored" to serve the communicative needs of its users. +This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic, cognitive, and interactive frameworks, as well as in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as dynamic phenomena, as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the classification of languages according to structural features, as processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent on typology. In the philosophy of language, the view of pragmatics as being central to language and meaning is often associated with Wittgenstein's later works and with ordinary language philosophers such as J. L. Austin, Paul Grice, John Searle, and W.O. Quine. + +=== Human versus animal language === + +A number of features, many of which were described by Charles Hockett and called design features set human language apart from communication used by non-human animals. +Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited, number of possible ideas that can be expressed. In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. This is possible because human language is based on a dual code, in which a finite number of elements which are meaningless in themselves (e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form an infinite number of larger units of meaning (words and sentences). However, one study has demonstrated that an Australian bird, the chestnut-crowned babbler, is capable of using the same acoustic elements in different arrangements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations. Additionally, pied babblers have demonstrated the ability to generate two functionally distinct vocalisations composed of the same sound type, which can only be distinguished by the number of repeated elements. +Several species of animals have proved to be able to acquire forms of communication through social learning: for instance a bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself using a set of symbolic lexigrams. Similarly, many species of birds and whales learn their songs by imitating other members of their species. However, while some animals may acquire large numbers of words and symbols, none have been able to learn as many different signs as are generally known by an average 4 year old human, nor have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language. +Human languages differ from animal communication systems in that they employ grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb, present and past, which may be used to express exceedingly complex meanings. It is distinguished by the property of recursivity: for example, a noun phrase can contain another noun phrase (as in "[[the chimpanzee]'s lips]") or a clause can contain another clause (as in "[I see [the dog is running]]"). Human language is the only known natural communication system whose adaptability may be referred to as modality independent. This means that it can be used not only for communication through one channel or medium, but through several. For example, spoken language uses the auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality, and braille writing uses the tactile modality. +Human language is unusual in being able to refer to abstract concepts and to imagined or hypothetical events as well as events that took place in the past or may happen in the future. This ability to refer to events that are not at the same time or place as the speech event is called displacement, and while some animal communication systems can use displacement (such as the communication of bees that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of sight), the degree to which it is used in human language is also considered unique. + +== Origin == + +Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic assumptions about what language is. Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors. These theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. These theories can be defined as discontinuity-based. Similarly, theories based on the generative view of language pioneered by Noam Chomsky see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded, whereas functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural, learned through social interaction. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4ce13fab5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 4/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Continuity-based theories are held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly innate, such as psychologist Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition, whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as psychologist Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal communication in primates: either gestural or vocal communication to assist in cooperation. Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. A prominent proponent of this view is archaeologist Steven Mithen. Stephen Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated at 60,000 to 100,000 years and that: Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to suggest that language was invented only once, and that all modern spoken languages are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered ... because of limitations on the methods available for reconstruction. +Because language emerged in the early prehistory of man, before the existence of any written records, its early development has left no historical traces, and it is believed that no comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. Early human fossils can be inspected for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour. Among the signs in human fossils that may suggest linguistic abilities are: the size of the brain relative to body mass, the presence of a larynx capable of advanced sound production and the nature of tools and other manufactured artifacts. +It was mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general. However, a 2017 study on Ardipithecus ramidus challenges this belief. Scholarly opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of the genus Homo some 2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) while others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago), and the development of language proper with anatomically modern Homo sapiens with the Upper Paleolithic revolution less than 100,000 years ago. +Chomsky is one prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins. He suggests that for scholars interested in the nature of language, "talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point." Chomsky proposes that perhaps "some random mutation took place [...] and it reorganized the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain." Though cautioning against taking this story literally, Chomsky insists that "it may be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary processes, including language." +In March 2024, researchers reported that the beginnings of human language began about 1.6 million years ago. + +== Study == + +The study of language, linguistics, has been developing into a science since the first grammatical descriptions of particular languages in India more than 2000 years ago, after the development of the Brahmi script. Modern linguistics is a science that concerns itself with all aspects of language, examining it from all of the theoretical viewpoints described above. + +=== Subdisciplines === +The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to linguistics. For example, descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single languages, theoretical linguistics develops theories on how best to conceptualize and define the nature of language based on data from the various extant human languages, sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description, neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain and allows the experimental testing of theories, computational linguistics builds on theoretical and descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at processing natural language or at testing linguistic hypotheses, and historical linguistics relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the comparative method. + +=== Early history === + +The formal study of language is often considered to have started in India with Pāṇini, the 5th century BC grammarian who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. However, Sumerian scribes already studied the differences between Sumerian and Akkadian grammar around 1900 BC. Subsequent grammatical traditions developed in all of the ancient cultures that adopted writing. +In the 17th century AD, the French Port-Royal Grammarians developed the idea that the grammars of all languages were a reflection of the universal basics of thought, and therefore that grammar was universal. In the 18th century, the first use of the comparative method by British philologist and expert on ancient India William Jones sparked the rise of comparative linguistics. The scientific study of language was broadened from Indo-European to language in general by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Early in the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure introduced the idea of language as a static system of interconnected units, defined through the oppositions between them. +By introducing a distinction between diachronic and synchronic analyses of language, he laid the foundation of the modern discipline of linguistics. Saussure also introduced several basic dimensions of linguistic analysis that are still fundamental in many contemporary linguistic theories, such as the distinctions between syntagm and paradigm, and the Langue-parole distinction, distinguishing language as an abstract system (langue), from language as a concrete manifestation of this system (parole). + +=== Modern linguistics === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a372ee2b1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 5/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky formulated the generative theory of language. According to this theory, the most basic form of language is a set of syntactic rules that is universal for all humans and which underlies the grammars of all human languages. This set of rules is called Universal Grammar; for Chomsky, describing it is the primary objective of the discipline of linguistics. Thus, he considered that the grammars of individual languages are only of importance to linguistics insofar as they allow us to deduce the universal underlying rules from which the observable linguistic variability is generated. +In opposition to the formal theories of the generative school, functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, its structures are best analyzed and understood by reference to their functions. Formal theories of grammar seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other as systems of formal rules or operations, while functional theories seek to define the functions performed by language and then relate them to the linguistic elements that carry them out. The framework of cognitive linguistics interprets language in terms of the concepts (which are sometimes universal, and sometimes specific to a particular language) which underlie its forms. Cognitive linguistics is primarily concerned with how the mind creates meaning through language. + +== Physiological and neural architecture of language and speech == +Speaking is the default modality for language in all cultures with hearing members. The production of spoken language depends on sophisticated capacities for controlling the lips, tongue and other components of the vocal apparatus, the ability to acoustically decode speech sounds, and the neurological apparatus required for acquiring and producing language. The study of the genetic bases for human language is at an early stage: the only gene that has definitely been implicated in language production is FOXP2, which may cause a kind of congenital language disorder if affected by mutations. + +=== The brain === + +The brain is the coordinating center of all linguistic activity; it controls both the production of linguistic cognition and of meaning and the mechanics of speech production. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the neurological bases for language is quite limited, though it has advanced considerably with the use of modern imaging techniques. The discipline of linguistics dedicated to studying the neurological aspects of language is called neurolinguistics. +Early work in neurolinguistics involved the study of language in people with brain lesions, to see how lesions in specific areas affect language and speech. In this way, neuroscientists in the 19th century discovered that two areas in the brain are crucially implicated in language processing. The first area is Wernicke's area, which is in the posterior section of the superior temporal gyrus in the dominant cerebral hemisphere. People with a lesion in this area of the brain develop receptive aphasia, a condition in which there is a major impairment of language comprehension, while speech retains a natural-sounding rhythm and a relatively normal sentence structure. The second area is Broca's area, in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the dominant hemisphere. People with a lesion to this area develop expressive aphasia, meaning that they know what they want to say, they just cannot get it out. They are typically able to understand what is being said to them, but unable to speak fluently. Other symptoms that may be present in expressive aphasia include problems with word repetition. The condition affects both spoken and written language. Those with this aphasia also exhibit ungrammatical speech and show inability to use syntactic information to determine the meaning of sentences. Both expressive and receptive aphasia also affect the use of sign language, in analogous ways to how they affect speech, with expressive aphasia causing signers to sign slowly and with incorrect grammar, whereas a signer with receptive aphasia will sign fluently, but make little sense to others and have difficulties comprehending others' signs. This shows that the impairment is specific to the ability to use language, not to the physiology used for speech production. +With technological advances in the late 20th century, neurolinguists have also incorporated non-invasive techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology to study language processing in individuals without impairments. + +=== Anatomy of speech === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..42951e498 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 6/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Spoken language relies on human physical ability to produce sound, which is a longitudinal wave propagated through the air at a frequency capable of vibrating the ear drum. This ability depends on the physiology of the human speech organs. These organs consist of the lungs, the voice box (larynx), and the upper vocal tract – the throat, the mouth, and the nose. By controlling the different parts of the speech apparatus, the airstream can be manipulated to produce different speech sounds. +The sound of speech can be analyzed into a combination of segmental and suprasegmental elements. The segmental elements are those that follow each other in sequences, which are usually represented by distinct letters in alphabetic scripts, such as the Roman script. In free flowing speech, there are no clear boundaries between one segment and the next, nor usually are there any audible pauses between them. Segments therefore are distinguished by their distinct sounds which are a result of their different articulations, and can be either vowels or consonants. Suprasegmental phenomena encompass such elements as stress, phonation type, voice timbre, and prosody or intonation, all of which may have effects across multiple segments. +Consonants and vowel segments combine to form syllables, which in turn combine to form utterances; these can be distinguished phonetically as the space between two inhalations. Acoustically, these different segments are characterized by different formant structures, that are visible in a spectrogram of the recorded sound wave. Formants are the amplitude peaks in the frequency spectrum of a specific sound. +Vowels are those sounds that have no audible friction caused by the narrowing or obstruction of some part of the upper vocal tract. They vary in quality according to the degree of lip aperture and the placement of the tongue within the oral cavity. Vowels are called close when the lips are relatively closed, as in the pronunciation of the vowel [i] (English "ee"), or open when the lips are relatively open, as in the vowel [a] (English "ah"). If the tongue is located towards the back of the mouth, the quality changes, creating vowels such as [u] (English "oo"). The quality also changes depending on whether the lips are rounded as opposed to unrounded, creating distinctions such as that between [i] (unrounded front vowel such as English "ee") and [y] (rounded front vowel such as German "ü"). +Consonants are those sounds that have audible friction or closure at some point within the upper vocal tract. Consonant sounds vary by place of articulation, i.e. the place in the vocal tract where the airflow is obstructed, commonly at the lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, palate, velum, uvula, or glottis. Each place of articulation produces a different set of consonant sounds, which are further distinguished by manner of articulation, or the kind of friction, whether full closure, in which case the consonant is called occlusive or stop, or different degrees of aperture creating fricatives and approximants. Consonants can also be either voiced or unvoiced, depending on whether the vocal cords are set in vibration by airflow during the production of the sound. Voicing is what separates English [s] in bus (unvoiced sibilant) from [z] in buzz (voiced sibilant). +Some speech sounds, both vowels and consonants, involve release of air flow through the nasal cavity, and these are called nasals or nasalized sounds. Other sounds are defined by the way the tongue moves within the mouth such as the l-sounds (called laterals, because the air flows along both sides of the tongue), and the r-sounds (called rhotics). +By using these speech organs, humans can produce hundreds of distinct sounds: some appear very often in the world's languages, whereas others are much more common in certain language families, language areas, or even specific to a single language. + +== Modality == +Human languages display considerable plasticity in their deployment of two fundamental modes: oral (speech and mouthing) and manual (sign and gesture). For example, it is common for oral language to be accompanied by gesture, and for sign language to be accompanied by mouthing. In addition, some language communities use both modes to convey lexical or grammatical meaning, each mode complementing the other. Such bimodal use of language is especially common in genres such as story-telling (with Plains Indian Sign Language and Australian Aboriginal sign languages used alongside oral language, for example), but also occurs in mundane conversation. For instance, many Australian languages have a rich set of case suffixes that provide details about the instrument used to perform an action. Others lack such grammatical precision in the oral mode, but supplement it with gesture to convey that information in the sign mode. In Iwaidja, for example, 'he went out for fish using a torch' is spoken as simply "he-hunted fish torch", but the word for 'torch' is accompanied by a gesture indicating that it was held. In another example, the ritual language Damin had a heavily reduced oral vocabulary of only a few hundred words, each of which was very general in meaning, but which were supplemented by gesture for greater precision (e.g., the single word for fish, l*i, was accompanied by a gesture to indicate the kind of fish). +Secondary modes of language, by which a fundamental mode is conveyed in a different medium, include writing (including braille), sign (in manually coded language), whistling and drumming. Tertiary modes – such as semaphore, Morse code and spelling alphabets – convey the secondary mode of writing in a different medium. For some extinct languages that are maintained for ritual or liturgical purposes, writing may be the primary mode, with speech secondary. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b945f2c52 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 7/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Structure == +When described as a system of symbolic communication, language is traditionally seen as consisting of three parts: signs, meanings, and a code connecting signs with their meanings. The study of the process of semiosis, how signs and meanings are combined, used, and interpreted is called semiotics. Signs can be composed of sounds, gestures, letters, or symbols, depending on whether the language is spoken, signed, or written, and they can be combined into complex signs, such as words and phrases. When used in communication, a sign is encoded and transmitted by a sender through a channel to a receiver who decodes it. + +Some of the properties that define human language as opposed to other communication systems are: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, meaning that there is no predictable connection between a linguistic sign and its meaning; the duality of the linguistic system, meaning that linguistic structures are built by combining elements into larger structures that can be seen as layered, e.g. how sounds build words and words build phrases; the discreteness of the elements of language, meaning that the elements out of which linguistic signs are constructed are discrete units, e.g. sounds and words, that can be distinguished from each other and rearranged in different patterns; and the productivity of the linguistic system, meaning that the finite number of linguistic elements can be combined into a theoretically infinite number of combinations. +The rules by which signs can be combined to form words and phrases are called syntax or grammar. The meaning that is connected to individual signs, morphemes, words, phrases, and texts is called semantics. The division of language into separate but connected systems of sign and meaning goes back to the first linguistic studies of de Saussure and is now used in almost all branches of linguistics. + +=== Semantics === + +Languages express meaning by relating a sign form to a meaning, or its content. Sign forms must be something that can be perceived, for example, in sounds, images, or gestures, and then related to a specific meaning by social convention. Because the basic relation of meaning for most linguistic signs is based on social convention, linguistic signs can be considered arbitrary, in the sense that the convention is established socially and historically, rather than by means of a natural relation between a specific sign form and its meaning. +Thus, languages must have a vocabulary of signs related to specific meaning. The English sign "dog" denotes, for example, a member of the species Canis familiaris. In a language, the array of arbitrary signs connected to specific meanings is called the lexicon, and a single sign connected to a meaning is called a lexeme. Not all meanings in a language are represented by single words. Often, semantic concepts are embedded in the morphology or syntax of the language in the form of grammatical categories. +All languages contain the semantic structure of predication: a structure that predicates a property, state, or action. Traditionally, semantics has been understood to be the study of how speakers and interpreters assign truth values to statements, so that meaning is understood to be the process by which a predicate can be said to be true or false about an entity, e.g. "[x [is y]]" or "[x [does y]]". Recently, this model of semantics has been complemented with more dynamic models of meaning that incorporate shared knowledge about the context in which a sign is interpreted into the production of meaning. Such models of meaning are explored in the field of pragmatics. + +=== Sounds and symbols === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-7.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-7.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..94aa39697 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-7.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 8/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Depending on modality, language structure can be based on systems of sounds (speech), gestures (sign languages), or graphic or tactile symbols (writing). The ways in which languages use sounds or signs to construct meaning are studied in phonology. +Sounds as part of a linguistic system are called phonemes. Phonemes are abstract units of sound, defined as the smallest units in a language that can serve to distinguish between the meaning of a pair of minimally different words, a so-called minimal pair. In English, for example, the words bat [bæt] and pat [pʰæt] form a minimal pair, in which the distinction between /b/ and /p/ differentiates the two words, which have different meanings. However, each language contrasts sounds in different ways. For example, in a language that does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants, the sounds [p] and [b] (if they both occur) could be considered a single phoneme, and consequently, the two pronunciations would have the same meaning. Similarly, the English language does not distinguish phonemically between aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations of consonants, as many other languages like Korean and Hindi do: the unaspirated /p/ in spin [spɪn] and the aspirated /p/ in pin [pʰɪn] are considered to be merely different ways of pronouncing the same phoneme (such variants of a single phoneme are called allophones), whereas in Mandarin Chinese, the same difference in pronunciation distinguishes between the words [pʰá] 'crouch' and [pā] 'eight' (the accent above the á means that the vowel is pronounced with a high tone and the accent above the ā means that the vowel is pronounced with a flat tone). +All spoken languages have phonemes of at least two different categories, vowels and consonants, that can be combined to form syllables. As well as segments such as consonants and vowels, some languages also use sound in other ways to convey meaning. Many languages, for example, use stress, pitch, duration, and tone to distinguish meaning. Because these phenomena operate outside of the level of single segments, they are called suprasegmental. Some languages have only a few phonemes, for example, Rotokas and Pirahã language with 11 and 10 phonemes respectively, whereas languages like Taa may have as many as 141 phonemes. In sign languages, the equivalent to phonemes (formerly called cheremes) are defined by the basic elements of gestures, such as hand shape, orientation, location, and motion, which correspond to manners of articulation in spoken language. +Writing systems represent language using visual symbols, which may or may not correspond to the sounds of spoken language. The Latin alphabet (and those on which it is based or that have been derived from it) was originally based on the representation of single sounds, so that words were constructed from letters that generally denote a single consonant or vowel in the structure of the word. In syllabic scripts, such as the Inuktitut syllabary, each sign represents a whole syllable. In logographic scripts, each sign represents an entire word, and will generally bear no relation to the sound of that word in spoken language. +Because all languages have a very large number of words, no purely logographic scripts are known to exist. Written language represents the way spoken sounds and words follow one after another by arranging symbols according to a pattern that follows a certain direction. The direction used in a writing system is entirely arbitrary and established by convention. Some writing systems use the horizontal axis (left to right as the Latin script or right to left as the Arabic script), while others such as traditional Chinese writing use the vertical dimension (from top to bottom). A few writing systems use opposite directions for alternating lines, and others, such as the ancient Maya script, can be written in either direction and rely on graphic cues to show the reader the direction of reading. +In order to represent the sounds of the world's languages in writing, linguists have developed the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to represent all of the discrete sounds that are known to contribute to meaning in human languages. + +=== Grammar === + +Grammar is the study of how meaningful elements called morphemes within a language can be combined into utterances. Morphemes can either be free or bound. If they are free to be moved around within an utterance, they are usually called words, and if they are bound to other words or morphemes, they are called affixes. The way in which meaningful elements can be combined within a language is governed by rules. The study of the rules for the internal structure of words are called morphology. The rules of the internal structure of phrases and sentences are called syntax. + +==== Grammatical categories ==== + +Grammar can be described as a system of categories and a set of rules that determine how categories combine to form different aspects of meaning. Languages differ widely in whether they are encoded through the use of categories or lexical units. However, several categories are so common as to be nearly universal. Such universal categories include the encoding of the grammatical relations of participants and predicates by grammatically distinguishing between their relations to a predicate, the encoding of temporal and spatial relations on predicates, and a system of grammatical person governing reference to and distinction between speakers and addressees and those about whom they are speaking. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-8.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-8.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a92c5bc87 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-8.md @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 9/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +==== Word classes ==== +Languages organize their parts of speech into classes according to their functions and positions relative to other parts. All languages, for instance, make a basic distinction between a group of words that prototypically denotes things and concepts and a group of words that prototypically denotes actions and events. The first group, which includes English words such as "dog" and "song", are usually called nouns. The second, which includes "think" and "sing", are called verbs. Another common category is the adjective: words that describe properties or qualities of nouns, such as "red" or "big". Word classes can be "open" if new words can continuously be added to the class, or relatively "closed" if there is a fixed number of words in a class. In English, the class of pronouns is closed, whereas the class of adjectives is open, since an infinite number of adjectives can be constructed from verbs (e.g. "saddened") or nouns (e.g. with the -like suffix, as in "noun-like"). In other languages such as Korean, the situation is the opposite, and new pronouns can be constructed, whereas the number of adjectives is fixed. +Word classes also carry out differing functions in grammar. Prototypically, verbs are used to construct predicates, while nouns are used as arguments of predicates. In a sentence such as "Sally runs", the predicate is "runs", because it is the word that predicates a specific state about its argument "Sally". Some verbs such as "curse" can take two arguments, e.g. "Sally cursed John". A predicate that can only take a single argument is called intransitive, while a predicate that can take two arguments is called transitive. +Many other word classes exist in different languages, such as conjunctions like "and" that serve to join two sentences, articles that introduce a noun, interjections such as "wow!", or ideophones like "splash" that mimic the sound of some event. Some languages have positionals that describe the spatial position of an event or entity. Many languages have classifiers that identify countable nouns as belonging to a particular type or having a particular shape. For instance, in Japanese, the general noun classifier for humans is nin (人), and it is used for counting humans: + +san-nin no gakusei (三人の学生) lit. "3 human-classifier of student" – three students +For trees, it would be: + +san-bon no ki (三本の木) lit. "3 classifier-for-long-objects of tree" – three trees \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-9.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-9.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b2b366c66 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-9.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +title: "Language" +chunk: 10/17 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:38.145873+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +==== Morphology ==== +In linguistics, the study of the internal structure of complex words and the processes by which words are formed is called morphology. In most languages, it is possible to construct complex words that are built of several morphemes. For instance, the English word "unexpected" can be analyzed as being composed of the three morphemes "un-", "expect" and "-ed". +Morphemes can be classified according to whether they are independent morphemes, so-called roots, or whether they can only co-occur attached to other morphemes. These bound morphemes or affixes can be classified according to their position in relation to the root: prefixes precede the root, suffixes follow the root, and infixes are inserted in the middle of a root. Affixes serve to modify or elaborate the meaning of the root. Some languages change the meaning of words by changing the phonological structure of a word, for example, the English word "run", which in the past tense is "ran". This process is called ablaut. Furthermore, morphology distinguishes between the process of inflection, which modifies or elaborates on a word, and the process of derivation, which creates a new word from an existing one. In English, the verb "sing" has the inflectional forms "singing" and "sung", which are both verbs, and the derivational form "singer", which is a noun derived from the verb with the agentive suffix "-er". +Languages differ widely in how much they rely on morphological processes of word formation. In some languages, for example, Chinese, there are no morphological processes, and all grammatical information is encoded syntactically by forming strings of single words. This type of morpho-syntax is often called isolating, or analytic, because there is almost a full correspondence between a single word and a single aspect of meaning. Most languages have words consisting of several morphemes, but they vary in the degree to which morphemes are discrete units. In many languages, notably in most Indo-European languages, single morphemes may have several distinct meanings that cannot be analyzed into smaller segments. For example, in Latin, the word bonus, or "good", consists of the root bon-, meaning "good", and the suffix -us, which indicates masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. These languages are called fusional languages, because several meanings may be fused into a single morpheme. The opposite of fusional languages are agglutinative languages which construct words by stringing morphemes together in chains, but with each morpheme as a discrete semantic unit. An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or "from your houses", consists of the morphemes, ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. The languages that rely on morphology to the greatest extent are traditionally called polysynthetic languages. They may express the equivalent of an entire English sentence in a single word. For example, in Persian the single word نفهمیدمش, nafahmidamesh means I didn't understand it consisting of morphemes na-fahm-id-am-esh with the meanings, "negation.understand.past.I.it". As another example with more complexity, in the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksatengqiggtuq, which means "He had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer", the word consists of the morphemes tuntu-ssur-qatar-ni-ksaite-ngqiggte-uq with the meanings, "reindeer-hunt-future-say-negation-again-third.person.singular.indicative", and except for the morpheme tuntu ("reindeer") none of the other morphemes can appear in isolation. +Many languages use morphology to cross-reference words within a sentence. This is sometimes called agreement. For example, in many Indo-European languages, adjectives must cross-reference the noun they modify in terms of number, case, and gender, so that the Latin adjective bonus, or "good", is inflected to agree with a noun that is masculine gender, singular number, and nominative case. In many polysynthetic languages, verbs cross-reference their subjects and objects. In these types of languages, a single verb may include information that would require an entire sentence in English. For example, in the Basque phrase ikusi nauzu, or "you saw me", the past tense auxiliary verb n-au-zu (similar to English "do") agrees with both the subject (you) expressed by the n- prefix, and with the object (me) expressed by the – zu suffix. The sentence could be directly transliterated as "see you-did-me" + +==== Syntax ==== \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_classification-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_classification-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e470d5e32 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_classification-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Language classification" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_classification" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:39.333152+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In linguistics, language classification is the grouping of related languages into the same category. There are two main kinds of language classification: genealogical and typological classification. + + +== Genealogical (or genetic) classification == +Languages are grouped by diachronic relatedness into language families. In other words, languages are grouped based on how they were developed and evolved throughout history, with languages which descended from a common ancestor being grouped into the same language family. + + +== Typological classification == + +Languages are grouped by their structural and functional features. + + +== See also == +Genetic relationship +List of language families + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0c64b99a0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Language preservation" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:40.522726+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Language preservation is the preservation of endangered or dead languages. With language death, studies in linguistics, anthropology, prehistory and psychology lose diversity. As history is remembered with the help of historic preservation, language preservation maintains dying or dead languages for future studies in such fields. Organizations such as 7000 Languages and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages document and teach endangered languages as a way of preserving languages. Sometimes parts of languages are preserved in museums, such as tablets containing Cuneiform writing from Mesopotamia. Additionally, dictionaries have been published to help keep record of languages, such as the Kalapuya dictionary published by the Siletz tribe in Oregon. + +Language is an important part of any society, because it enables people to communicate and express themselves. When a language dies out, future generations lose a vital part of the culture that is necessary to completely understand it. This makes language a vulnerable aspect of cultural heritage, and it becomes especially important to preserve it. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),from facts published in their "Atlas of Languages in Danger of Disappearing", there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken worldwide today, and half of the world's population speaks the eight most common. +More than 3,000 languages are reportedly spoken by fewer than 10,000 people each. Ethnologue, a reference work published by SIL International, has cataloged the world's known living languages, and it estimates that 417 languages are on the verge of extinction. +Language protection is protection of cultural heritage, as Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, states. "Today, on average, we lose one language in the world every six weeks. There are approximately 6800 languages. But four percent of the population speaks 96 percent of the languages, and 96 percent of the population speaks four percent of the languages. These four percent are spoken by large language groups and are therefore not at risk. But 96 percent of the languages we know are more or less at risk. You have to treat them like extinct species." + +== Reasons for language endangerment or extinction == +There are different factors that can put a language in danger of becoming extinct. One is when a language is no longer being taught to the children of the community, or at least to a large number of the children. In these cases, the remaining fluent speakers of the language are generally the older members of the community, and when they pass on, the language dies out with them. +Child speakers are not enough to ensure the survival of a language however. If the children who do speak the language are relocated to another area where it is not spoken, it becomes endangered. Political and military turmoil can also endanger a language. When people are forced from their homes into new lands, they may have to learn the language of the new area to adapt, and they end up losing their language. Likewise, when a country or territory is successfully invaded, the population may be forced to learn the invader's language. +A language can also become associated with a lower social class. In this instance, parents will encourage their children to use the language used more often in society to distance themselves from the perceived lower class. Within one or two generations of this occurrence, the language can easily be lost. + +== Methods of preservation == + +=== Schooling === +One way to preserve languages is to encourage younger generations to speak their native language as they grow, so that they will then teach their children the language as well. Introducing local native languages in schools would accelerate this process. However, school systems are experiencing a decline in incorporating foreign language, especially in the United States. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American students are first introduced to secondary-language-learning in either middle or high school, yet there has been a 17% decline in middle schools teaching secondary languages between 1996 and 2008. Marty Abbott, the executive director of the American Council on the 7 Teaching of Foreign Languages, considers the decline and lack of foreign language curricula in American schools as a matter of a lack of confidence students exhibit when learning new languages. +Global efforts have been made, as well, on including native local languages in public schools to foster cultural growth. Introduced in India from a recommendation by the University Education Commission, the three-language formula became a foundation for a balanced linguistic policy. When it was concocted, the three languages were English, Hindi, and a local tongue. Although this program failed in India due to lack of public fervor and government funding, it thrived in Kazakhstan, where their three languages are English, Kazakh, and Russian. English served as a 'world' language that was seen as a push for economic and business prowess on the international level, while Kazakh and Russian were seen as the glue to Kazakhstan's culture and nationality. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8cd5c1464 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "Language preservation" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:40.522726+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Modern technology === +The internet can be used to raise awareness about the issues of language extinction and language preservation. It can be used to translate, catalog, store, and provide information and access to languages. New technologies such as podcasts can be used to preserve the spoken versions of languages, and written documents can preserve information about the native literature and linguistics of languages. +The international internet provider VeriSign estimates that 65–70% of all internet content is in English. +Using written documents to preserve information about the native literature and linguistics is also not without potential problems. Just because a language is written down, this does not mean it will survive. Written information in book or manuscript form is subject to acid issues, binding problems, environmental monitoring problems, and security concerns. +Technology can also be used to preserve the integrity of spoken versions of languages. Many of the same techniques used in recording oral history can be used to preserve spoken languages. Preservationists can use reel-to-reel audio tape recordings, along with video recordings, and new technologies like podcasts to record spoken accounts of languages. Technology is also vulnerable to new technology. Preservation efforts would fail if the technology to listen to or watch certain media such as audio tape recordings or video tapes is lost. +Typeface design can offer a way of preservation with digital and print media. An example of this can be seen with the Cultural Centre of the Philippines. In honor of the CCP's 50th anniversary, they released a typeface called BayBayan, mixing Baybayin with the Tagalog word bayan, meaning community. This project was to push the interest and awareness of the script among the youth, encouraging it to become a form of communication versus how often it has been used as a decorative element (TDC, 2019). The design of the typeface matches phonetically with Baybayin and the Latin alphabet in a san serif form, meaning the designers had to understand to some extent, both scripts in order to succeed with the design. It encompasses Filipino culture as a whole, creating a sort of bridge between pre-colonial and contemporary times, providing a gateway into learning about the language. + +=== Examples === +The Administration for Native Americans has published the "Reference Guide for Establishing Archives and Repositories", which explains why language repositories are vital to long-term language preservation efforts. The guide offers practical advice on what to preserve and why; it explains what a language repository is, how to build one, and the costs involved; and lists other resources for creating an archive and repository. +The Kalapuya dictionary published by the Siletz tribe in Oregon was fundraised through an online platform, GoFundMe, and as of March 2022 they published 150 copies after raising $13,000. The Siletz tribe is able to speak Kalapuya at a preschool level, due to a lack of documentation of the language. + +== Lingua Libre == +Lingua Libre is an online collaborative project and tool by the Wikimedia France association, which can be used as a tool for Language Preservation. Lingua Libre enables one to record words, phrases, or sentences of any language, oral (audio recording) or signed (video recording). It is a highly efficient method to record endangered languages since up to 1000 words can be recorded per hour. All the content is under Free License, and speakers of minority languages are encouraged to record their own dialects. + +== See also == +Lingua Libre +Language policy +Rosetta Project +Aikuma software for language preservation + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Albey, Mark. Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003. +Bradley, David and Maya Bradley, editors. Language Endangerment and Language Maintenance. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. +Crystal, David. Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. +Dalby, Andrew. Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to Our Future. New York: Columbia University; London: The Penguin Press, 2002. +Nettle, Daniel and Suzanne Romaine. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..dcf4bddba --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Language survey" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:42.963511+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A language survey is conducted around the world for a variety of reasons. + +Measuring people's ability to speak and understand another language (usually community based, not school based) (multilingualism) +studying people's attitudes about different languages +evaluating the differences and similarities in speech of communities that speak related speech forms, noting comprehension or collecting details of linguistic form (dialectology) +assessing the vitality of languages that may be disappearing (language death) +doing initial descriptions of languages in areas that are linguistically undescribed + +== Methods == +Methods used in language surveys depend on the questions that the survey is trying to answer. Methods used include collecting word lists, playing recorded texts to assess comprehension, sentence repetition tests, questionnaires, group and individual interviews, retelling of stories, direct observation, pointing to pictures after listening to instructions, and even internet surveys. +There is a growing trend to involve communities more in language survey, using a variety of methods. +As with any form of research, the methods used depend on the questions that the researchers are trying to answer. Also, the reliability of the results varies according to the method and the rigor with which it is applied, proper sampling technique, etc. + +== Applications == +The results of language surveys are use for a variety of purposes. One of the most common is in making decisions for implementing educational programs. The results have also been used for making decision for language development work (Holbrook, 2001). And of course, academics are always interested in the results of any language survey. + +== Agencies == +Surveys have also been conducted by ethnic associations (Saskatchewan 1991), government agencies (Statistics Canada 1993), NGO's (Toba, et al. 2002), foundations (Pew Hispanic Center 2004), etc. Often such groups work together (Clifton 2002). Some large and notable surveys include the Linguistic Survey of India which was begun by George Abraham Grierson late in the 19th century (Sociolinguistics research in India) and the Survey of Language Use and Language Teaching in East Africa, sponsored by the Ford Foundation from the 1960s. Both resulted in a number of volumes describing locations of languages, patterns of multilingualism, language classification, and also included descriptions of languages, such as Language in Ethiopia (Bender, Bowen, Cooper, and Ferguson 1976). The single agency conducting the most language surveys around the world is SIL Global (formerly Summer Institute of Linguistics). +Language survey work is also done by academics, such as graduate students doing dissertation or thesis work or faculty members doing research. + +== Sign languages == +Surveys have usually been conducted among spoken languages. However, surveys have also been done among users of sign languages (Vasishta, Woodward, and Wilson 1978, Woodward 1991, 1993, 1996, Parkhurst & Parkhurst 1998, Al-Fityani & Padden 2008). As with surveys among spoken languages, surveys among sign languages have studied multilingualism, attitudes about various languages both spoken and signed (Ciupek-Reed 2012), differences and similarities between signed varieties (Aldersson and McEntee-Atalianis 2007, Bickford 1991, 2005, Parks 2011), and assessing the vitality of signed languages, and initial descriptions of undocumented sign languages. Adopting and adapting the concept of "extensibility" from spoken languages, Jason Hopkins wrote about how this could be applied to surveying sign languages. Sentence Repetition Tests have also been used for assessing people's ability in a sign language. + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1ca0c0c6b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Language survey" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:42.963511+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== References: sample survey reports == +Acharya, A. S. 1976. Tiptur Kannada. Linguistic Survey of India Series, no. 8. Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute. +Aldersson, Russell R. and Lisa J. McEntee-Atalianis. 2007. A Lexical Comparison of Icelandic Sign Language and Danish Sign Language. Birkbeck Studies in Applied Linguistics 2 Icelandic & Danish Sign Languages Archived 2021-05-14 at the Wayback Machine +Al-Fityani, Kinda & Carole Padden. 2008. A lexical comparison of sign languages in the Arab world. In R. M. de Quadros (Ed.), Sign languages: Spinning and unraveling the past, present, and future. TISLR9, forty five papers and three posters from the 9th Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research Conference. Florianopolis, Brazil, December 2006. Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil: Editora Arara Azul. Downloadable +Backstrom, Peter C. 1992. "Wakhi." In Peter C. Backstrom and Carla J. Radloff (eds.), Languages of northern areas, 57-74. Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, 2. Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University and Summer Institute of Linguistics. +Bender, M. L. 1971. The languages of Ethiopia. A new lexicostatistic classification and some problems of diffusion. Anthropological Linguistics 13(5): 165-288. +Bender, M. L., J. D. Bowen, R. L. Cooper, and C. A. Ferguson. 1976. Language in Ethiopia. London: Oxford University Press. +Beyer, Daniela and Simone Beck. 2011. A Linguistic Assessment of the Munji language in Afghanistan. Language Documentation and Conservation 6: 38-103. [1] +Bickford, J. Albert. 1991. Lexical variation in Mexican Sign Language. Sign Language Studies 72:241–276. +Bickford, J. Albert. 2005. The signed languages of Eastern Europe. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2005-026: 45. http://www.sil.org/silesr/abstract.asp?ref=2005-026 +Clifton, John M., editor. 2002. Studies in languages of Azerbaijan, vol. 1,2. Baku, Azerbaijan and St. Petersburg, Russia: Institute of International Relations, Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan and North Eurasian Group, SIL International. +Clifton, John M., editor. 2005. Studies in languages of Tajikistan. Dushanbe, Tajikistan: National State University of Tajikistan; St. Petersburg, Russia : North Eurasia Group, SIL International. +Egland, Steven T., ed. 1978. La inteligibilidad interdialectal en México: Resultados de algunos sondeos. Mexico: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. +Ferreira, Jo-Anne and David Holbrook. 2002. Are they dying? The case of some French-lexifier creoles. La Torre 7(25): 367-397. +Holbrook, David. 2001. "Exploring the potential for Creole language development through religious literature: the current sociolinguistic situation in Guyana, South America." La Torre 6(19): 75-90. +Jernudd, Bjorn H. 1979. The language survey of Sudan. The first phase: a questionnaire survey in schools. Acta universitatis umensis 22. +King, Julie K. and John Wayne King, editors. 1984. Languages of Sabah: a survey report. (Pacific Linguistics C, 78.) Canberra: Australian National University. +Labov, William. 1982. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D. C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. +Lewis, M. Paul. 1987. "Un estudio de la sociología de lenguaje del idioma quiché." Winak 2(4): 249-55. +Rensch, Calvin R. 1992. "The language environment of Hindko-speaking people." In Calvin R. Rensch, Calinda E. Hallberg and Clare F. O'Leary (eds.), Hindko and Gujari, 3-88. Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, 3. Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies and Summer Institute of Linguistics. +Saskatchewan Indigenous Languages Committee. (1991). Socio-linguistic survey of Indigenous languages in Saskatchewan: On the critical list. Saskatoon, Sask.: Saskatchewan Indigenous Languages Committee. +Statistics Canada. (1993). 1991 Aboriginal peoples survey: Language, tradition, health, lifestyle and social issues. Catalogue No. 89-533. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, Post Censal Surveys Program. +Toba, Sueyoshi, Ingrid Toba and Novel Kishore Rai. 2002. UNESCO language survey report Nepal. Kathmandu: UNESCO. +Vasishta, M., J. C. Woodward, and K. L. Wilson. 1978. Sign Language in India: Regional Variation within the Deaf Population. Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics 4 (2): 66–74. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f828ca91f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Language survey" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_survey" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:42.963511+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== References: survey methodology == +Blair, Frank, 1990. Survey on a Shoestring: A Manual for Small-Scale Language Surveys. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. +Busch, Brigitta. 2018. The language portrait in multilingualism research: Theoretical and methodological considerations. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 236, 1-13, King's College London, UK. +Casad, Eugene H. 1974. Dialect intelligibility testing. Summer Institute of Linguistics Publications in Linguistics and Related Fields, 38. Norman: Summer Institute of Linguistics of the University of Oklahoma. +Casad, Eugene H. 1993. Language area surveys. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 8: 29-49. +Ciupek-Reed, Julia. 2012. Participatory methods in sociolinguistic sign language survey: A case study in El Salvador. University of North Dakota MA thesis. Ciupek-Reed's thesis Archived 2014-03-26 at the Wayback Machine +Cooper, R. L. and S. Carpenter. 1976. Language in the Market. In Language in Ethiopia, ed. by Bender, M. L., J. D. Bowen, R. L. Cooper, and C. A. Ferguson, pp. 244–255. London: Oxford University Press. +Downey, Michael P. 1986. "Survey methods and their insights into the acceptability of literature among related varieties." Studies in Philippine Linguistics 6(2): 94-180 +Ferguson, Charles. 1975 "On sociolinguistically oriented language surveys." From S. Ohannessian, C. Ferguson and E. Polome (eds.), Language surveys in developing nations, p. 1-5. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. +Gooskens, Charlotte and Cindy Schneider. 2016. Testing mutual intelligibility between closely related languages in an oral society. Language Documentation & Conservation Vol. 10: 278–30. +Hickerson, Harold, Glen D. Turner, and Nancy P. Hickerson. 1962. "Testing procedures for estimating transfer of information among Iroquois dialects and languages." International Journal of American Linguistics 18: 1-8. +Hochstetler, Lee and Tim Tillinghast. 1996. "Discussion on sociolinguistic questionnaires." Notes on Literature in Use and Language Programs 48: 48-61. +Ibarra, Francisco Martínez. 2012. Qualitative Research and the Study of Language Use and Attitudes. Retrospective Methods Network, RMN Newsletter, special issue: "Approaching Methodology" pp. 75-80. +McKinnie, Meghan and Tom Priestly. 2004. Telling tales out of school: assessing linguistic competence in minority language fieldwork. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25(1): 24-40. +Parkhurst, Stephen and Dianne Parkhurst. 1998. Introduction to Sign Language survey. Notes on Sociolinguistics 3: 215-42. +Parks, Jason. 2011. Sign language word list comparisons: Toward a replicable coding and scoring methodology. University of North Dakota MA thesis. Parks' thesis +Priedite, Aija. Surveying Languages and Attitudes and Practices in Latvia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 26, no. 5, pp. 409-424. +Radloff, Carla F. 1991. Sentence repetition testing for studies of community bilingualism. Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, 104. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington. +Travis, Catherine E., and Rena Torres Cacoullos. "BEYOND QUESTIONNAIRES: COMMUNITY-BASED MEASURES OF BILINGUALISM." International journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 34, no. 1-2 (2015): 105-128. +Woodward, James. 1991. Sign language varieties in Costa Rica. Sign Language Studies Special Extra Length Issue: "Papers on Sign Languages & Deaf Cultures" 73:329-346. +Woodward, James. 1993. The relationship of sign language varieties in India, Pakistan, and Nepal. Sign Language Studies 78: 15-22. +Woodward, James. 1996. Modern Standard Thai Sign Language, influence from ASL and its relationship to original Thai sign varieties. Sign Language Studies 92: 227-252. +Yoder, Zachariah. 2017. "The reliability of recorded text test scores: widespread inconsistent intelligibility testing in minority languages." Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 38, no. 9: 843-855. + +== External links == +Jobs in survey work through Wycliffe Bible Translators +Samoan language survey via internet +Assimilation and language among Latino population in USA, by Kaiser foundation +Reports of surveys in a variety of smaller language communities around the world +Canada's indigenous languages +The People's Linguistic Survey of India \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laudative-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laudative-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c304c5a4a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laudative-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +title: "Laudative" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laudative" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:44.165937+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Laudatives (from Latin laudare "to praise") are words or grammatical forms that denote a positive affect. That is, they express praise or approval on the part of the speaker. +The Spanish augmentative suffix -azo has laudative uses, such as cuerpazo "great body", though it also has pejorative uses such as cabronazo "major asshole." +Mansi has a suffix -ke that functions as both a diminutive and a laudative, as in saalike "good little reindeer", lowke X "ten good X", totike "he carries (it) with pleasure". +Laudatory words are rare in English compared to pejorative ones, though there are a few, such as "steed" for a fine horse. More common is laudative use of metaphor, such as calling a helpful person a "saint" or fine food "ambrosia". Intonation may convey a laudative affect, as in "What a house!" said with an air of wonder. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..50e0f7065 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Leisure" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:09.720357+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Leisure (UK: , US: ) has often been defined as a quality of experience or as free time. Free time is time spent away from business, work, job hunting, domestic chores, and education, as well as necessary activities such as eating and sleeping. Leisure as an experience usually emphasizes dimensions of perceived freedom and choice. It is done for "its own sake", for the quality of experience and involvement. Other classic definitions include Thorstein Veblen's (1899) of "nonproductive consumption of time." Free time is not easy to define due to the multiplicity of approaches used to determine its essence. Different disciplines have definitions reflecting their common issues: for example, sociology on social forces and contexts and psychology as mental and emotional states and conditions. From a research perspective, these approaches have an advantage of being quantifiable and comparable over time and place. +Leisure studies and sociology of leisure are the academic disciplines concerned with the study and analysis of leisure. Recreation differs from leisure in that it is a purposeful activity that includes the experience of leisure in activity contexts. Economists consider that leisure times are valuable to a person like wages. If it were not, people would have worked instead of taking leisure. However, the distinction between leisure and unavoidable activities is not a rigidly defined one, e.g. people sometimes do work-oriented tasks for pleasure as well as for long-term utility. A related concept is social leisure, which involves leisurely activities in social settings, such as extracurricular activities, e.g. sports, clubs. Another related concept is that of family leisure. Relationships with others is usually a major factor in both satisfaction and choice. +The concept of leisure as a human right was realised in article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. + +== History == +Leisure has historically been the privilege of the upper class. Opportunities for leisure came with more money, or organization, and less working time, rising dramatically in the mid-to-late 19th century, starting in Great Britain and spreading to other rich nations in Europe. It spread as well to the United States, although that country had a reputation in Europe for providing much less leisure despite its wealth. Immigrants to the United States discovered they had to work harder than they did in Europe. Economists continue to investigate why Americans work longer hours. In a recent book, Laurent Turcot argues that leisure was not created in the 19th century but is imbricated in the occidental world since the beginning of history. + +=== Canada === +In Canada, leisure in the country is related to the decline in work hours and is shaped by moral values, and the ethnic-religious and gender communities. In a cold country with winter's long nights, and summer's extended daylight, favorite leisure activities include horse racing, team sports such as hockey, singalongs, roller skating and board games. The churches tried to steer leisure activities, by preaching against drinking and scheduling annual revivals and weekly club activities. By 1930 radio played a major role in uniting Canadians behind their local or regional hockey teams. Play-by-play sports coverage, especially of ice hockey, absorbed fans far more intensely than newspaper accounts the next day. Rural areas were especially influenced by sports coverage. + +=== France === +Leisure by the mid-19th century was no longer an individualistic activity. It was increasingly organized. In the French industrial city of Lille, with a population of 80,000 in 1858, the cabarets or taverns for the working class numbered 1300, or one for every three houses. Lille counted 63 drinking and singing clubs, 37 clubs for card players, 23 for bowling, 13 for skittles, and 18 for archery. The churches likewise have their social organizations. Each club had a long roster of officers, and a busy schedule of banquets, festivals and competitions. At the turn of the century thousands of these clubs had been created. + +=== United Kingdom === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..24df35b40 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Leisure" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:09.720357+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +As literacy, wealth, ease of travel, and a broadened sense of community grew in Britain in the mid-19th century onward, there was more time and interest in leisure activities of all sorts, on the part of all classes. +Opportunities for leisure activities increased more because real wages continued to grow and hours of work continued to decline. In urban Britain, the nine-hour day was increasingly the norm; the 1874 Factory Act limited the workweek to 56.5 hours. The movement toward an eight-hour day. Furthermore, system of routine annual vacations came into play, starting with white-collar workers and moving into the working-class. Some 200 seaside resorts emerged thanks to cheap hotels and inexpensive railway fares, widespread banking holidays and the fading of many religious prohibitions against secular activities on Sundays. +By the late Victorian era, the leisure industry had emerged in all British cities, and the pattern was copied across Western Europe and North America. It provided scheduled entertainment of suitable length and convenient locales at inexpensive prices. These include sporting events, music halls, and popular theater. By 1880 football was no longer the preserve of the social elite, as it attracted large working-class audiences. Average gate was 5,000 in 1905, rising to 23,000 in 1913. That amounted to 6 million paying customers with a weekly turnover of £400,000. Sports by 1900 generated some three percent of the total gross national product in Britain. Professionalization of sports was the norm, although some new activities reached an upscale amateur audience, such as lawn tennis and golf. Women were now allowed in some sports, such as archery, tennis, badminton and gymnastics. +Leisure was primarily a male activity, with middle-class women allowed in at the margins. There were class differences with upper-class clubs, and working-class and middle-class pubs. Heavy drinking declined; there was more betting on outcomes. Participation in sports and all sorts of leisure activities increased for average English people, and their interest in spectator sports increased dramatically. +By the 1920s the cinema and radio attracted all classes, ages, and genders in very large numbers. Giant palaces were built for the huge audiences that wanted to see Hollywood films. In Liverpool 40 percent of the population attended one of the 69 cinemas once a week; 25 percent went twice. Traditionalists grumbled about the American cultural invasion, but the permanent impact was minor. +The British showed a more profound interest in sports, and in greater variety, that any rival. They gave pride of place to such moral issues as sportsmanship and fair play. Cricket became symbolic of the Imperial spirit throughout the Empire. Soccer proved highly attractive to the urban working classes, which introduced the rowdy spectator to the sports world. In some sports, there was significant controversy in the fight for amateur purity especially in rugby and rowing. New games became popular almost overnight, including golf, lawn tennis, cycling and hockey. Women were much more likely to enter these sports than the old established ones. The aristocracy and landed gentry, with their ironclad control over land rights, dominated hunting, shooting, fishing and horse racing. +Cricket had become well-established among the English upper class in the 18th century, and was a major factor in sports competition among the public schools. Army units around the Empire had time on their hands, and encouraged the locals to learn cricket so they could have some entertaining competition. Most of the Empire embraced cricket, with the exception of Canada. Cricket test matches (international) began by the 1870s; the most famous is that between Australia and Britain for "The Ashes". + +== Types == +The range of leisure activities extends from the very informal and casual to highly organised and long-lasting activities. A significant subset of leisure activities are hobbies which are undertaken for personal satisfaction, usually on a regular basis, and often result in satisfaction through skill development or recognised achievement, sometimes in the form of a product. The list of hobbies is ever changing as society changes. +Substantial and fulfilling hobbies and pursuits are described by Sociologist Robert Stebbins as serious leisure. The serious leisure perspective is a way of viewing the wide range of leisure pursuits in three main categories: casual leisure, serious leisure, and project-based leisure. + +=== Serious leisure === +"Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer ... that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where ... participants find a [leisure] career...". For example, collecting stamps or maintaining a public wetland area. +People undertaking serious leisure can be categorised as amateurs, volunteers or hobbyists. Their engagement is distinguished from casual leisure by a high level of perseverance, effort, knowledge and training required and durable benefits and the sense that one can create in effect a leisure career through such activity. +The range of serious leisure activities is growing rapidly in modern times with developed societies having greater leisure time, longevity and prosperity. The Internet is providing increased support for amateurs and hobbyists to communicate, display and share products. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bca26c50a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +title: "Leisure" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:09.720357+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +==== Reading ==== +As literacy and leisure time expanded after 1900, reading became a popular pastime. Libraries saw heavy demand for new fiction. A dramatic innovation was the inexpensive paperback, pioneered by Allen Lane (1902–70) at Penguin Books in 1935. The first titles included novels by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie. They were sold cheap (usually sixpence) in a wide variety of inexpensive stores such as Woolworths. Penguin aimed at an educated middle class "middlebrow" audience. It avoided the downscale image of American paperbacks. The line signaled cultural self-improvement and political education. The more polemical Penguin Specials, typically with a leftist orientation for Labour readers, were widely distributed during World War II. However the war years caused a shortage of staff for publishers and book stores, and a severe shortage of rationed paper, worsened by the air raid on Paternoster Square in 1940 that burned 5 million books in warehouses. +Romantic fiction was especially popular, with Mills and Boon the leading publisher. Romantic encounters were embodied in a principle of sexual purity that demonstrated not only social conservatism, but also how heroines could control their personal autonomy. Adventure magazines became quite popular, especially those published by DC Thomson; the publisher sent observers around the country to talk to boys and learn what they wanted to read about. The story line in magazines and cinema that most appealed to boys was the glamorous heroism of British soldiers fighting wars that were perceived as exciting and just. + +=== Casual leisure === +"Casual leisure is immediately, intrinsically rewarding; and it is a relatively short-lived, pleasurable activity requiring little or no special training to enjoy it." For example, watching TV or going for a swim. + +=== Project-based leisure === +"Project-based leisure is a short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time." For example, working on a single Wikipedia article or building a garden feature. + +== Cultural differences == + +Time available for leisure varies from one society to the next, although anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherers tend to have significantly more leisure time than people in more complex societies. As a result, band societies such as the Shoshone of the Great Basin came across as extraordinarily lazy to European colonialists. +Workaholics, less common than the social myths, are those who work compulsively at the expense of other activities. They prefer to work rather than spend time socializing and engaging in other leisure activities. +European and American men statistically have more leisure time than women, due to both household and parenting responsibilities and increasing participation in the paid employment. In Europe and the United States, adult men usually have between one and nine hours more leisure time than women do each week. + +== Family leisure == +Family leisure is defined as time that parents, children and siblings spend together in free time or recreational activities, and it can be expanded to address intergenerational family leisure as time that grandparents, parents, and grandchildren spend together in free time or recreational activities. Leisure can become a central place for the development of emotional closeness and strong family bonds. Contexts such as urban/rural shape the perspectives, meanings, and experiences of family leisure. For example, leisure moments are part of work in rural areas, and the rural idyll is enacted by urban families on weekends, but both urban and rural families somehow romanticize rural contexts as ideal spaces for family making (connection to nature, slower and more intimate space, notion of a caring social fabric, tranquillity, etc.). Also, much "family leisure" requires tasks that are most often assigned to women. Family leisure also includes playing together with family members on the weekend day. + +== Aging == +Leisure is important across the lifespan and can facilitate a sense of control and self-worth. Older adults, specifically, can benefit from physical, social, emotional, cultural, and spiritual aspects of leisure. Leisure engagement and relationships are commonly central to "successful" and satisfying aging. For example, engaging in leisure with grandchildren can enhance feelings of generativity, whereby older adults can achieve well-being by leaving a legacy beyond themselves for future generations. + +== See also == + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Cross, Gary S. Encyclopedia of recreation and leisure in America. (2004). +Harris, David. Key concepts in leisure studies. (Sage, 2005) +Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream. (Temple University Press, 2013). +Ibrahim, Hilmi. Leisure and society: a comparative approach (1991). +Jenkins, John M., and J.J.J. Pigram. Encyclopedia of leisure and outdoor recreation. (Routledge, 2003). ISBN 0-415-25226-1. +Kostas Kalimtzis. An Inquiry into the Philosophical Concept of Scholê: Leisure As a Political End. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. +Rojek, Chris, Susan M. Shaw, and A.J. Veal, eds/ A Handbook of Leisure Studies. (2006). +Rose, Julie L. (2024). "The Future of Work? The Political Theory of Work and Leisure". Annual Review of Political Science. 27 (1) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9dd93d319 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +--- +title: "Leisure" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:09.720357+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== History of leisure === +Abrams, Lynn. Workers' culture in imperial Germany: leisure and recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (2002). +Beck, Peter J. "Leisure and Sport in Britain." in Chris Wrigley, ed., A Companion to Early Twentieth-Century Britain (2008): 453–469. +Borsay, Peter. A History of Leisure: The British Experience since 1500 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). +Burke, Peter. "The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe". In: Past and Present 146 (1995), pp. 136–150. +Cross, Gary. A social history of leisure since 1600 (1990). +De Grazia, Victoria. The culture of consent: mass organisation of leisure in fascist Italy (2002). +Hatcher, John. "Labour, Leisure and Economic Thought before the Nineteenth Century". In: Past and Present 160 (1998), pp. 64–115. +Koshar, Rudy. Histories of Leisure (2002). +Levinson, David, and Karen Christensen. Encyclopedia of world sport: from ancient times to the present (Oxford UP, 1999). +Marrus, Michael R. The Emergence of Leisure. New York 1974 +Poser, Stefan: Leisure Time and Technology, European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2011, retrieved: 25 October 2011. +Stearns, Peter N. ed. Encyclopedia of European social history from 1350 to 2000 (2001) 5:3–261; 18 essays by experts +Struna, Nancy L. People of Prowess Sport Leisure and Labor in Early Anglo-America (1996) excerpt +Towner, John, and Geoffrey Wall. "History and tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 18.1 (1991): 71–84. online +Towner, John. "The Grand Tour: a key phase in the history of tourism." Annals of tourism research 12#3 (1985): 297–333. +Turcot, Laurent Sports et Loisirs. Une histoire des origines à nos jours, Paris, Gallimard, 2016. +Turcot, Laurent "The origins of Leisure", International Innovation, April 2016 [2] Archived 26 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine +Walton, John K. Leisure in Britain, 1780–1939 (1983). +Withey, Lynne. Grand Tours and Cook's Tours: A history of leisure travel, 1750 to 1915 (1997). + +=== Historiography === +Akyeampong, Emmanuel, and Charles Ambler. "Leisure in African history: An introduction." International journal of African historical studies 35#1 (2002): 1–16. +Mommaas, Hans, et al. Leisure research in Europe: methods and traditions (Cab international, 1996), on France, Poland, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and the UK. +Ritter, Gerhard A (1978). "Workers' culture in Imperial Germany: problems and points of departure for research". Journal of Contemporary History. 13 (2): 165–189. doi:10.1177/002200947801300201. JSTOR 260112. S2CID 144905527. +Schiller, Kay; Young, Christopher (2009). "The history and historiography of sport in Germany: Social, cultural and political perspectives". German History. 27 (3): 313–330. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghp029. + +== External links == + +Leisure +Peter Burke, The invention of leisure in early modern Europe, Past & Present, February 1995 +The Development of Leisure Amongst the Social Classes During the Industrial Revolution (archived 9 May 2008) +"The Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP)". The Serious Leisure Perspective (SLP). Retrieved 17 February 2016. +"Leisure Perspective". My Nephew's Take on Leisure (SMD). Retrieved 19 September 2016. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_satisfaction-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_satisfaction-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c351f12e0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_satisfaction-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Leisure satisfaction" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_satisfaction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:15.805500+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Leisure satisfaction is the positive perceptions or feelings that an individual forms, elicits and gains as a result of engaging in leisure activities and choices. "Leisure refers to activities that a person voluntarily engages in when they are free from any work, social or familial responsibilities." What can contribute to leisure satisfaction is to what degree an individual is currently satisfied with their leisure experiences and activities. An individual might attain positive feelings of contentment and happiness that result from the satisfaction of needs. Participation in leisure activities and leisure satisfaction are inextricably linked to an individual's health. Caldwell suspects that leisure activities may be associated with a number of defensive traits that enhance a person's resiliency to negative life experiences. Some aspects of leisure activities that can act as protective factors include: "[the activity] being personally meaningful, intrinsically interesting and/or challenging; offering social support and friendships; contributing to a sense of competence and/or self efficacy; offering a sense of personal control, choice and self-determination; and being relaxing and/or distracting the individual from negative life events." Leisure activities, although ranging in types, have also proven to be beneficial to health cross-culturally. + +== Subjective well-being == +In a study by Hribernik and Mussap, leisure satisfaction was found to predict unique variance in life satisfaction, supporting its inclusion as a distinct life domain contributing to subjective well-being. Additionally, relationship status interacted with age group and gender on differences in leisure satisfaction. The relationship between leisure satisfaction and life satisfaction, however, was reduced when considering the impact of core affect (underlying mood state). This suggests that leisure satisfaction may primarily be influenced by an individual's subjective well-being level as represented by core affect. This has implications for possible limitations in the extent to which leisure satisfaction may be improved beyond pre-existing levels of well-being and mood in individuals. +In another study published by Brajsa-Zagnec et al. in 2010, subjective well-being (SWB) was defined as a combination of an individual's emotional reactions, satisfaction with specific aspects of one's life, and satisfaction with one's whole life. Many studies have been conducted to determine what specific leisure activities are linked to SWB. Research identifies other groups of leisure activities ranging from three to eleven to sixteen groups. There is no overall agreement regarding what specific groups of leisure activities predict SWB, but some researchers agree that leisure activities contribute to SWB and that the relationship between the two is complex. +Data was collected from a group of Croatian citizens ranging across various age groups. The participants estimated their SWB and time spent participating in leisure activities. These leisure activities included active socializing and going out (sports, going to clubs, eating dinner out etc.), visiting cultural events (reading books, going to concerts, going to movies etc.), and family and home activities (going to church, visiting family, watching television etc.). The results of the study found specific leisure activities to be a predictor of SWB across age groups. For people ages 31–60 participation in visiting cultural events, family leisure activities, and active socializing and going out contributed to SWB. A significant positive correlation was found between family leisure activities and SWB of men and women across different age groups. This study concluded that participation in leisure activities lead to SWB, though the importance of such specific leisure activities vary across different age and genders. Essentially, people may improve their SWB by participating in leisure activities, especially in family and home activities. + +== Family leisure activities and quality of life == +A study conducted by London et al. in 1977 was about job and leisure satisfaction contributing to quality of life (QOL). QOL was determined by asking the participants "How do you feel about your life as a whole" twice during the run of the study. As well, the participants were asked to fill out a survey that measured feelings about leisure, work, and life. It was found that activities that had to do with families and people they socialize with was significant to QOL. Overall non-job related activities (leisure activities) can be more important and a better predictor of QOL as opposed to variables of job related activities. People should consider the importance of the amount of time spent in leisure activities. + +== Family leisure activities and family life satisfaction == +In a study published by Agate et al. in 2009, participants required a child and parent from a family to fill out an online survey which measured the amount of involvement in family leisure activities and the satisfaction with involvement of family leisure activities. It was found that families' involvement in leisure activities is the best predictor for overall family life satisfaction, even more than the amount of time spent together. In early adolescent years, the amount and the satisfaction of family leisure experiences are important to the perceptions of satisfaction with family life that the adolescents will develop later on in life. In 2003, Zabriskie and McCormick, the study that Agate modeled his off of, also concluded that involvement in family leisure activities was the single strongest predictor of satisfaction with family life. As well, benefits of participation in family leisure activities are better communication skills among the family, better problem solving strategies, development of life and social skills, and better overall satisfaction with family life. Overall research has provided evidence for significant correlations between leisure satisfaction and satisfaction with family life. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_satisfaction-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_satisfaction-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..602742fdc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_satisfaction-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Leisure satisfaction" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_satisfaction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:15.805500+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Leisure activities and marital satisfaction == +Not much empirical data has been collected regarding leisure activities and marital satisfaction. But with the research that has been conducted, it has been found that leisure activities influence marital satisfaction positively. Happily married men and women were likely to value spending time together, enjoy activities done together, and agree on recreation needs. Some research has focused on the compatibility between married couples and this influence on the types of leisure activities they choose and the relationship between their overall marital satisfactions. Some research that focused on the relationship between leisure companionship and marital satisfaction found these couples tended to participate in activities that both partners enjoyed. +In a study published by Orthner et al. in 1975, the overall amount of time spent together in leisure activities is positively related to marital satisfaction for both males and females. Participants filled out a questionnaire measuring the pattern of interaction between spouses during leisure time and how much time is spent in individual, parallel, and joint leisure activities. It was found that wives spent more time alone in leisure activities than husbands across the marital career, but this individual participation was negatively correlated with marriage satisfaction. As well, the scores for marriage satisfaction were more stable for wives than husbands over time. Overall, this study concluded that the benefit of participating in leisure activities as a married couple is improved communication. Marital participation in leisure activities is the most critical during the first years of marriage and after 18–23 years of marriage when the marital relationship is reestablishing itself. +Research regarding compatibility in spouses and the relationship between leisure activities and marital satisfaction have found that the couples who are less compatible are more prone to pursue leisure activities separately than highly compatible couples. This study concluded that the more spouses liked the leisure activities they were participating in, the higher their marital satisfaction was. Essentially the results of this study determined that couples participating in leisure activities together positively correlated with their marriage satisfaction. + +== Psychological functioning == +The importance of leisure activities has been studied in various aspects of life. One of the most prevalent aspects of life studied with importance of leisure satisfaction is for people with psychological issues. Some psychological issues can consist of common concerns such as stress or more complex concerns such as clinical disorders. Whether a person experiences stressors at work, through depression or brain injuries, leisure satisfaction may ease the stress regardless of the type. +Stress in the workforce is a common issue many people face in their lifetime, however, leisure activities may help lower a person's stress levels and increase their satisfaction. When someone engages in enjoyable leisure activities, their moods tend to increase, which in turn, allows them to better accept everyday stressors. When faced with difficult job situations one must be able to achieve adequate free time to truly enjoy their leisure activity of choice. Another important aspect of leisure activity is the type performed, whether is it an active or passive activity. In 2009, Joudrey & Wallace published a study that statistically found the importance of active leisure activity. Passive leisure activities were suggested to give workers an ability to "escape", which in end could cause depressive moods. However, workers participating in active leisure showed considerably higher levels of mental health. +People with mental disabilities often lack the ability or confidence to participate in social events, such as leisure activities. However, studies such as the one published by Lloyd, King, Lampe, & McDougall in 2001 have been performed to prove the true importance of leisure among patients with mental disabilities. The results from their study showed a strong positive relationship between leisure satisfaction and the patients' met needs. The results basically state that the more leisure patients experienced, the more likely they felt their social, education and psychological needs were met. The study concluded that leisure is as important for people with psychiatric disabilities as it is for the general public. As Lloyd et al. explained, the general public may view an event, such as a leisure activity, as unsatisfactory, but to a mental patient a leisure activity can greatly raise their average happiness. Prvu conducted a study among brain injury patients. Results showed that patients involved in the leisure activity program that helped increase leisure skills and knowledge of community resources also provided patients with an increase in self-confidence and leisure participation, which in turn increased leisure satisfaction. Leisure activity can be a significant factor in lowering a person's level of depressive symptoms. + +== See also == +Leisure +Subjective well-being +Quality of life +Positive psychology +Flow (psychology) +Self-determination theory +Psychological resilience +Family life education +Occupational stress +Mental health +Recreational therapy + +== References == + +== External links == +The Serious Leisure Perspective [1] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_studies-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_studies-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3488f3c66 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_studies-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,62 @@ +--- +title: "Leisure studies" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_studies" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:10.910825+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Leisure studies is a branch of the social sciences that focuses on understanding and analyzing leisure. Recreation and tourism are common topics of leisure research. +The National Recreation and Park Association is the national organization in the United States for leisure studies, and offers accreditation to many universities to offer courses of study (degree programs) in leisure studies. +The Journal of Leisure Research and Journal of Park and Recreation Administration are some scholarly US academic journals of leisure studies. + + +== History == +While leisure studies has existed for much longer, a first centralized organization for directing leisure studies was established in Birmingham, England, in May 1975, and is known as the Leisure Studies Association. In 1984, the first international conference was held by the LSA at the University of Sussex in Brighton, which also set the record as the largest LSA event held to date with over 275 attendees. LSA conferences are widely regarded as some of the most attended events for leisure researchers in the world. + + +== Education == +Pursuing a degree in leisure studies will give students the opportunity to learn how to incorporate leisure into recreational activities and tourism. Students take a wide variety of classes ranging from psychology and social sciences to biology and anatomy. Students learn how to improve and foster a healthy life through leisure. + + +== Leisure activities == +The leisure activities that people who work in leisure studies deal with include a very broad range of activities. Most of the activities can be separated into 3 sub-categories: sport and recreation, tourism, and general leisure. +Sport and recreation activities is one of the broadest categories in leisure studies. This includes sports, both traditional and non-traditional, and any indoor or outdoor physical activities done for recreational purposes. Sport and recreation activities includes, but is not limited to, swimming, running, hiking, weight lifting, playing games and other outdoor recreation. +Tourism describes the traveling for leisure purposes. Destinations include parks and national parks, hikes, and domestic and foreign cities. +General leisure encompasses all other activities that are not part of sport, recreation, or tourism. This broad category includes yoga, the arts, nature conservation, and various other hobbies. + + +== Career opportunities == +A bachelor's degree in leisure studies qualifies graduates for a wide range of entry level recreational occupations in the private and public sectors. Leisure Service jobs involve a variety of leisure, recreational and sport settings for all age groups, populations, and diverse geographical locations. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report that 345,400 recreation worker jobs existed in the U.S. as of 2012 and the mean annual wage for a recreation worker was $25,430. The leisure studies field is expected to grow 14% from 2012–2022. This is growing as fast as the average of all jobs and is potentially due to increasing childhood obesity rates and the aging baby-boomers generation. +Work settings include: + +Rehabilitation centers +State and municipal parks +Schools +Camps +Coaching +Athletic programs +Fitness centers +Sporting organizations and businesses +Correctional facilities +Non-profit organizations +Community centers +Hospitality services +Nursing homes +Industries that employed the most recreation/leisure workers in 2012 and average annual salary: + + +== See also == +Hospitality management studies +Sociology of leisure +Digital leisure studies + + +== References == + +Bibliography +Blackshaw, Tony; Crawford, Garry (2009). The Sage Dictionary of Leisure Studies. London: SAGE Publications. ISBN 9781412919968. +Blackshaw, Tony (2010). Leisure. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780415430272. +Blackshaw, Tony, ed. (2013). Routledge Handbook of Leisure Studies. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780203140505. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diversity-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diversity-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..cc02b0142 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diversity-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Lexical diversity" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_diversity" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:46.674857+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Lexical diversity is one aspect of 'lexical richness' and refers to the ratio of different unique word stems (types) to the total number of words (tokens). The term is used in applied linguistics and is quantitatively calculated using numerous different measures including Type-Token Ratio (TTR), vocd, and the measure of textual lexical diversity (MTLD). +A common problem with lexical diversity measures, especially TTR, is that text samples containing large number of tokens give lower values for TTR since it is often necessary for the writer or speaker to re-use many words. One consequence of this is that it is often assumed that lexical diversity can only be used to compare texts of the same length. Yet, many measures of lexical diversity attempt to account for sensitivity to text length. Surveys of such measures are provided by Baayen and more recently Bestgen. + + +== Definitions == +In a 2013 article Scott Jarvis proposed that lexical diversity, similar to diversity in ecology, is a perceptual phenomenon. Lexical redundancy is a positive counterpart of lexical diversity in the same way as lexical variability is the mirror image of repetition. According to Jarvis's model, lexical diversity includes variability, volume, evenness, rarity, dispersion and disparity. +According to Jarvis, the six properties of lexical diversity should be measured by the following indices. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9ebf8db76 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +--- +title: "Lexicon" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:47.887995+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A lexicon (pl. lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν (lexikon), neuter of λεξικός (lexikos) meaning 'of or for words'. +Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon, essentially a catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock); and a grammar, a system of rules which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also thought to include bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as words (such as most affixes). In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions, collocations and other phrasemes are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries are lists of the lexicon, in alphabetical order, of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included. + +== Size and organization == +Items in the lexicon are called lexemes, lexical items, or word forms. Lexemes are not atomic elements but contain both phonological and morphological components. When describing the lexicon, a reductionist approach is used, trying to remain general while using a minimal description. To describe the size of a lexicon, lexemes are grouped into lemmas. A lemma is a group of lexemes generated by inflectional morphology. Lemmas are represented in dictionaries by headwords that list the citation forms and any irregular forms, since these must be learned to use the words correctly. Lexemes derived from a word by derivational morphology are considered new lemmas. The lexicon is also organized according to open and closed categories. Closed categories, such as determiners or pronouns, are rarely given new lexemes; their function is primarily syntactic. Open categories, such as nouns and verbs, have highly active generation mechanisms and their lexemes are more semantic in nature. + +== Lexicalization and other mechanisms in the lexicon == +A central role of the lexicon is documenting established lexical norms and conventions. Lexicalization is the process by which new words, having gained widespread usage, enter the lexicon. Since lexicalization may modify lexemes phonologically and morphologically, it is possible that a single etymological source may be inserted into a single lexicon in two or more forms. These pairs, called a doublet, are often close semantically. Two examples are aptitude versus attitude and employ versus imply. +The mechanisms, not mutually exclusive, are: + +Innovation, the planned creation of new roots (often on a large-scale), such as slang, branding. +Borrowing of foreign words. +Compounding (composition), the combination of lexemes to make a single word. +Abbreviation of compounds. +Acronyms, the reduction of compounds to their initial letters, such as NASA and laser (from "LASER"). +Inflection, a morphology change with a category, such as a number or tense. +Derivation, a morphological change resulting in a change of category. +Agglutination, the compounding of morphemes into a single word. + +=== Neologisms (new words) === +Neologisms are new lexeme candidates which, if they gain wide usage over time, become part of a language's lexicon. Neologisms are often introduced by children who produce erroneous forms by mistake. Other common sources are slang and advertising. + +=== Neologisms that maintain the sound of their external source === +There are two types of borrowings (neologisms based on external sources) that retain the sound of the source language material: + +Borrowing using the source language lexical item as the basic material for the neologization: guestwords, foreignisms and loanwords +Borrowing using a target language lexical items as the basic material for the neologization: phono-semantic matching, semanticized phonetic matching and phonetic matching. + +==== Guestwords, foreignisms and loanwords ==== +The following are examples of external lexical expansion using the source language lexical item as the basic material for the neologization, listed in decreasing order of phonetic resemblance to the original lexical item (in the source language): + +Guestword (in German: Gastwort): unassimilated borrowing. +Foreignism (in German: Fremdwort): foreign word, e.g. phonetic adaptation. +Loanword (in German: Lehnwort): totally assimilated borrowing, e.g. morphemic adaptation. + +==== Phono-semantic matches, semanticized phonetic matches and phonetic matches ==== +The following are examples of simultaneous external and internal lexical expansion using target language lexical items as the basic material for the neologization but still resembling the sound of the lexical item in the source language: + +Phono-semantic matching (PSM): the target language material is originally similar to the source language lexical item both phonetically and semantically. +Semanticized phonetic matching (SPM): the target language material is originally similar to the source language lexical item phonetically, and only in a loose way semantically. +Phonetic matching (PM): the target language material is originally similar to the source language lexical item phonetically but not semantically. + +=== Role of morphology === +Another mechanism involves generative devices that combine morphemes according to a language's rules. For example, the suffix "-able" is usually only added to transitive verbs, as in "readable" but not "cryable". + +=== Compounding === +A compound word is a lexeme composed of several established lexemes, whose semantics is not the sum of that of their constituents. They can be interpreted through analogy, common sense and, most commonly, context. Compound words can have simple or complex morphological structures. Usually, only the head requires inflection for agreement. Compounding may result in lexemes of unwieldy proportion. This is compensated by mechanisms that reduce the length of words. A similar phenomenon has been recently shown to feature in social media also where hashtags compound to form longer-sized hashtags that are at times more popular than the individual constituent hashtags forming the compound. Compounding is the most common of word formation strategies cross-linguistically. + +== Diachronic mechanisms == +Comparative historical linguistics studies the evolution of languages and takes a diachronic view of the lexicon. The evolution of lexicons in different languages occurs through a parallel mechanism. Over time historical forces work to shape the lexicon, making it simpler to acquire and often creating an illusion of great regularity in language. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fe1865eec --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Lexicon" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexicon" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:47.887995+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Phonological assimilation, the modification of loanwords to fit a new language's sound structure more effectively. If, however, a loanword sounds too "foreign", inflection or derivation rules may not be able to transform it. +Analogy, where new words undergo inflection and derivation analogous to that of words with a similar sound structure. +Emphasis, the modification of words' stress or accent. +Metaphor, a form of semantic extension. + +== Second-language lexicon == + +The term "lexicon" is generally used in the context of a single language. Therefore, multi-lingual speakers are generally thought to have multiple lexicons. Speakers of language variants (Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese, for example) may be considered to possess a single lexicon. Thus a cash dispenser (British English) as well as an automatic teller machine or ATM in American English would be understood by both American and British speakers, despite each group using different dialects. +When linguists study a lexicon, they consider such things as what constitutes a word; the word/concept relationship; lexical access and lexical access failure; how a word's phonology, syntax, and meaning intersect; the morphology-word relationship; vocabulary structure within a given language; language use (pragmatics); language acquisition; the history and evolution of words (etymology); and the relationships between words, often studied within philosophy of language. +Various models of how lexicons are organized and how words are retrieved have been proposed in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and computational linguistics. + +== See also == +Glossary +Grammaticalization +Lexical frequency analysis +Lexical Markup Framework +Lexicography + +== References == + +== Further reading == + +Aitchison, Jean. Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f532bc18f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +title: "Library and information science" +chunk: 1/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:22.453410+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Library and information science (LIS) are two academic disciplines that study all aspects of the creation, organization, documentation, management, communication, and use of recorded information. It underlies a variety of professional activities such as information management, librarianship, and archiving and records management, educating professionals for work in those areas, and carrying out research to improve practice. +Library science and information science are two original disciplines; however, they are within the same field of study. Library science is applied information science, as well as a subfield of information science. Due to the strong connection, sometimes the two terms are used synonymously. + +== Definition == +Library science (previously termed library studies and library economy) is an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, and other areas to libraries; the collection, organization, preservation, and dissemination of information resources; and the political economy of information. Martin Schrettinger, a Bavarian librarian, coined the discipline within his work (1808–1828) Versuch eines vollständigen Lehrbuchs der Bibliothek-Wissenschaft oder Anleitung zur vollkommenen Geschäftsführung eines Bibliothekars. Rather than classifying information based on nature-oriented elements, as was previously done in his Bavarian library, Schrettinger organized books in alphabetical order. The first American school for library science was founded by Melvil Dewey at Columbia University in 1887. +Historically, library science has also included archival science. This includes: how information resources are organized to serve the needs of selected user groups; how people interact with classification systems and technology; how information is acquired, evaluated and applied by people in and outside libraries as well as cross-culturally; how people are trained and educated for careers in libraries; the ethics that guide library service and organization; the legal status of libraries and information resources; and the applied science of computer technology used in documentation and records management. +LIS should not be confused with information theory, the mathematical study of the concept of information. Library philosophy has been contrasted with library science as the study of the aims and justifications of librarianship as opposed to the development and refinement of techniques. + +== Education and training == + +Academic courses in library science include collection management, information systems and technology, research methods, user studies, information literacy, cataloging and classification, preservation, reference, statistics and management. Library science is constantly evolving, incorporating new topics like database management, information architecture and information management, among others. + +With the mounting acceptance of Wikipedia as a valued and reliable reference source, many libraries, museums, and archives have introduced the role of Wikipedian in residence. As a result, some universities are including coursework relating to Wikipedia and Knowledge Management in their MLIS programs. +Becoming a library staff member does not always need a degree, and in some contexts the difference between being a library staff member and a librarian is the level of education. Most professional library jobs require a professional degree in library science or equivalent. In the United States and Canada the certification usually comes from a master's degree granted by an ALA-accredited institution. In Australia, a number of institutions offer degrees accepted by the ALIA (Australian Library and Information Association). Global standards of accreditation or certification in librarianship have yet to be developed. + +=== United States and Canada === +The Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) is the master's degree that is required for most professional librarian positions in the United States and Canada. The MLIS was created after the older Master of Library Science (MLS) was reformed to reflect the information science and technology needs of the field. According to the American Library Association (ALA), "ALA-accredited degrees have [had] various names such as Master of Arts, Master of Librarianship, Master of Library and Information Studies, or Master of Science. The degree name is determined by the program. The [ALA] Committee for Accreditation evaluates programs based on their adherence to the Standards for Accreditation of Master's Programs in Library and Information Studies, not based on the name of the degree." + +== Types of librarianship == + +=== Public === + +The study of librarianship for public libraries covers issues such as cataloging; collection development for a diverse community; information literacy; readers' advisory; community standards; public services-focused librarianship via community-centered programming; serving a diverse community of adults, children, and teens; intellectual freedom; censorship; and legal and budgeting issues. The public library as a commons or public sphere based on the work of Jürgen Habermas has become a central metaphor in the 21st century. +In the United States there are four different types of public libraries: association libraries, municipal public libraries, school district libraries, and special district public libraries. Each receives funding through different sources, each is established by a different set of voters, and not all are subject to municipal civil service governance. + +=== School === + +The study of school librarianship covers library services for children in nursery, primary through secondary school. In some regions, the local government may have stricter standards for the education and certification of school librarians (who are sometimes considered a special case of teacher), than for other librarians, and the educational program will include those local criteria. School librarianship may also include issues of intellectual freedom, pedagogy, information literacy, and how to build a cooperative curriculum with the teaching staff. + +=== Academic === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..29853f193 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +title: "Library and information science" +chunk: 2/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:22.453410+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The study of academic librarianship covers library services for colleges and universities. Issues of special importance to the field may include copyright; technology; digital libraries and digital repositories; academic freedom; open access to scholarly works; and specialized knowledge of subject areas important to the institution and the relevant reference works. Librarians often divide focus individually as liaisons on particular schools within a college or university. Academic librarians may be subject specific librarians. +Some academic librarians are considered faculty, and hold similar academic ranks to those of professors, while others are not. In either case, the minimal qualification is a Master of Arts in Library Studies or a Master of Arts in Library Science. Some academic libraries may only require a master's degree in a specific academic field or a related field, such as educational technology. + +=== Archival === + +The study of archives includes the training of archivists, librarians specially trained to maintain and build archives of records intended for historical preservation. Special issues include physical preservation, conservation, and restoration of materials and mass deacidification; specialist catalogs; solo work; access; and appraisal. Many archivists are also trained historians specializing in the period covered by the archive. There have been attempts to revive the concept of documentation and to speak of Library, information and documentation studies (or science). +The archival mission includes three major goals: To identify papers and records with enduring value, preserve the identified papers, and make the papers available to others. While libraries receive items individually, archival items will usually become part of the archive's collection as a cohesive group. Major difference in collections is that library collections typically comprise published items (books, magazines, etc.), while archival collections are usually unpublished works (letters, diaries, etc.). Library collections are created by many individuals, as each author and illustrator create their own publication; in contrast, an archive usually collects the records of one person, family, institution, or organization, so the archival items will have fewer sources of authors. +Behavior in an archive differs from behavior in other libraries. In most libraries, items are openly available to the public. Archival items almost never circulate, and someone interested in viewing documents must request them of the archivist and may only be able view them in a closed reading room. + +=== Special === + +Special libraries are libraries established to meet the highly specialized requirements of professional or business groups. A library is special depending on whether it covers a specialized collection, a special subject, or a particular group of users, or even the type of parent organization, such as medical libraries or law libraries. +The issues at these libraries are specific to their industries but may include solo work, corporate financing, specialized collection development, and extensive self-promotion to potential patrons. Special librarians have their own professional organization, the Special Libraries Association (SLA). +Some special libraries, such as the CIA Library, may contain classified works. It is a resource to employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, containing over 125,000 written materials, subscribes to around 1,700 periodicals, and had collections in three areas: Historical Intelligence, Circulating, and Reference. In February 1997, three librarians working at the institution spoke to Information Outlook, a publication of the SLA, revealing that the library had been created in 1947, the importance of the library in disseminating information to employees, even with a small staff, and how the library organizes its materials. + +=== Preservation === + +Preservation librarians most often work in academic libraries. Their focus is on the management of preservation activities that seek to maintain access to content within books, manuscripts, archival materials, and other library resources. Examples of activities managed by preservation librarians include binding, conservation, digital and analog reformatting, digital preservation, and environmental monitoring. + +== History == + +Libraries have existed for many centuries but library science is a more recent phenomenon, as early libraries were managed primarily by academics. + +=== 17th and 18th century === + +The earliest text on "library operations", Advice on Establishing a Library was published in 1627 by French librarian and scholar Gabriel Naudé. Naudé wrote on many subjects including politics, religion, history, and the supernatural. He put into practice all the ideas put forth in Advice when given the opportunity to build and maintain the library of Cardinal Jules Mazarin. +During the 'golden age of libraries' in the 17th century, publishers and sellers seeking to take advantage of the burgeoning book trade developed descriptive catalogs of their wares for distribution – a practice was adopted and further extrapolated by many libraries of the time to cover areas like philosophy, sciences, linguistics, and medicine +In 1726 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote Idea of Arranging a Narrower Library. + +=== 19th century === + +Martin Schrettinger wrote the second textbook (the first in Germany) on the subject from 1808 to 1829. +Some of the main tools used by LIS to provide access to the resources originated in 19th century to make information accessible by recording, identifying, and providing bibliographic control of printed knowledge. The origin for some of these tools were even earlier. +Thomas Jefferson, whose library at Monticello consisted of thousands of books, devised a classification system inspired by the Baconian method, which grouped books more or less by subject rather than alphabetically, as it was previously done. The Jefferson collection provided the basis of what became the Library of Congress after the first collection was destroyed in the 1814 Burning of Washington. +The first American school of librarianship opened in New York under the leadership of Melvil Dewey, noted for his 1876 decimal classification, on January 5, 1887, as the Columbia College School of Library Economy. The term library economy was common in the U.S. until 1942, with the term, library science, predominant through much of the 20th century. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e05173e9d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +title: "Library and information science" +chunk: 3/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:22.453410+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== 20th century === +In the English-speaking world the term "library science" seems to have been used for the first time in India in the 1916 book Punjab Library Primer, written by Asa Don Dickinson and published by the University of Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. This university was the first in Asia to begin teaching "library science". The Punjab Library Primer was the first textbook on library science published in English anywhere in the world. The first textbook in the United States was the Manual of Library Economy by James Duff Brown, published in 1903. +Later, the term was used in the title of S. R. Ranganathan's The Five Laws of Library Science, published in 1931, which contains Ranganathan's titular theory. Ranganathan is also credited with the development of the first major analytical-synthetic classification system, the colon classification. +In the United States, Lee Pierce Butler published his 1933 book An Introduction to Library Science (University of Chicago Press), where he advocated for research using quantitative methods and ideas in the social sciences with the aim of using librarianship to address society's information needs. He was one of the first faculty at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, which changed the structure and focus of education for librarianship in the twentieth century. This research agenda went against the more procedure-based approach of the "library economy", which was mostly confined to practical problems in the administration of libraries. +In 1923, Charles C. Williamson, who was appointed by the Carnegie Corporation, published an assessment of library science education entitled "The Williamson Report", which designated that universities should provide library science training. This report had a significant impact on library science training and education. Library research and practical work, in the area of information science, have remained largely distinct both in training and in research interests. +William Stetson Merrill's A Code for Classifiers, released in several editions from 1914 to 1939, is an example of a more pragmatic approach, where arguments stemming from in-depth knowledge about each field of study are employed to recommend a system of classification. While Ranganathan's approach was philosophical, it was also tied more to the day-to-day business of running a library. A reworking of Ranganathan's laws was published in 1995 which removes the constant references to books. Michael Gorman's Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century features the eight principles necessary by library professionals and incorporates knowledge and information in all their forms, allowing for digital information to be considered. + +==== From library science to LIS ==== +By the late 1960s, mainly due to the meteoric rise of human computing power and the new academic disciplines formed therefrom, academic institutions began to add the term "information science" to their names. The first school to do this was at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964. More schools followed during the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s almost all library schools in the US had added information science to their names. Although there are exceptions, similar developments have taken place in other parts of the world. In India, the Department of Library Science, University of Madras (southern state of Tamil Nadu, India) became the Department of Library and Information Science in 1976. In Denmark, for example, the "Royal School of Librarianship" changed its English name to The Royal School of Library and Information Science in 1997. + +=== 21st century === +The digital age has transformed how information is accessed and retrieved. "The library is now a part of a complex and dynamic educational, recreational, and informational infrastructure." Mobile devices and applications with wireless networking, high-speed computers and networks, and the computing cloud have deeply impacted and developed information science and information services. The evolution of the library sciences maintains its mission of access equity and community space, as well as the new means for information retrieval called information literacy skills. All catalogs, databases, and a growing number of books are available on the Internet. In addition, the expanding free access to open access journals and sources such as Wikipedia has fundamentally impacted how information is accessed. +Information literacy is the ability to "determine the extent of information needed, access the needed information effectively and efficiently, evaluate information and its sources critically, incorporate selected information into one's knowledge base, use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose, and understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally." In recent years, the concept of data literacy has emerged within library and information science as a complement to information literacy to refer to the ability to find, interpret, evaluate, manage, and ethically use data to support research, learning, and informed decision-making. +In the early 2000s, dLIST, Digital Library for Information Sciences and Technology was established. It was the first open access archive for the multidisciplinary 'library and information sciences' building a global scholarly communication consortium and the LIS Commons in order to increase the visibility of research literature, bridge the divide between practice, teaching, and research communities, and improve visibility, uncitedness, and integrate scholarly work in the critical information infrastructures of archives, libraries, and museums. +Social justice, an important ethical value in librarianship and in the 21st century has become an important research area, if not subdiscipline of LIS. + +== Journals == + +Some core journals in LIS are: + +Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) (1966–2011) +El Profesional de la Información (EPI) (1992–) (Formerly Information World en Español) +Information Processing and Management +Information Research: An International Electronic Journal (IR) (1995–) +Italian Journal of Library and Information Studies (JLIS.it) +Journal of Documentation (JDoc) (1945–) +Journal of Information Science (JIS) (1979–) +Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (formerly Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology) (JASIST) (1950–) +Knowledge Organization +Library Literature and Information Science Retrospective +Library Trends (1952–) +Scientometrics (journal) (1978–) +The Library Quarterly (LQ) (1931–) +Grandhalaya Sarvaswam (1915–) +Important bibliographical databases in LIS are, among others, Social Sciences Citation Index and Library and Information Science Abstracts \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1303c3fd1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,66 @@ +--- +title: "Library and information science" +chunk: 4/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:22.453410+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Conferences == +This is a list of some of the major conferences in the field. + +Annual meetings of the American Library Association. +Annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology +Annual meeting of the Association for Library and Information Science Education +Conceptions of Library and Information Science +Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians (CONSAL) +i-Schools' iConferences +The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA): World Library and Information Congress +African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) Conference + +== Subfields == + +Information science grew out of documentation science and therefore has a tradition for considering scientific and scholarly communication, bibliographic databases, subject knowledge and terminology etc. + +An advertisement for a full Professor in information science at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, spring 2011, provides one view of which sub-disciplines are well-established: "The research and teaching/supervision must be within some (and at least one) of these well-established information science areas +A curriculum study by Kajberg & Lørring in 2005 reported a "degree of overlap of the ten curricular themes with subject areas in the current curricula of responding LIS schools". + +Information seeking and Information retrieval 100% +Library management and promotion 96% +Knowledge management 86% +Knowledge organization 82% +Information literacy and learning 76% +Library and society in a historical perspective (Library history) 66% +The Information society: Barriers to the free access to information 64% +Cultural heritage and digitisation of the cultural heritage (Digital preservation) 62% +The library in the multi-cultural information society: International and intercultural communication 42% +Mediation of culture in a special European context 26% " +There is often an overlap between these subfields of LIS and other fields of study. Most information retrieval research, for example, belongs to computer science. Knowledge management is considered a subfield of management or organizational studies. + +=== Metadata === + +Pre-Internet classification systems and cataloging systems were mainly concerned with two objectives: + +To provide rich bibliographic descriptions and relations between information objects, and +To facilitate sharing of this bibliographic information across library boundaries. +The development of the Internet and the information explosion that followed found many communities needing mechanisms for the description, authentication and management of their information. These communities developed taxonomies and controlled vocabularies to describe their knowledge, as well as unique information architectures to communicate these classifications and libraries found themselves as liaison or translator between these metadata systems. The concerns of cataloging in the Internet era have gone beyond simple bibliographic descriptions and the need for descriptive information about the ownership and copyright of a digital product – a publishing concern – and description for the different formats and accessibility features of a resource – a sociological concern – show the continued development and cross discipline necessity of resource description. +In the 21st century, the usage of open data, open source and open protocols like OAI-PMH has allowed thousands of libraries and institutions to collaborate on the production of global metadata services previously offered only by increasingly expensive commercial proprietary products. Tools like BASE and Unpaywall automate the search of an academic paper across thousands of repositories by libraries and research institutions. + +=== Knowledge organization === + +Library science is very closely related to issues of knowledge organization; however, the latter is a broader term that covers how knowledge is represented and stored (computer science/linguistics), how it might be automatically processed (artificial intelligence), and how it is organized outside the library in global systems such as the internet. In addition, library science typically refers to a specific community engaged in managing holdings as they are found in university and government libraries, while knowledge organization, in general, refers to this and also to other communities (such as publishers) and other systems (such as the Internet). The library system is thus one socio-technical structure for knowledge organization. +The terms 'information organization' and 'knowledge organization' are often used synonymously. The fundamentals of their study - particularly theory relating to indexing and classification - and many of the main tools used by the disciplines in modern times to provide access to digital resources such as abstracting, metadata, resource description, systematic and alphabetic subject description, and terminology, originated in the 19th century and were developed, in part, to assist in making humanity's intellectual output accessible by recording, identifying, and providing bibliographic control of printed knowledge. +Information has been published that analyses the relations between the philosophy of information (PI), library and information science (LIS), and social epistemology (SE). + +=== Ethics === +Practicing library professionals and members of the American Library Association recognize and abide by the ALA Code of Ethics. According to the American Library Association, "In a political system grounded in an informed citizenry, we are members of a profession explicitly committed to intellectual freedom and freedom of access to information. We have a special obligation to ensure the free flow of information and ideas to present and future generations." The ALA Code of Ethics was adopted in the winter of 1939, and updated on June 29, 2021. + +== See also == + +== Notes == + +== References == + +== Further reading == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bf3eee306 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Library and information science" +chunk: 5/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_and_information_science" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:22.453410+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Åström, Fredrik (September 5, 2008). "Formalizing a discipline: The institutionalization of library and information science research in the Nordic countries". Journal of Documentation. 64 (5): 721–737. doi:10.1108/00220410810899736. +Bawden, David; Robinson, Lyn (August 20, 2012). Introduction to Information Science. American Library Association. ISBN 978-1555708610. +Hjørland, Birger (2000). "Library and information science: practice, theory, and philosophical basis". Information Processing & Management. 36 (3): 501–531. doi:10.1016/S0306-4573(99)00038-2. +Järvelin, Kalervo; Vakkari, Pertti (January 1993). "The evolution of library and information science 1965–1985: A content analysis of journal articles". Information Processing & Management. 29 (1): 129–144. doi:10.1016/0306-4573(93)90028-C. +Levine, Joyce, ed. (2016). The Jewish Library Handbook : A Guide for Synagogue, School and Center Libraries. United States: Association of Jewish Libraries. +McNicol, Sarah (March 2003). "LIS: the interdisciplinary research landscape". Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. 35 (1): 23–30. doi:10.1177/096100060303500103. S2CID 220912521. +Dick, Archie L. (1995). "Library and Information Science as a Social Science: Neutral and Normative Conceptions". The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy. 65 (2): 216–235. doi:10.1086/602777. JSTOR 4309022. S2CID 142825177. +Foundational Books in Library Services.1976-2024. LHRT News & Notes. October, 2024. +International Journal of Library Science (ISSN 0975-7546) +Lafontaine, Gerard S. (1958). Dictionary of Terms Used in the Paper, Printing, and Allied Industries. Toronto: H. Smith Paper Mills. 110 p. +The Oxford Guide to Library Research (2005) – ISBN 0195189981 +Smith, Gregory A., ed. (2002). Christian Librarianship : Essays on the Integration of Faith and Profession. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. +Taşkın, Zehra (2021). "Forecasting the future of library and information science and its sub-fields". Scientometrics. 126 (2): 1527–1551. doi:10.1007/s11192-020-03800-2. PMC 7745590. PMID 33353991. +Thompson, Elizabeth H. (1943). A.L.A. Glossary of Library Terms, with a Selection of Terms in Related Fields, prepared under the direction of the Committee on Library Terminology of the American Library Association. Chicago, Ill.: American Library Association. viii, 189 p. ISBN 978-0838900000 +V-LIB 1.2 (2008 Vartavan Library Classification, over 700 fields of sciences & arts classified according to a relational philosophy, currently sold under license in the UK by Rosecastle Ltd. (see Vartavan-Frame) + +== External links == + +LISNews.org Archived October 15, 2019, at the Wayback Machine – librarian and information science news +LISWire.com – librarian and information science wire \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-0.md index 9ed51f7d3..313d754ea 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T10:17:35.925447+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:54.114354+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-1.md index a7c5eea25..98e8f44aa 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T10:17:35.925447+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:54.114354+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-2.md index f8df8883a..ca059d148 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_Linked_Open_Data" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T10:17:35.925447+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:54.114354+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories-0.md index 1ea73e425..003c16eaf 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T14:25:13.684263+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:49.146031+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories-1.md index 00df125d1..0ec15bd4a 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_categories" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T14:25:13.684263+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:49.146031+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_demography-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_demography-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..749736129 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_demography-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistic demography" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_demography" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:50.383147+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Linguistic demography is the statistical study of languages among all populations. Estimating the number of speakers of a given language is not straightforward, and various estimates may diverge considerably. This is first of all due to the question of defining "language" vs. "dialect". Identification of varieties as a single language or as distinct languages is often based on ethnic, cultural, or political considerations rather than mutual intelligibility. The second difficulty is multilingualism, complicating the definition of "native language". Finally, in many countries, insufficient census data add to the difficulties. +Demolinguistics is a branch of Sociology of language observing linguistic trends as affected by population distribution and redistribution and by the status of societies. + + +== Most spoken languages == + +The following table compares the estimates of Comrie (1998) and Weber (1997) (number of native speakers in millions). Also given are the estimates of SIL Ethnologue (2005). +Comparing estimates that do not date to the same year is problematic due to the 1.14% per year growth of world population (with significant regional differences). + +This table shows that for the world's largest languages, it is impossible to give an estimate of the number of native speakers with a certainty better than maybe 10% or 20% or so. + + +== See also == +List of languages by number of native speakers +List of languages by total number of speakers +Abstand and ausbau languages +Autonomous language +Language geography +Languages in censuses +Case studies: + +Language demographics of Quebec +Language Spoken at Home + + +== Notes == + + +== Literature == +Johanna Nichols, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, University of Chicago Press (1992), ISBN 978-0-226-58056-2. +David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel (eds.), Census and Indentiry : The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses, ISBN 978-0-521-80823-1. +Jacques Pohl, Demolinguistics and Language Problems (1972). +H. Kloss, G. McConnell (eds.), Linguistic Composition of the Nations of the World vol. 2, North America, Quebec (1974–1984). + + +== External links == +CIA - The World Factbook +M.Turner compares five language surveys - first language vs total speakers, degree of influence, etc. Plus graphs and charts. +Top 100 languages +Ethnologue +Unicode.org Top Languages by GDP Graphs \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..913095245 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,65 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistic description" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:51.615275+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community. +All academic research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other scientific disciplines, it aims to describe reality, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be. Modern descriptive linguistics is based on a structural approach to language, as exemplified in the work of Leonard Bloomfield and others. This type of linguistics utilizes different methods in order to describe a language such as basic data collection, and different types of elicitation methods. + + +== Descriptive versus prescriptive linguistics == +Linguistic description, as used in academic and professional linguistics, is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, which is found especially in general education, language arts instruction, and the publishing industry. +As English-linguist Larry Andrews describes it, descriptive grammar is the linguistic approach which studies what a language is like, as opposed to prescriptive, which declares what a language should be like. In other words, descriptive grammarians focus analysis on how all kinds of people in all sorts of environments, usually in more casual, everyday settings, communicate, whereas prescriptive grammarians focus on the grammatical rules and structures predetermined by linguistic registers and figures of power. Andrews also believes that, although most linguists would be descriptive grammarians, most public school teachers tend to be prescriptive. +Webster's Third New International Dictionary was the subject of controversy over its use of linguistic description. It included words, pronunciations, and meanings that previous dictionaries would omit. It also labeled words such as ain't as "nonstandard," while older, prescriptive dictionaries may use terms such as "improper," "incorrect," or even "illiterate." This descriptive approach, while common in sociolinguistics, was seen as overly permissive by many who felt dictionaries ought to approach language prescriptively. + + +== History of the discipline == + +The earliest known descriptive linguistic work took place in a Sanskrit community in northern India; the most well-known scholar of that linguistic tradition was Pāṇini, whose works are commonly dated to around the 5th century BCE. Philological traditions later arose around the description of Greek, Latin, Chinese, Tamil, Hebrew, and Arabic. The description of modern European languages did not begin before the Renaissance – e.g. Spanish in 1492, French in 1532, English in 1586; the same period saw the first grammatical descriptions of Nahuatl (1547) or Quechua (1560) in the New World, followed by numerous others. +Even though more and more languages were discovered, the full diversity of language was not yet fully recognized. For centuries, language descriptions tended to use grammatical categories that existed for languages considered to be more prestigious, like Latin. +Linguistic description as a discipline really took off at the end of the 19th century, with the Structuralist revolution (from Ferdinand de Saussure to Leonard Bloomfield), and the notion that every language forms a unique symbolic system, different from other languages, worthy of being described “in its own terms”. + + +== Methods == +The first critical step of language description is to collect data. To do this, a researcher does fieldwork in a speech community of their choice, and they record samples from different speakers. The data they collect often comes from different kind of speech genres that include narratives, daily conversations, poetry, songs and many others. While speech that comes naturally is preferred, researchers use elicitation, by asking speakers for translations, grammar rules, pronunciation, or by testing sentences using substitution frames. Substitution frames are pre-made sentences put together by the researcher that are like fill in the blanks. They do this with nouns and verbs to see how the structure of the sentence might change or how the noun and verb might change in structure. +There are different types of elicitation used in the fieldwork for linguistic description. These include schedule controlled elicitation, and analysis controlled elicitation, each with their own sub branches. Schedule controlled elicitation is when the researcher has a questionnaire of material to elicit to individuals and asks the questions in a certain order according to a schedule. These types of schedules and questionnaires usually focus on language families, and are typically flexible and are able to be changed if need be. The other type of elicitation is analysis controlled elicitation which is elicitation that is not under a schedule. The analysis of the language here in fact controls the elicitation. There are many sub types of analysis controlled elicitation, such as target language interrogation elicitation, stimulus driven elicitation, and many other types of elicitation. Target language interrogation elicitation is when the researcher asks individuals questions in the target language, and the researcher records all the different answers from all the individuals and compares them. Stimulus driven elicitation is when a researcher provides pictures, objects or video clips to the language speakers and asks them to describe the items presented to them. These types of elicitation help the researcher build a vocabulary, and basic grammatical structures. +This process is long and tedious and spans over several years. This long process ends with a corpus, which is a body of reference materials, that can be used to test hypothesis regarding the language in question. + + +== Challenges == +Almost all linguistic theory has its origin in practical problems of descriptive linguistics. Phonology (and its theoretical developments, such as the phoneme) deals with the function and interpretation of sound in language. Syntax has developed to describe how words relate to each other in order to form sentences. Lexicology collects words as well as their derivations and transformations: it has not given rise to much generalized theory. +Linguistics description might aim to achieve one or more of the following goals: + +A description of the phonology of the language in question. +A description of the morphology of words belonging to that language. +A description of the syntax of well-formed sentences of that language. +A description of lexical derivation. +A documentation of the vocabulary, including at least one thousand entries. +A reproduction of a few genuine texts. + + +== See also == +African-American Vernacular English and social context +GOLD (ontology) +Grammatical gender +Language documentation +Linguistic relativity +Linguistic typology +Mondegreen +Text linguistics + + +== References == + + +== Bibliography == +Ameka, Felix K.; Alan Charles Dench; Nicholas Evans (2006). Catching language: the standing challenge of grammar writing. Walter de Gruyter. p. 662. ISBN 3-11-018603-9. +Chelliah, Shobhana L.; de Reuse, Willem J. (2011). Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-9026-3. ISBN 978-90-481-9025-6. +François, Alexandre; Ponsonnet, Maïa (2013). "Descriptive linguistics" (PDF). In Jon R. McGee; Richard L. Warms (eds.). Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. SAGE Publications, Inc. pp. 184–187. ISBN 9781412999632. +Haviland, William A. (2005). Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge. Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 978-0534624873 +Renouf, Antoinette & Andrew Kehoe (2006). The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics 408 pp. p. 377. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_ecology-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_ecology-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4ed6d6c6e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_ecology-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistic ecology" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_ecology" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:52.834796+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Linguistic ecology or language ecology is the study of how languages interact with each other and the places they are spoken in, and frequently argues for the preservation of endangered languages as an analogy of the preservation of biological species. +The term was first used in an article on the "language situation" in Arizona (Voegelin, Voegelin and Schutz, 1967). It was taken up by Einar Haugen, who pioneered a form of linguistics which used the metaphor of an ecosystem to describe the relationships among the diverse forms of language found in the world, and the groups of people who speak them. + + +== Description == +Linguistic ecology is represented by the journal Language Ecology, which describes the field as follows: + +The ecology of language is a framework for the study of language as conceptualised primarily in Einar Haugen's 1971/72 work, where he defines language ecology as "the study of interactions between any given language and its environment". It was a reaction to the abstract notion of language – as a monolithic, decontextualised, static entity – propagated by Chomsky, and it was conceived as a broad and interdisciplinary framework. In his use of 'ecology' as a metaphor from biology in linguistics, Haugen formulated ten questions which together comprehensively address factors pertaining to the positioning of languages in their environment. Each of these relates to a traditional sub-field of the study of language – encompassing historical linguistics, linguistic demography, sociolinguistics, contact, variation, philology, planning and policy, politics of language, ethnolinguistics, and typology – and each of them intersects with one or more of the other sub-fields. Taken together, answering some or all of these questions is part of the enterprise of the ecology of language. Since then the notion of ecology in linguistics has evolved to address matters of social, educational, historical and developmental nature. With the development of ecology as a special branch of biology, and issues of the 20th and 21st centuries such as migration, hybridity and marginalisation coming to the fore, the notion of language ecology plays an important part in addressing broad issues of language and societal change, endangerment, human rights, as well as more theoretical questions of classification and perceptions of languages, as envisaged in Haugen's work. +Linguistic ecology has sometimes been described as a form of ecolinguistics (e.g., in Fill and Mühlhäusler). However, some studies in language ecology refer only to language within a social context and disregard the ecological context of the living ecosystems and physical environment that life depends on, so could be considered to be more sociolinguistic in nature. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and David Harmon (2018) write that "There has been a tendency of many sociolinguists to pay only lip service to the literal sense of ‘ecology’ and to focus only on social concerns. They see the ‘eco-’ in ecolinguistics/language ecology as a relationship within and between various languages, speakers of these languages and their sociocultural and economic contexts.". Other studies, however, are relevant to ecolinguistics because they describe the association of high linguistic diversity with high biological diversity (see Bastardas-Boada 2002). The relationship between linguistic diversity and biodiversity is claimed to arise since local ecological knowledge is built into local language varieties and threatened if the local language is threatened by a more dominant language (see Skutnabb-Kangas and Harmon 2017, Mühlhäusler 1995). + + +== See also == +Language geography +Language policy +Linguistic rights +Sociolinguistics + + +== References == + + +== Literature == +Bastardas-Boada, Albert (1996) Ecologia de les llengües. Medi, contactes i dinàmica sociolingüística. Barcelona: Proa. [English translation: Ecology of languages. Sociolinguistic environment, contacts and dynamics, in Bastardas-Boada, A. (2019), From language shift to language revitalization and sustainability. A complexity approach to linguistic ecology. Barcelona: Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona]. +Bastardas-Boada, Albert (2002) "Biological and linguistic diversity: Transdisciplinary explorations for a socioecology of languages" Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine Diverscité langues, vol. VII. +Bastardas-Boada, Albert (2002) "The Ecological perspective: Benefits and risks for Sociolinguistics and Language Policy and Planning", in: Fill, Alwin, Hermine Penz, & W. Trampe (eds.), Colourful Green Ideas. Berna: Peter Lang, pp. 77–88. +Bastardas-Boada, Albert (2007) "Linguistic sustainability for a multilingual humanity" Glossa. An Interdisciplinary Journal vol. 2, num. 2. +Bastardas-Boada, Albert (2017). “The ecology of language contact: Minority and majority languages”, in: Alwin F. Fill, Hermine Penz (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics, p. 26-39. +Calvet, Jean-Louis (1999) Pour une écologie des langues du monde. Plon +Fill, A. and Mühlhäusler, P., 2001. Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment. Bloomsbury Publishing. +Hornberger, N.H., & Hult, F.M. (2008). Ecological language education policy. In B. Spolsky & F.M. Hult (Eds.), Handbook of educational linguistics (pp. 280-296). Malden, MA: Blackwell. +Hult, F.M. (2009). Language ecology and linguistic landscape analysis. In E. Shohamy & D. Gorter (Eds.), Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery (pp. 88-104). London: Routledge. +Hult, F.M. (2010). Analysis of language policy discourses across the scales of space and time. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 202, 7-24. +Hult, F.M. (2012). Ecology and multilingual education. In C. Chapelle (Gen. Ed.), Encyclopedia of applied linguistics (Vol. 3, pp. 1835-1840). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. +Language Ecology 2016 [1] +Mühlhäusler, Peter (1995) Linguistic Ecology; Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Rim. London: Routledge. +Sánchez Carrión, José María (1985). "La nueva sociolingüistica y la ecología de las lenguas". Eusko Ikaskuntza. Donostia-San Sebastián. Archived from the original on Mar 7, 2016. +Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove and David Harmon (2017) Biological Diversity and Language Diversity. In Fill and Penz (eds) Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics. London Routledge. + +Steffensen, Sune Vork (2007): "Language, Ecology and Society: An introduction to Dialectical Linguistics". In: Bang, Jørgen Christian and Jørgen Døør (eds) Language, Ecology and Society. A Dialectical Approach. Edited by Sune Vork Steffensen and Joshua Nash. London: Continuum. Pp. 3–31. +C.F. Voegelin, F. M. Voegelin and Noel W. Schutz, Jr. The language situation in Arizona as part of the Southwest culture area" in Studies in Southwestern Ethnolinguistics: Meaning and history in the languages of the American Southwest, ed. by Dell Hymes and William E. Bittle, 403–51, 1967. The Hague: Mouton. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_monogenesis_and_polygenesis-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_monogenesis_and_polygenesis-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8e96f6d19 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_monogenesis_and_polygenesis-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistic monogenesis and polygenesis" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_monogenesis_and_polygenesis" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:55.432595+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In historical or evolutionary linguistics, monogenesis and polygenesis are two different hypotheses about the phylogenetic origin of human languages. According to monogenesis, human language arose only once in a single community, and all current languages come from the first original tongue. On the other hand, according to polygenesis, human languages came into being in several communities independently, and current tongues derived from different sources. + + +== Monogenesis == +The monogenetic theory posits a single origin of all of the world's oral languages and it is the most accepted theory. It states that all current languages have formed through language change from a single tongue that gradually differentiated into mutually unintelligible languages. The first scholar to publish this theory was Alfredo Trombetti, in the book L'Unità d'origine del linguaggio, published in 1905. More recently, Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen, proponents of monogenesis, argue that in modern languages there is sufficient evidence to reconstruct part of the original language (called Proto-World or Proto-Sapiens). However, this claim has been highly controversial and the reconstructions made by Ruhlen are often discredited by mainstream linguists. +Some studies seemed to correlate genetic and phonemic diversity, but this approach has been criticized thoroughly. +Some proponents of monogenesis are Alfredo Trombetti, Joseph Greenberg, Harold C. Fleming, Merritt Ruhlen and John Bengtson. + + +=== History === +The first serious scientific attempt to establish the reality of monogenesis was that of Alfredo Trombetti, in his book L'unità d'origine del linguaggio, published in 1905. Trombetti estimated that the common ancestor of existing languages had been spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. +In the 1950s, Morris Swadesh was one of the most important supporters of monogenesis. He created two controversial methods based on previous ideas, namely lexicostatistics and glottochronology. +In the second half of the 20th century, Joseph Greenberg produced a series of controversial large-scale classifications of the world's languages. Although Greenberg did not produce an explicit argument for monogenesis, all of his classification work was geared toward this end. As he stated, "The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family." + + +== Polygenesis == +Polygenesis points to a multiple origin of human languages. According to this hypothesis, languages evolved as several lineages independent of one another. +Modern investigation about creole languages demonstrated that with an appropriate linguistic input or pidgin, children develop a language with stable and defined grammar in one generation. Creole languages descend from pidgins. Another example is Nicaraguan Sign Language, created from isolated signs that did not form a set of stable rules, and thus did not then constitute an authentic language. +Polygenesis is not to be confused with the wave theory, originally propounded by Johannes Schmidt. +Some proponents of polygenesis are David A. Freedman, William Shi-Yuan Wang, Cristophe Coupé, and Jean-Marie Hombert. + + +=== History === +Two of the earliest supporters of polygenesis were August Schleicher and Ernst Haeckel. Their ideas of linguistic polygenesis were linked with polygenism: it stated that several language families arose independently from speechless Urmenschen (German: proto-humans). According to Haeckel, + +We must mention here one of the most important results of the comparative study of languages, which for the Stammbaum of the species of men is of the highest significance, namely that human languages probably had a multiple or polyphyletic origin. Human language as such probably developed only after the species of speechless Urmenschen or Affenmenschen (German: ape-men) had split into several species or kinds. With each of these human species, language developed on its own and independently of the others. At least this is the view of Schleicher, one of the foremost authorities on this subject. ... If one views the origin of the branches of language as the special and principal act of becoming human, and the species of humankind as distinguished according to their language stem, then one can say that the different species of men arose independently of one another. +Polygenesis was accepted by many linguists in the late 19th and early 20th century, when polygenism was popularized. +In the 1990s and 2000s, interest in polygenesis reappeared, with papers written by David A. Freedman, William S-Y. Wang, Cristophe Coupé, and Jean-Marie Hombert. + + +== Bibliography == +Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. The Languages of Africa, revised edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Published simultaneously at The Hague by Mouton & Co.) +Greenberg, Joseph H. 1971. "The Indo-Pacific hypothesis." Reprinted in Joseph H. Greenberg, Genetic Linguistics: Essays on Theory and Method, edited by William Croft, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. +Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. +Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000–2002. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family. Volume 1: Grammar. Volume 2: Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press. +Ruhlen, Merritt. 1994. On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. +Trombetti, Alfredo. 1905. L'unità d'origine del linguaggio. Bologna: Luigi Beltrami. +Trombetti, Alfredo. 1922–1923. Elementi di glottologia, 2 volumes. Bologna: Zanichelli. + + +== See also == +Monogenetic theory of pidgins +Proto-human language +Monogenism +Polygenism +August Schleicher +Ernst Haeckel +The Tower of Babel + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_norm-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_norm-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ba1be7ac8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_norm-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistic norm" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_norm" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:56.645906+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The literary norm, linguistic norm, linguistic standard, or language norm is a historically determined set of commonly used language assets, as well as rules for their selection and use, which have been recognized by society as the most appropriate in a particular historical period. These are the collective rules for implementing the language system. +The language norm is one of the essential properties of language, ensuring its functioning and historical continuity due to its inherent stability, although not excluding the variability of language devices and noticeable historical variability, since the norm is intended, on the one hand, to preserve speech traditions, and on the other, to satisfy current and changing social needs. + + +== Notes == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_system-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_system-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8de62fc78 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_system-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistic system" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_system" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:57.810441+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The idea of language as a linguistic system appears in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, J.R. Firth, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Louis Hjelmslev, and Michael Halliday. +The paradigmatic principle - the idea that the process of using language involves choosing from a specifiable set of options - was established in semiotics by Saussure, whose concept of value (viz. “valeur”), and of signs as terms in a system, “showed up paradigmatic organization as the most abstract dimension of meaning” + + +== 'System' in systemic functional linguistics == +“System” is used in two related ways in systemic functional linguistics (SFL). SFL uses the idea of system to refer to language as a whole, (e.g. “the system of language”). This usage derives from Hjelmslev. In this context, Jay Lemke describes language as an open, dynamic system. +There is also the notion of “system” as used by J.R. Firth, where linguistic systems are considered to furnish the background for elements of structure. Halliday argues that, unlike system in the sense in which it was used by Firth was a conception only found in Firth’s linguistic theory. +In this use of the term “system”, grammatical, or other features of language, are considered best understood when described as sets of options. Thus, “the most abstract categories of the grammatical description are the systems together with their options (systemic features). A systemic grammar differs from other functional grammars (and from all formal grammars) in that it is paradigmatic: a system is paradigmatic set of alternative features, of which one must be chosen if the entry condition is satisfied. +In Halliday’s early work, “system” was considered to be one of four fundamental categories for the theory of grammar, the others being unit, structure and class. The category of ‘system’ was invoked to account for “the occurrency of one rather than another from among a number of like events” At that time, Halliday defined grammar as “that level of linguistic form at which operate closed systems” +In adopting a system perspective on language, systemic functional linguistics can be seen as part of a more general 20th and 21st century reaction against atomistic approaches to science, in which an essence is sought after within smaller and smaller components of the phenomenon under study. In systems thinking, any delineated object of study is defined by its relations to other units postulated by the theory. In systemic functional linguistics, this has been described as the trinocular perspective. Thus a descriptive category must be defended from three perspectives: from above (‘what does it construe?’ ‘what effect does it have in a context of use?’), below (‘how is this function realized?’) and round about (‘what else is in the neighbourhood?’ ‘what other things does this thing have to interact with?’). This gives systemic functional linguistics an affinity with studies of complex systems. + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +Baggio, G., Van Lambalgen, M., & Hagoort, P. (2012) processing consequences of compositionality, in M. Werning, W. Hinzen, & E. Machery (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of compositionality (pp. 655–672). Oxford University Press. +Johnson, K. (2004) On the systematicity of language and thought, in The Journal of Philosophy, 101(3), pp. 111-139. +Pullum, G. K., & Scholz, B. C. (2007) Systematicity and natural language syntax in Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 7(21), 375-402. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-0.md index 028be182a..513ee036e 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:15:13.070396+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:27.899257+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-1.md index fedda9ba2..51ef21a94 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:15:13.070396+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:27.899257+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-2.md index f8ba46807..235b652e2 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:15:13.070396+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:27.899257+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-3.md index 38cb2c955..0a27a964a 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-3.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-3.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 4/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:15:13.070396+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:27.899257+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-4.md index bdad9ff4d..7c76e879d 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-4.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-4.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 5/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:15:13.070396+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:27.899257+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-5.md index dbaac960f..ceb9f37a3 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-5.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics-5.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 6/6 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:15:13.070396+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:27.899257+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..619479171 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 1/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Linguistics has an intrinsic connection to science fiction stories given the nature of the genre and its frequent use of alien settings and cultures. As mentioned in Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction by Walter E. Meyers, science fiction is almost always concerned with the idea of communication, such as communication with aliens and machines, or communication using dead languages and evolved languages of the future. Authors at times use linguistics and its theories as a tool for storytelling, as in Jack Vance's 1958 novel Languages of Pao, although technical terms are rarely used, and authors only go into as much detail as the average reader will understand. +While linguistics is used by science fiction authors, not all uses are accurate to actual linguistics and its theories. Nevertheless, there still exists the lingering presence and use of linguistics (even if inaccurate) in such cases. As mentioned by Walter E. Meyers, the ability to make a story seem more unfamiliar and exotic, and an alien seem less of a costumed human who merely differs in physical appearance, is only possible through the use of language. It is this ability that appears to draw the boundary between great works of science fiction and those lesser so. As such, linguistics, the scientific study of language, comes to hold an important role in the genre of science fiction. + +== History == + +=== The Lord of the Rings and linguistics === + +Since the mid-19th century, science fiction works using language as the heart of the plot, rather than just a convenient means to advance the story, have reflected the history of linguistics. One such case of the history of linguistics being intertwined with the makings of science fiction involves the author J. R. R. Tolkien, who is known for fantasy works such as The Lord of the Rings. +This history begins with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which was 70 years in the making and aimed at "...exhibiting the history and significance of English words now in use, or known to have been in use since the middle of the 12th century". William Craigie, one of the editors of the OED, tutored undergraduates at Oxford including Tolkien, whom he later invited to work as a junior editor of the OED. According to Daniel Grotta-Kurska, Tolkien’s biographer, it was Craigie who provided "Tolkien’s greatest impetus to transform Elvish from an experiment to a life-long pursuit". +As Tolkien built the Elvish language, his fantasy works were aimed at providing a setting for it. The Silmarillion, which covered the First and Second Age (a period of time before The Lord of the Rings), was said by Tolkien as having been: + +"...primarily linguistic in inspiration and was begun in order to provide the necessary background of ‘history’ for Elvish tongues." +As Walter E. Meyers pointed out, + +"...Tolkien would shape his narrative to fit not just one language at a particular time, but a whole world of languages in earlier and later stages, some related and some not, all molded by principles of historic change." +True to this, Paul Kocher noticed that the evolution of the languages of Middle-Earth was similar to that of the Indo-European languages. +As Meyers noted, the rich linguistic details encapsulated within The Lord of the Rings made reading it feel: + +"... more like reading history, during which we know that the author has not exhausted the subject in the discussion of it." +Meyers attributes most of this feeling to the languages of The Lord of the Rings, explaining, + +"We know the existence of a realm of perception beyond our experience when we travel to a country whose language we do not speak. All around us we hear unknown yet articulate sounds, and we know that a culture lies behind them, a culture to which we can be admitted with patience and study. +It is much the same with LR; yet there we do not travel not in a foreign country, but in a foreign world, for the languages we encounter are many." +In The Lord of the Rings, all the different beings (dwarves, elves, humans and orcs) spoke different languages and dialects, with only the hobbits speaking English. The riders of Rohan (Middle-earth) spoke Rohirric, illustrated by Tolkien using slightly disguised Old English (especially since the language was archaic compared to that of the hobbits). The orcs even had a language with different dialects while the language of the elves had history narrated into it. +The efforts employed by Tolkien to fully create the languages of The Lord of the Rings and the importance he gives them are obvious from his attention to linguistic detail. This attention to linguistic detail was so great, Meyers in his work Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction was able to conduct a linguistic analysis on Tolkien’s Elvish languages (Middle-earth). Although the full analysis will not be provided, the following content are some conclusions he derived from the analysis. +With regards to Elvish, there are two forms: Quenya and Sindarin. These two forms are somehow related, with both being derived from an older form of language, although Quenya was more similar to that older form and retained certain features of it. The word order of Quenya poetry is flexible, as the suffixes on the words showed their relationships, similar to many inflected languages in the real world, such as Latin. Quenya appeared to be like Indo-European languages in its structure, where, for example, a verb consists of a prefix (if any), a root and an ending that show grammatical tense, grammatical aspect and number. +As Meyers concludes from this analysis, \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..67f82dd70 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 2/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"Tolkien’s great trilogy, together with The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, is a full embodiment of historical linguistics’ highest aims." +With Tolkien’s efforts in his works, science fiction authors have honoured him by referencing his creations in their own works. One example of such a case is Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, in which the protagonist, Barlennan, sails a ship named ‘’Bree’’, referencing Tolkien’s Barliman Butterbur, the owner of the inn ‘The Prancing Pony’ The Prancing Pony in the town of Bree (Middle-earth). In James Tiptree Jr.’s Your Haploid Heart, Mordor, a fictional realm in Tolkien’s works, was used as a common obscenity, similar to how we use ‘Hell’. A. Bertram Chandler’s To Keep the Ship even mentioned a constellation named ‘The Hobbit’. +Several books also went into depth about the languages in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. One example of this is the Parma Eldalamberon (see: Elvish Linguistic Fellowship), a special interest group of the Mythopoeic Society. Another example is A Glossary of the Eldarin Tongues written by James D. Allan in 1972, before it was replaced by An Introduction to Elvish, which discussed the languages in Middle-earth, in 1978. + +=== Whorf and science fiction === +Franz Boas, was a self-taught linguist, who focused on the aboriginal languages of North America. His field experience led to the realisation that using the traditional method of analyzing Western European languages would not work for other languages. Boas wrote the Handbook of American Indian Languages in 1911, justifying his methods in the book by saying: + +"It is important at this point to emphasize the fact that the group of ideas expressed by specific phonetic groups show material differences in different languages, and do not conform by any means to the same principles of classification." +Edward Sapir met Boas in 1904, and was inspired to begin analysing American Indian languages. Sapir then became Benjamin Lee Whorf’s mentor. Some parts of Whorf’s later ideas can be found in Sapir’s works, such as in linguistic relativity, which is sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. +In 1924, Whorf wrote a science fiction novel called The Ruler of the Universe, which remained unpublished. It narrated the destruction of Earth by a horrific chain reaction caused by the military's research on atomic fission. According to Peter C. Rollins, it was during the writing of this work that Whorf began to consider the relation between Language and Thought, resulting in the principle of linguistic relativity. +As summarised by Meyers, + +"The central question of linguistic relativity is this: does our perception of reality constrain our language or does our language constrain our perception of reality?" +This came to suggest that language influenced the naming of places (similar to gender assignments seen in Spanish nouns), an example of language constraining our perception of reality. +In ‘’Science and Linguistics’’, Whorf stated that: + +"All observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated." +Whorf’s principle of linguistic relativity was very much used as material for science fiction novels. For example, it appeared in Philip José Farmer’s Prometheus, in which the protagonist, at one point, suggested teaching different groups of aliens different languages, to test the Whorf hypothesis. +As pointed out by Meyers, + +"The Whorf hypothesis has a corollary: if it is true that our language determines our perception of reality, then whoever controls language controls the perceptions of reality as well. If language can be controlled. Then would-be despots have available a subtle and efficient means of restricting thought." +This is explored in George Orwell’s work, Nineteen Eighty-four. The novel tells the story of a government that practises totalitarianism, where even thoughts could be considered an offence (see: Thoughtcrime). Newspeak was created by the government, which was a much narrower form of English, to limit freedom of thought. The list of vocabulary grew smaller each year, and the meanings of the words were reduced as well, all to fit into the political goals of the ruling party. + +"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. … Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. … The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect." +However, the Whorf hypothesis could also work to the advantage of human beings. This was seen in Jack Vance’s The Languages of Pao, in which the planet Pao was invaded by another planet and the son of the Emperor of Pao was placed on the throne as the invaders’ puppet. The son, Beran Panasper, sought the help of a scientist, Palafox, from another planet, Breakness, to free Pao. As one of Palafox’s sons said: + +"Think of a language as the contour of a watershed, stopping flow in certain directions, channeling it into others. Language controls the mechanism of your mind. When people speak different languages, their minds work differently and they act differently." +Linguistic Relativity continues to play a large role in the story, where language constrains world-views of the speaker and can be used as a tool to control or liberate the people. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-10.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-10.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..004cf241a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-10.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 11/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"Computer simulation of primate vocal range was unknown when de Camp wrote, of course, but there had been indications, even in science fiction itself, that without changes in bone structure and musculature, the baboons could not have mastered the phonology of Xhosa or any other human language." +A good example of a detailed explanation into human speech production in primates can be seen in Pithecanthropus Rejectus by Manly Wade Wellman. In the story, Wellman details the problems faced by the character, an ape, in human speech production as well as how it was overcome by "the Doctor", another character in the story. + +"As I learned to speak and to comprehend, I found out the cause of those pains. I was told by the tall, smiling blond woman who taught me to call her ‘Mother’. She explained that I had been born with no opening in the top of my skull - so needed for bone and brain expansion - and that the man of the house - ‘Doctor’ - had made such an opening governing the growth of my cranium and later stopping the hole with a silver plate. My jaw, too, had been altered with silver, for when I was born it had been too shallow and narrow to give my tongue play. The building of a chin for me and the remodeling of several tongue-muscles had made it possible for me to speak." +Another method used by science fiction writers to introduce physical changes enabling human speech production in non-human animals is genetic engineering. This method appeared in Doomship by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson. In the story, Pohl and Williamson also describe the challenges involved in human speech production by non-human animals: + +"A chimpanzee is simply not human. His physiology is one count against him. He cannot develop the brain of a human being because his skull is the wrong shape - and because the chemistry of his blood does not carry enough nourishment to meet the demands of abstract thought. He cannot fully master speech because he lacks the physical equipment to form the wide variety of phonemes in human language. The molecular-biology people knew how to deal with that. They could do things like widening the angle of the cranium called the kyphosis, thus allowing the brain to round out full frontal lobes, or restructuring tongue and palate, even adding new serum components to the blood like the alpha2 globulins that bind human hemoglobin." +Issues with cognitively enhanced animals (uplifted) learning human languages is a theme in the Uplift Universe novels by David Brin. The dolphins in Startide Rising speak three languages: Primal, Trinary and Anglic. Primal and Trinary are represented as haiku-esque poems, while Anglic is a hypothetical English-derivative rendered for the reader as standard English. + +=== Humans learning animal languages === +When it comes to the less popular and much rarer theme of humans learning the languages of the animals, there are only few examples present in science fiction works. Known examples would include the following: + +In Clarke’s story, however, the device, resembling an over-sized wrist watch, would convert pre-selected words (appearing as buttons on the device) into the language of dolphins. This does not really involve learning the animal language itself but rather relies on a translation device (Related to Automatic Translators). However this does imply that the animal language has already been decoded and learnt, for the device to work. + +== Telepathy == +Telepathy has been a recurring motif (narrative) in science fiction stories, for the most part being used as a convenient tool to bypass linguistic problems that writers encounter. This is illustrated in H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923). In this science fiction story, telepathy is used in daily communications, although the accuracy of what is communicated differs from person to person, with thought being rephrased and reflected based on the receiver's linguistic ability. Wells, through his character's dialogue, directly mentions how convenient a solution telepathy is to linguistic problems such as language barriers (related to: Alien Communication): + +"And all things considered, it is really very convenient for us that there should be this method of transmission. For otherwise, I do not see how we could have avoided weeks of linguistic bother, first principles of our respective grammars, logic, significs, and so forth, boring stuff for the most part, before we could have got to anything like our present understanding"However, while conveniently giving a solution to that linguistic issue, Wells's form of telepathy seemed to create problems for other aspects of linguistics. Given that language change is a result of variations in speech, Walter E. Meyers suggested that this telepathy would result in an obstruction to language evolution (see: Evolutionary Change). +"...a universal telepathic power would slow down, and perhaps even halt [language] change altogether, if (and this is an important condition) change in language results from normal but inevitable variation in speech forms" +Although affecting speech, telepathy would not isolate writing from changes, as illustrated by Burrough in his Martian novels, where Mars has several forms of written language despite having only one spoken language. +As noted by Walter E. Meyers, Wells use of telepathy implies that: + +"...telepathy transmits linguistic constructions" +In doing so, however, differences between linguistic, lexical, and even cultural concepts of different language speakers would still hinder understanding between speakers using telepathy. The challenges presented by cultural barriers, for example, was presented in the work Prott by Margaret St. Clair, in which a telepath laments that despite conducting 52 interviews with aliens named "Prott" he has been unable to learn much. As John W. Campbell pointed out in an editorial (see: Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Astounding, June 1941) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-11.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-11.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0ad06ad96 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-11.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 12/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"Most of our words have background references that we know so well we tend to overlook them." +As per this quote, these background references may be easily understood by speakers of a language but not to the rest. Paul A. Carter summarised this well, explaining that "... in situations demanding discernment of the cultural context of words, there might be trouble.". +Given such a problem, some science-fiction writers suggested pictures were transmitted via telepathy instead of words. This could be seen in works like Judith Merril’s Whoever You Are and Michael Elder’s Flight to Terror (also known as Perfumed Planet). However, the process of transmitting pictures still involves a hidden form of linguistic structure, as mentioned by Meyers: + +"It is difficult to divorce the transmission of information in whatever medium from predications; introspection, if we can rely on it, seems to confirm that we think in linguistic structures." +This brings back the question of barriers in language mentioned before. Stanley G. Weinbaum attempted to address this issue in his work The Lotus Eaters, where the partly telepathetic alien learned the language from humans through its ability to read links between words as well as the conceptual meanings of the words, though only after the words are used by the humans. One other example of this concept of telepathy being limited to the surface of one’s conscious mind appears in To Die in Italbar by Roger Zelazny. +Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, however, presents a rather convincing argument that words, and not pictures, are transmitted through telepathy. In the novel, the characters tried telepathy without using any words, but found "...the silly, incoherent rumbling that went on in [the other’s] mind in place of thought was as confusing and annoying, as senseless as finding yourself inside another person’s dream. The habitual receiving of each other’s thoughts as words was explained by the psychologist in the novel as: + +"The ears and eyes and fingers are just data collectors; it is the brain that abstracts order out of chaos of data and gives it meaning… You expect words, your brain ‘hears’ words; it is a process used to and knows how to handle." +Despite all these explanations offered by science fiction authors, telepathy still seems to be something unknown. As written in Blind Alley by Isaac Asimov: + +"Telepathy! Telepathy! Telepathy! Might as well say by witch brew; Nobody knows anything about telepathy except its name. What is the mechanism of telepathy? What is the physiology and the physics of it?" +Several characters in science fiction novels do attempt to explore the workings of telepathy, however, such as the characters in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Command Performance, or Fritz Leiber’s Deadly Moon. +Regardless of the reason behind the use of telepathy by authors of science fiction, whether a real interest in the topic or convenience, it is as Meyers points out: + +"...there is no question that writers find the subject a fertile one for an array of linguistic functions." + +== Dystopian and utopian works == +In Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction, Walter E. Meyers stated that whether a work is dystopian or utopian is a matter of perspective. To decide if a science fiction piece is intended by the author to be a dystopia or a utopia, Meyers argued, it is helpful to examine the language use in the fictional world of the book. The method that Meyers suggested in his book is not one of stylistics but to instead study how the language(s) spoken by characters are dictated, or not, by their leaders. According to Meyers, 30% to 50% of science fiction works touch on language in some ways while a high percentage of utopian science fiction works have language as a concern; at the same time, the importance of language can be missed by science fiction authors. +For this type of analysis, Meyers established that works of science fiction intended as dystopian would involve thought control by fictional governments, often done through the control of the language of their fictional citizens. This means that more often than not, science fiction authors who touch on language are subscribers of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. +This type of language control can be seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the use of Newspeak, which was aimed at making unorthodox political thought impossible. A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms by Jonathan Swift is another example of this control. In his book, Meyers described Swift’s manipulation in the novel as "eliminat[ing] dissent by destroying the ability of language to express fictions, theories, falsehoods, indeed, anything other than a statement of fact". In short, Swift’s manipulation of language was an attempt to manipulate reality in his novel. +For these authors’ dystopian governments to work, Meyers argued that they "must not only enslave words, but also prevent the natural forces of languages from freeing them". This was because language change could become a form of liberation; words for dissent can be borrowed from other languages, made from existing words or coined entirely anew. To prevent language change from happening, authors wrote certain preventative measures into their stories. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-12.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-12.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..57544e250 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-12.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 13/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Meyers also claimed that languages were used in science fiction as a tool for world building where authors often manipulated language in order to make their fictional worlds a dystopian one. Meyers even went as far as to claim that the genre was "especially suited" for giving instruction about language. +Meyers also lamented on the different ways science fiction missed out on opportunities to make a well-rounded and holistic manipulation of language for world building. One example he gave was of The Troika Incident by James Cooke Brown. Brown wrote the novel to test, with Loglan, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The characters in the novel were given the constructed language under the name Panlan to see if the constraints of the language would make their thought more logical. Given its utopian nature, Brown wrote the novel such that Loglan speakers had a perfect feedback loop and kept improving the language as they spoke it, making it more logical. Loglan speakers, however, need to expand the vocabulary of Loglan for their society to function. Yet, as Meyers pointed out, Brown missed the opportunity to expand on how the language might evolve in the novel. +Meyers also mentioned specific examples of figurative and creative uses of language that would not work in Loglan, which Brown could have gone in depth about. For example, if there were a music band named The Killers in the fictional world of the novel, speakers would need to create a word in Loglan that could be glossed as kill.ɴᴍᴢ, yet can not be understood as a synonym of murderer. By design, creative word use would not work in Loglan. Additionally, Meyers commented that Brown neglected the possibility of language change in his fictional world, which might have made Loglan less logical than he would have liked. +Meyers also argued that if fictional societies in science fiction were great, they were so "in spite of a language designed for propaganda and a government willing to employ it" + +== See also == +Bongo-Bongo (linguistics) +Elvish languages (Middle-earth) +Folk linguistics +List of common misconceptions about language learning +Perceptual dialectology + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Aires, Nick (2005). "First Contact". In Westfahl, Gary (ed.). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 295–297. ISBN 978-0-313-32951-7. +Barrette, Elizabeth (2005). "Language and Linguistics". In Westfahl, Gary (ed.). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 461–464. ISBN 978-0-313-32952-4. +Ekman, F: "The Martial Language of Percy Greg", Invented Languages Summer 2008, p0. 11. Richard K. Harrison, 2008 +Lubin, Gus (21 November 2016). "'Arrival' nails how humans might actually talk to aliens, a linguist says". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 2018-01-17. Retrieved 2018-01-19. +Nicholls, Peter; Langford, David (2022). "Linguistics". In Clute, John; Langford, David; Sleight, Graham (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (4th ed.). Retrieved 2025-06-15. +Stableford, Brian (2006). "Linguistics". Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. Taylor & Francis. pp. 270–272. ISBN 978-0-415-97460-8. +Stanway, Elizabeth (2025-06-15). "Language and Linguistics". Warwick University. Cosmic Stories Blog. Archived from the original on 2025-06-15. Retrieved 2025-06-15. +Jonathan Vos Post, Me Human, You Alien: How to Talk to an Extraterrestrial Archived 24 October 2012 at the Wayback Machine; In: "Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters" by Ronald Story (2001) ISBN 0-451-20424-7 +Westfahl, Gary (2021). "Linguistics". Science Fiction Literature through History: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. pp. 408–411. ISBN 978-1-4408-6617-3. + +== External links == +A Primer In SF XENOLINGUISTICS Archived 2010-08-24 at the Wayback Machine, by Justin B. Rye \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3ac889ae8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 3/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== After WWII === +Science fiction works after WWII were influenced by the beliefs behind Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics. When Korzybski launched General Semantics as a self-improvement program, John W. Campbell Jr. promoted its belief system to many widely read science fiction authors and encouraged people to write about it in works of science fiction. This is in spite of the fact that General Semantics has nothing to do with linguistics. As such, science fiction works of this era often contradict actual psycholinguistic theories. For example, in The World of Null-A by A. E. van Vogt describes language as having the ability to physically alter the human brain in the sense that if a language portrays reality untruthfully, "brain damage (in the form of sub-microscopic colloidal lesions) results". This contradicts any and all psycholinguistic descriptions of aphasia, the only language related brain damage. Even in aphasia, language is not the cause, although the loss of language is an effect. +General semantics has also inspired Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. In this story, Delany described a character as being incapable of pronouncing /b/ but capable of pronouncing /p/ due to the presence of fangs. This is not a speech impediment that can be caused by having fangs because the two phonemes share the same method of articulation, they are both bilabial stops. The only thing that is distinct between the two is voicedness; /b/ is voiced while /p/ is unvoiced. Therefore, the only thing that can cause such a speech impediment is damage to the vocal cords. Even if there is damage to the vocal cords it only makes sense if the resulting speech impediment was an inability to produce a voiced sound due to the inability for the damaged vocal cords to vibrate properly. Babel-17, despite its linguistic errors, was positively received by its readers. In the same book, Delany confuses between grammatical gender and sex. He has a character lament over how a "sex" can be assigned in some languages but not others. This is incongruent with grammatical gender because it is not about sex and it is not a matter of choice whether or not a speaker uses grammatical gender in a language with grammatical gender. +Because general semantics has language as a core concern, it was not uncommon for science fiction authors of its time to adopt it as a basis for the different ways they might imagine language to affect the human mind. This can be seen in Gulf by Robert A. Heinlein where Speedtalk is described to "[make] thought processes enormously faster". In Gulf, Heinlein described Speedtalk as being able to express whole sentences in a word. Together, these features were supposed to make the characters of his book more efficient by means of language. Here, science fiction contradicts linguistics for it has been proven that the speed of thought is independent of the length of a verbal utterance. Heinlein also made Speedtalk to have no real distinction between nouns and verbs because he believed that they were not necessary to be logical. In short, Speedtalk is yet another product of subscription to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; Heinlein believed that providing his characters with a language he claimed was logical would make them incapable of illogical thought. +In The Languages of Pao, however Jack Vance managed to avoid the mistakes that a lot of other science fiction authors have made. At the same time, Vance employs the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in his work; he describes the languages of the Paonese people as being capable of altering their minds. +The Embedding by Ian Watson, however, contains detailed descriptions of many linguistics concepts and theories, with the language experiments Watson wrote about in his book also receiving praise from Meyers. One criticism Meyers had for it was that it was wrong of Watson to think of American English as "a totally nonexistent dialect" +Many works are often well received despite their erroneous portrayal linguistics. As a result, readers of these works of science fiction are likely to be misinformed of linguistic facts. Despite this, linguistic concepts and theories are used as a tool in science fiction to "[give readers] important insights into man and his world". Even in works that try to be as linguistically accurate as possible, there is still a chance of the author making the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis its central argument in the language of their fictional world. + +== Alien communication == +When dealing with fictional alien languages, the general practice for science fiction, as described by Meyers, was to "mine earlier stories for themes and approaches, frequently making references to what they regard as flaws or virtues in the works of their predecessors". As such, it is common for science fiction works to be inspired by one another in terms of linguistics endeavours. +To have alien language involved in works of science fiction, there has to be contact between humans and extraterrestrial life forms. This is argued by Meyers to be a "staple" of science fiction. Despite the linguistic nature of such a task, Meyers laments that "the job of a linguist is handled by some other specialist" and in the works he examined, the characters seem to have no qualms with such a choice. There are several works of science fiction that have professionals with no linguistic training to undertake the attempts at communication with aliens. Such examples include professionals like astronomers, geologists and poets. To some of these choices, Meyers suggests that the success of science fiction communications "might be the result of sheer good luck" for characters are often unfamiliar not only with the alien language they are faced, but linguistics as a whole. +In science fiction, the success in communication with extraterrestrial life forms often involve no attempt at solving the issue of the language barrier between the human characters and the alien characters. Meyers expresses his distaste for such writing in Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction with: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ee4cffb87 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 4/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"One does not resolve a contradiction by asserting it" +Generally, science fiction authors still use such a non-method. One such example is the translation circuit built into the TARDIS (see: Automatic Translators) that automatically resolves any language barrier characters face in their space travel. +At the same time, science fiction is not completely devoid of attempts at solving the issue of language barriers between the different species of science fiction. +In Tetrahedra of Space, author P. Schuyler Miller employs sign language as a means of communication between aliens and humans. This is, however, not before having considered other methods such as drawings. A notable attempt from the novel is that the human in the story draws a diagram of the Solar System to explain to the alien its heliocentric nature. This method is susceptible to the arbitrariness of images. This is similar to the criticisms often applied to the Pioneer plaque that Frank Drake and Carl Sagan placed on board the Pioneer 10 spacecraft. The diagram in the story, much like the diagrams on the Pioneer plaque, can be easily misunderstood by any nonhuman life form that comes across it. In short, the strategy of using images to communicate with aliens in science fiction is not linguistically robust. +Another point of discussion brought up by Meyers is the question of whether or not aliens even have the sense of sight. The strategy of using images to communicate with aliens would not even be possible, regardless of its arbitrariness, if the intended recipient is not even capable of seeing it. For example, in Old Faithful by Raymond Z. Gallun, a Martian astronomer detects a morse code message from Earth. Unfortunately for the Martian, not only can he not understand the message, he is deaf and mute and is therefore familiar with neither the concept that sounds are put together to represent meanings in human language, nor that these strings of sound are represented by an orthography that can be encoded into signals. Throughout the book, Gallun made the Martian learn the messages he receives from Earth despite his disability. +In Swords of Mars of the Barsoom series, an example praised by Meyers, author Edgar Rice Burroughs documented a method with which his alien character learns human language that is similar to that used by linguists. In one of the books, the alien character ignores the attempts of communication made by a human character for being too ambiguous. Instead, he points to things in his surroundings and asks the human for a name. This way, he slowly learns some words in English. +In The Winds of Time by Chad Oliver, Oliver not only addressed the issue of there being language barrier but also described a method similar to those a linguist might employ when trying to document an unfamiliar language. The alien even goes on to look for minimal pairs and with his findings, builds an alien equivalent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The alien also learns human languages other than English, the majority language of where his ship landed. Oliver, however, glossed over the morphology (linguistics) and syntax part of learning a language and chose to summarise the entire process instead. Overall, Meyers praised this book as having "[set] a high standard of excellence for the use of linguistics". +The minority of its kind, Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang actually has a linguist attempt communication with an alien species that entered the Earth’s atmosphere. The linguistic concept used in the novella was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The novella is the source material for the 2016 film, Arrival (film). + +== Deciphering languages == +The concept of unknown languages appears as a recurring theme in many science fiction books that contain alien languages. In some science fiction works, the deciphering of these unknown languages by protagonists of the story follow the linguistic method similar to that used in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts using the Rosetta Stone. This method involves comparing between translations of the same text, where at least one translation is in a known text. As Meyers puts it, \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b4f2c0c24 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 5/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"...to decipher a dead language one must have some way of getting into the circle, of finding a connection between something inside the system and something outside it." +This method can be seen in science fiction works such as Arrival (film) in which a part of the deciphering process involved acquiring translations of English sentences in the alien language to compare and decipher meanings. Another method used in the movie was learning the language one word at a time, see: Alien Communication. This is not a recent phenomenon in science fiction, with such ideas appearing even earlier such as in This Perfect Day by Ira Levin. In the story, the world is unified under an oppressive rule with only one language. The protagonist, a nonconformist, later finds books in other languages and attempts to decipher them with limited success, until he finds a book (in French) with an essay by the founder of the unified world; an essay which already has a translated version available to him in the language he knows. This, in the same way as the Rosetta Stone, helps him decipher the language (French). Some other works involve lesser accidental Rosetta Stones but rather deliberate clues with the explicit intention of helping future populations decipher the language. In such cases, since there is no way of knowing what future communication is like, there is a preference to use illustrations and other instructional material to help future populations learn the unknown language. Such methods can be found in works such as The Retreat to Mars by Cecil B. White. +Other works of science fiction involving language decipherment are Expedition by Anthony Boucher, Resurrection/The Monster (short story) by A. E. van Vogt, Surface Tension (short story) by James Blish, The Star by Arthur C. Clarke, and Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper. +Works that contain more futile efforts of the decipherment of unknown languages include The Pastel City (Viriconium Book 1), No Jokes on Mars by James Blish, and Patron of the Arts by William Rotsler. + +== Language change == + +=== Historical change === +"Science fiction as a genre, then, has a special relationship within the field of language within the field of language studies to historical linguistics." +As mentioned by Walter E. Meyers, science fiction is the only genre that enables writers to either foresee the future of the language or the older forms of language, depending on the context of the story. Despite this, many authors failed to realise the importance of linguistics in science fiction, even those with good knowledge of the field. As noted by John Krueger: + +"...in perhaps one-third or thereabouts of s-f stories, problems of language and communication raise their head, though not always playing a major role." +One example of this can be viewed in the portrayal of historical linguistics. Historical linguistics entails the study of the older forms of language, and unfortunately, has been one of the lowest priorities in accuracy for science-fiction authors. In some instances linguistic facts were disregarded such as in Harvey Jacobs’s The Egg of the Glak, where the Great Vowel Shift was said to be caused by the Norman Conquest. In other instances, linguistic changes were misinterpreted such as in Larry Niven’s The Fourth Profession. +However, there are authors who have employed linguistic change in their works fairly well. Philip José Farmer, for instance, conducted extensive research on the forms of English in different historical periods for his series Riverworld, resulting in consistent accuracies with language change in English. As Meyers points out, + +"In general the treatment of linguistic change in science fiction is like the sky on a hazy night: a few bright spots seen through an obfuscating fog." + +=== Evolutionary change === +Science fiction authors have had differing views on how language will change in the future. Some believe English will become incomprehensible such as in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Others hypothesize English will be influenced by other languages, as seen in the Nadsat jargon of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. There are, however, science fiction authors who choose neither and proclaim English as the "interstellar lingua franca as it had on Earth" such as in Robert Silverberg’s Schwartz Between the Galaxies and in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood's End, in which English is spoken by everyone. In his Visions of Tomorrow, David Samuelson noted that many science-fiction authors prefer English as the universal spoken language in their stories. For written English on the other hand, many science-fiction authors perceive a bleak future. This is seen in works such as Walter Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which the people are reduced to illiteracy due to nuclear war. In Algis Budrys’s For Love, it is not nuclear war but rather alien invasion that causes this. In other works such as Samuel R. Delaney’s Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones and Robert Sheckley’s Mindswap, written English is not completely wiped out but instead reduced to basic English. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2fdcf171b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 6/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"most science fiction writers have …. the habit of being extremely slipshod about language… The time travelers hop three thousand years into the future and find people still speaking idiomatic New York English. (How many people today speak any language that was used in 1000 B.C.?)" +As from the quote by Fletcher Pratt, the future of the language appears to be a topic brushed over by some science-fiction writers, where time-travellers into the future still find themselves being able to communicate perfectly in the same English regardless of the year from which the characters originate. Glottochronology assumes that a certain amount of basic words in a language will be lost after a thousand years and subsequently. This would mean that the language as we know it now would not be fully similar in the far future. Although, certain writers believed sound recordings would hinder language change, as seen in Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars. +However, not all writers give a lackluster effort into the future of the language. Science-fiction writers mostly use two methods to demonstrate English of the future: some difference in pronunciation, and the insertion of a few words. The former can be seen in Bruce McAllister’s Benji’s Pencil, where English is described as sounding like "nasalised English, chopped but softer than German" 200 years into the future. The inclusion of new words consists of either forming new words, such as "goffin" in James Blish’s A Work of Art, or using old words in a new sense such as in Samuel R. Delaney’s The Star Pit, in which the word "golden" is used as a term referring to the only ones capable of withstanding the mental stress of piloting an intergalactic craft. +Such assumptions on the evolution of language in science fiction might be helpful in predicting the future of language in reality as seen in an undertaking by Peter Stockwell. +All in all, the state of language change in science fiction may be summarized well by the following excerpt from Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction by Walter E. Meyers: + +"...science fiction is a window not into the future but into the present: in its stories we see what the writers know about language in general and historical linguistics in particular." + +== Learning alien language == +Although works of science fiction throughout history have employed different methods of learning alien language, their methods of language learning are not the standard. According to Walter E. Meyers in Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction, short stories were common in science fiction works of the time. This meant that for the sake of storytelling, authors usually had no room for extended descriptions on the process of language learning. When that process is described, it is usually not a central concern; some authors might try to document the process but most others would ignore it altogether. As Beverly Friend pointed out, having aliens learn human language rather than the opposite was a popular strategy. When human characters do learn alien languages, it is commonly done through the strategies listed below: + +When it comes to details in language learning, Meyers claims that some information "may have been extracted from professional and academic journals, [but] they are more likely to have come from general sources". Sources, from which journals are found, include National Geographic, Science Magazine, and Science News-letter, under the categories of learning and memory, rather than linguistics journals. +Some authors might make it such that a character required to learn a language is naturally skilled at doing so. Such characters are usually super-humanly efficient language learners. One such example is John Carter, a character in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom series. Similar to this strategy, other authors make the unfamiliar language simple to learn; one such example can be seen in Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg. Despite Greg’s description of the language as simple, the structure of the language is still that of an Indo-European language. This makes the language only simple to the author whose very own language is Indo-European. When languages are simple, John Krueger argues that authors cannot resist the temptation of making it difficult in some aspect of language. Although, difficulty in phonology can be justified considering alien anatomy. +There are still authors who do away with the need for language learning altogether. For example, in Doorway in the Sand by Roger Zelazny, Zelazny introduced an interpreter to resolve the language barrier between his human and alien characters . This way, he circumvented the need for any language learning process. (Related to: Alien Communication) +In his book, Meyers wrote that authors have a preconceived notion that language learning is hard and even labelled Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke as being overrated for equating language learning to the construction of the pyramids. + +It is also noted in Ria Cheyne's article, Created Languages in Science Fiction, in the journal of Science Fiction Studies, that:"In this way, the encounter with the alien language is the encounter with the alien: the created language is both the means by which information about the alien is communicated and the form that brings these beings into life."The difficulty of learning a truly Alien language is a main theme in Suzette Haden Elgin's novel Native Tongue. + +== Language medium == +With invented species, aliens, and other such characters in science fiction comes not only constructed languages but also new mediums using which these characters speak. As Meyers points out: + +"... the science fiction writer frequently invents both the message and the medium." \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ce89cdb7d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 7/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Auditory === +A common medium of communication employed by science fiction authors is the familiar one of vocal-auditory used by humans. In order to make this more exotic and suited to the alien theme of the story, some writers choose to tweak the method of producing this medium of communication. This could come in the form of a difference in physiology or structure of the alien as seen in Isaac Asimov’s Hostess. In his story, Asimov’s alien is described as having a different mouth structure to a human, although his speech sounds similar to that of a human on Earth: + +"The construction of his mouth, combined with an absence of incisors, gave a whistling sound to the sibilants. Aside from that, he might have been born on Earth for all the accent his speech showed." +Gordon R. Dickson describes just as much in his work The Christmas Present (see: The Star Road), with the jellyfish-like alien described as having a voice that was: + +"...croaky and unbeautiful, for a constricted air-sac is not built for the manufacture of human words." +John Brunner also goes into detail about the method of sound production of his aliens in his work The Dramaturges of Yan, writing that the aliens had lungs at their sides, + +"...drawing in air directly through spiracles between the ribs; like bagpipes, they had continual through-put. Sound to talk with was generated by a tympanal membrane and relayed through resonating chambers in the gullet, giving a rather pleasant, if not monotonous, timbre; in Kaydad’s case, resembling a cello droning away on a single note…" +Cyril M. Kornbluth uses a rather different method from these in his work Friend to Man (see: The Explorers (collection)), in which the alien resembles a cello in the way it produces sound and not just in the way it sounds. This method of producing sound is described in the following excerpt of an interaction between the alien and a man named Smith who was rescued by the alien: + +""Salt?" asked Smith, his voice thin in the thin air. "I need salt with water." +The thing rubbed two appendages together and he saw a drop of amber exude and spread on them. It was, he realised a moment later, rosining the bow, for the appendages drew across each other and he heard a whining, vibrating cricket voice say: "S-s-z-z-aw-w?" + +It did better the next time. The amber drop spread, and "S-z-aw-t?" was sounded, with a little tap of the bow for the final phoneme." +This theme of aliens producing sound in a way similar to a musical instrument (and perhaps physically resembling one as well) is continued by James Blish in his work This Earth of Hours. In the story, the aliens are known as "Callëans" and the character, 12-UpJohn, discovers how they speak, saying: + +"... the sounds issued at low volume from a multitude of spiracles or breath-holes all along the body, each hole producing only one pure tone, the words and intonations being formed in mid-air by intermodulation - a miracle of co-ordination among a multitude of organs obviously unsuitable for sound-forming at all." +The theme of musical communication has appeared in science fiction as early as 1638 in Francis Godwin’s work The Man in the Moone. It also appeared in Winfred P. Lehmann’s Decoding of the Martian Language. Since W. P. Lehmann is a linguist, his story was explained in far greater scientific detail than most other science fiction authors. +When it comes to the auditory medium, however, there is also communication at frequencies above and below that of what is audible to humans. For example, in Henry Kuttner’s The Big Night, the aliens communicate using frequencies below what is audible to humans (subsonics) and wear a device to increase this frequency to one that is audible to humans when communicating with them. In Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement, the alien is able to communicate in both a frequency higher than what is perceived by humans and a frequency perceivable by humans. The aliens in In a Good Cause— by Isaac Asimov had similar abilities, having a specialised organ for the higher frequencies and a separate one for frequencies audible to humans. +More science fiction stories involving the vocal-auditory medium as a means of communication include Proxima Centauri (short story) by Murray Leinster, Arrival (film) (although the aliens in Arrival had two mediums of communication, one vocal-auditory and the other through visuals), and in Star Trek, where alien communication is prevalent. + +=== Visual === +The second most popular choice of language medium in science fiction is the visual medium or sight. One such story using this medium is Venus on the Half-Shell by Kilgore Trout (Philip José Farmer), in which the aliens used their limbs to make signs in order to communicate: + +""What do they talk with?" Simon said to Chworktap. + "They use their fingers, just like deaf-and-dumb people." + +… Their arms came out, the fingers wriggling and crossing and bending as they asked each other what in the hell these strangers were and what did they mean to do?" +James Blish also explored the use of visual medium in communication in his work VOR. In the story, the alien communicated using colour-shifts in the light spectrum (displayed colours on the front of its head). Similar to this was the aliens in Rex Gordon’s First on Mars/No Man Friday, in which the aliens (as big as freight trains) also communicated using light with the main character remarking "...there simply has not been on Earth such a colloquy of light.". In What Is This Thing Called Love? by Isaac Asimov, the aliens also communicated through colour, using colour patches that changed hue to communicate. In Death and Designation Among the Asadi by Michael Bishop (author), Bishop describes in detail a similar form of communication: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-7.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-7.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f96cc0412 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-7.md @@ -0,0 +1,48 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 8/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"As for the staring matches, they’re of brief duration and involve fierce gesticulation and mane-shaking. In these head-to-head confrontations the eyes change colour with astonishing rapidity, flashing through the entire visible spectrum -and maybe beyond- in a matter of seconds. + I am now prepared to say that these instantaneous changes of eye color are the Asadi equivalent of speech…" + +=== Olfactory === +Although much more challenging to employ, smell has also been used as a medium of communication by science fiction authors. In Doomship by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, the aliens (T’worlies) communicate through smells. As noticed by a human character in the story, + +"The vinegary smell deepened. It was a sign of polite cogitation in a T’worlie, like a human being’s hmmm" +Similar to this method of communication is one employed the alien species in Cabin Boy (see Far Out (book)) by Damon Knight. In this story, two humans attempt to communicate with the alien that uses scent, although this proves rather difficult: + +"...there had been a series of separate odors, all unfamiliar and all overpoweringly strong. At least a dozen of them, Roget thought; they had gone past too quickly to count." +As Meyers points out, however, the challenge in "...using air-borne scents for communication is that even a casual breeze becomes "noise" in the system, blending odors and distorting their original sequence.". Then again, Colin Kapp overcomes this problem in his work The Old King’s Answers, in which the one character describes the aliens as having: + +"...scent glands in the pads of their feet… They’ve settled on the flat faces of the crystal rocks when they really want to leave a message for the world." +The character further goes on to explain: + +"Using chromatography, I’ve managed to identify three individual scent products, all of them remarkably persistent. They are combined together on the crystal faces in an amazing spectrum of complexity. In their scent-writing they have the capacity -though I’m not sure how much of it they utilize- to compress more bits of information in a given space than we humans can in our optical writing." +This medium of smell was also utilised by John Norman in his work Priest-Kings of Gor (Book 3 of Gor), in which the medium is not only described but the advantages and disadvantages of it is also discussed. In the story, the narrator describes the medium, saying: + +"What in the passageways I had taken to be the scent of Priest-Kings had actually been the residue of odor-signals which Priest-Kings, like certain social insects of our world, use in communicating with one another." +The narrator then goes on to discuss in length the advantageous and disadvantageous of such a medium: + +"Communication by odor-signals can in certain circumstances be extremely efficient, though it can be disadvantageous in others. For example, an odor can carry… much farther than can the shout or cry of a man to another man. Moreover, if not too much time is allowed to elapse, a Priest-King may leave a message in his chamber or in a corridor for another Priest-King, and the other may arrive later and interpret. A disadvantage of this mode of communication, of course, is that the message may be understood by strangers or by others for whom it is not intended. One must be careful of what one says in the tunnels of the Priest-Kings for one’s words may linger after one, until they sufficiently dissipate to be little more than a meaningless blur of scent." +Since Norman placed his setting in "tunnels", he rid himself of any problems posed by winds. A similar approach was taken by Hal Clement in his work Uncommon Sense, in which he had gotten rid of air altogether by assuming his setting to be an airless planet. + +=== Kinesics === +As explained by Meyers, gestures + +"...are as arbitrary in their meanings as any spoken word: they depend for their intelligibility on the prior agreement by the members of the community." +This code-like aspect of gestures is seen in science fiction stories involving kinesics as a medium for language. One such example of this is seen in Orn (Book 2 of Of Man and Manta) by Piers Anthony. In this story, "manta-shaped flying fungoids" used kinesics for communication in that they snapped their tails once for ‘yes’ and twice for ‘no’ when communicating with humans. This code eventually evolved and allowed the fungoids to initiate conversation, "with that combination of gesture and tail snaps they had gradually worked out as their code". +In some cases, however, kinesics was not employed as a medium of communication on its own but together with other mediums. For example, in The Dance of the Changer and the Three by Terry Carr, the aliens called "Loarrans" communicated via "wave-dancing", which seemed in part an art form rather than just communication: + +"The dance he went through to give the description was intricate and even imaginative… It used motion and color and sound and another sense something like smell." +In the case of the "Nildoror", aliens in Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg, they had no limbs that they were able to use to gesture (having walked on all fours). Hence, they had other appendages to do so. As the narrator explains: + +"The spiny crest down the middle of the alien’s broad skull began to twitch… The nildoror had a rich language of gesture, employing not only the spines but also their long ropy trunks and their many-pleated ears," +There are also some science fiction works that include tactile (touch) as a medium of communication. These include works such as The Persistence of Vision by John Varley, Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison, and The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. + +== Machine language == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-8.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-8.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c4338fb97 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-8.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 9/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Machine speech === +Machines have been another popular theme in science fiction works, appearing in works like I, Robot, Ex Machina, Chappie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and even much older works such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. In such works, machines are portrayed with the ability to speak just as well or even better than humans. This ability is almost always explained from the perspective of computer programming as was done in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, although it has just as much to do with linguistics, especially in order to sound natural enough to be indistinguishable from a regular human. +Speech synthesis occurring in science fiction works can be categorised into two forms. The first form is synthesised speech, which is completely produced by the machine itself and is the form of speech synthesis portrayed by Robert A. Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The second form appearing in science fiction works is one in which stored pre-recorded bits of human speech are assembled by the machine to form speech. This form of machine-generated speech appeared in works such as Autofac by Philip K. Dick, in which speech produced by the machine is void of any intonations or other prosody. +In more recent works, such as I, Robot, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and even the Iron Man trilogy (J.A.R.V.I.S.), machines are portrayed as having speech that sounds just as natural as that of a regular human. In The Machine by John W. Campbell (from The Best of John W. Campbell), the machine-produced voice was described as being "...peculiarly commanding, a superhuman voice of perfect clarity and perfect resonance. It was commanding, attracting, yet pleasant.". This manner of human-like speech can also be seen in You’ll take the High Road by John Brunner (from Three Trips in Time and Space) and Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick. Ira Levin has also utilised the idea of fluent human-like speech in his science fiction work The Stepford Wives, in which human-like androids are made to replace men's wives after they have been murdered by their husbands. The androids, needing to be perfect copies of the women, use machine-generated voices that gain their vocabulary from recordings of the women’s actual voices. +However, in many other works, machine speech was used to portray "human depersonalisation". In Promises to Keep: A Science Fiction Drama from Alien Horizons by William F. Nolan, Nolan described the computerised ship’s voice as "metallic, emotionless". This portrayal could be traced back to even older works such as The Last Evolution by John W. Campbell in which machine speech is described as + +"...the vibrationally correct, emotionless tones of all the race of machines." +Other work involving this theme of depersonalisation includes works such as It's Such a Beautiful Day by Isaac Asimov, The Quest for Saint Aquin by Anthony Boucher, The Hawks of Arcturus by Cecil Snyder, I, the Unspeakable by Walter J. Sheldon, and The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey. +Given the scientific capabilities to add prosody to machine-generated speech, Walter E. Meyers was critical of this use of emotionless machine speech in science fiction works, as shown from the following excerpt: + +"...the problems of adding pitch, stress, and juncture (the transitions between words and phrases) to machine-produced speech were mastered well before William F. Nolan wrote the passage… Writers who now speak of emotionless mechanical voices do so either through ignorance or, more probably, because they value the symbolism involved more highly than scientific accuracy." +More works utilising the general theme of machine speech are Jamboree by Jack Williamson, Becalmed in Hell by Larry Niven, Starchild by Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson (part of the Starchild Trilogy), Evane (1973) by E. C. Tubb, and Stranger Station by Damon Knight. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-9.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-9.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3da71572d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction-9.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +--- +title: "Linguistics in science fiction" +chunk: 10/13 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_in_science_fiction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:59.103311+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Automatic translators === +In many works of science fiction with language as part of the plot, the idea of automatic translators has been frequently brought up. These translators can be split into two main types: translators translating from a known language to another known language, and those translating from an unknown language to a known language. +Walter E. Meyers noted that translators of the first kind (known-to-known) were usually small devices, "...typically worn as a pendent or pinned to the shirt". This can be seen in Jackal’s Meal (collected in The Star Road) by Gordon R. Dickson. Such a device also appeared in A Little Knowledge by Poul Anderson, in which a small device worn on the chest and called a ‘Vocalizer’ translated English into the known language of aliens. More works involving this type of automatic translators include The Brains of Earth by Jack Vance. +The second type of translator (unknown-to-known) seems to appear more often in science fiction works and can be alternatively known as a "Universal Translator". In I’ll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty by James Tiptree Jr., the protagonist uses a universal translator called the ‘Omniglot Mark Eight Vocoder’ that instantly translates whatever is being said to the necessary alien language although the characters themselves do not know what language that is. +The universal translator also makes multiple appearances in science fiction movies and shows. In Men in Black (1997 film), a universal translator is introduced during the tour of the MIB headquarters. In Star Trek, a Universal Translator is frequently used to translate alien languages into known languages of the user. +The 1991 Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Darmok plays further with the concept by introducing a civilization that makes heavy use of analogies. +While the translator can give the equivalents of the words they use, it has no access to the cultural references that give them meaning. +Doctor Who also played with the idea of a universal translator, with the universal translator being part of the TARDIS. This recurring theme of universal translators being part of a ship or mode of transport was also seen in Ringworld by Larry Niven. +Contrary to this theme, works such as "How the Heroes Die", also by Larry Niven, and Unhuman Sacrifice by Katherine Maclean portrayed the universal translator as a less portable, more fixed-in-place computer. Even further from this theme are works such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the universal translator is not in the form of a machine at all. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the universal translator exists instead as a ‘babel fish’ that is inserted into the ear. + +== Animals and language == +Science fiction plots concerning animals and language can to an extent be divided into two main themes, the first being the popular theme of teaching animals to produce human speech, and the second being the less popular theme of learning the language of the animals themselves. + +=== Teaching animals human languages === +As Meyers puts it, "We have long felt the desire, even the need, to speak to the creatures around us, which parrots and the like do little to satisfy". A great example of such a desire is seen from the Planet of the Apes movie franchise. This desire is also explored by older works such as Clifford D Simak’s Census, one of the tales appearing in his work City. In the story, a character named Bruce Webster surgically alters dogs to give them the ability to speak. Harlan Ellison also explores a similar theme in his work A Boy and His Dog, in which a dog named "Blood" is capable of speech, speaking perhaps even better than his human, Vic. Blood, however, speaks through telepathy rather than actual outspoken speech (see: Telepathy). +Another instance similar to Blood but involving communicating out loud is the horse from Dream Done Green by Alan Dean Foster. In the story, the human character Micah Schell discovers a hormone that is capable of enabling higher mammals to have the mental abilities of at least a human 10-year-old. One horse, however, far exceeds this and is capable of speaking 18 languages, with the sound of his speech being described as: + +"a mellow tenor that tended to rise on concluding syllables, only to break and drop like a whitecap on the sea before the next word." +Science fiction authors dealing with this theme of animals capable of human speech mostly suggest a physical change that allows animals to have the capacity for human speech, especially considering the differences in sound production through the vocal tract between animals and humans. One writer that explicitly states this physical change is James H. Schmitz in his work The Demon Breed. In this story, Sweeting, one of three 7.5 foot otters capable of speech is described as being "a product of a geneticist’s miscalculation". The ancestors of Sweeting are said to have been + +"... a development of a preserved Teran otter strain, tailored for an oceanic existence. The coastal rancher who’d brought the consignment was startled some months later when the growing cubs began to address him in a slurrily chopped-up version [of his language]." +While such cases of genetic mutation have been used as a common mechanism to explain changes enabling animals to execute human speech production, some authors of science fiction at times do not use it correctly. For example, in the case of The Blue Giraffe by L. Sprague de Camp, the offspring of baboons mutated through exposure to radiation are described to have physically altered only in size and yet were able to speak in Xhosa that was taught to them by a ranger in the wildlife preserve they inhabited. As Meyers noted of de Camp’s writing, \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Global_Militarization_Index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Global_Militarization_Index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..822f3a351 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Global_Militarization_Index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "List of countries by Global Militarization Index" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Global_Militarization_Index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:40.218867+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +This list of countries by Global Militarization Index is based on the 2022 Global Militarization Index of the Bonn International Center for Conversion. + + +== 2022 list == + + +== See also == +Arms industry +Military budget + + +== References == + +"Global Militarization Index". Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC). 2015. + + +== External links == + +Global Militarization Index website \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_body_mass_index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_body_mass_index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4cbdc0328 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_body_mass_index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "List of countries by body mass index" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_body_mass_index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:41.435595+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The data for mean body mass index by country was published by the World Health Organization. The list below refers to year 2014. + + +== Data == +* indicates "Health in COUNTRY or TERRITORY" links. + + +== See also == +List of countries by obesity rate + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6d8533284 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "List of countries by obesity rate" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:42.754695+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +This is a list of countries by obesity rate, with data from the World Health Organization (WHO), as of 2022. There are 191 registered countries on this ranking. This excludes Monaco, Liechtenstein, Vatican City and San Marino. + + +== List == +Prevalence of obesity (BMI >30) among adults. + + +== See also == +List of countries by body mass index +Epidemiology of obesity +Obesity in the Pacific +Obesity + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_rankings-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_rankings-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2f6b382bd --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_rankings-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,198 @@ +--- +title: "List of international rankings" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_rankings" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:44.128566+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +This is a list of international rankings by country. + +== By category == + +=== Agriculture === +Production +Apple +Apricot +Artichoke +Avocado +Barley +Cereal +Cherry +Coconut +Coffee +Corn +Cucumber +Eggplant +Fruit +Garlic +Grape +Papaya +Pear +Pineapple +Plum +Potato +Rice +Soybean +Tomato +Vegetables +Wheat +Wine +Forest area +Irrigated land area + +=== Consumption === +Meat +Seafood +Milk +Beer +Electricity +Oil +Natural gas +Cannabis +Cocaine +Opiates + +=== Culture === +List of countries by number of Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film +List of World Heritage Sites by country +Books published per country per year +Power distance + +=== Economy === +World Economic Forum: Global Competitiveness Report +World Economic Forum: Financial Development Index +International Institute for Management Development: World Competitiveness Yearbook +Gini index: List of countries by income equality +Bloomberg Innovation Index +Global Innovation Index +International Innovation Index +Index of Economic Freedom +Ease of doing business index +Indigo Index +Transparency International: Corruption Perceptions Index + +==== Lists ==== +List of countries by economic complexity +List of countries by external debt +List of countries by long-term unemployment rate +List of countries by net international investment position per capita +List of countries by average wage +List of minimum wages by country +List of countries by public debt +List of countries by wealth per adult +List of countries by credit rating +List of countries by government budget +Gross national income +List of countries by GNI (PPP) per capita +List of countries by GNI (nominal, Atlas method) per capita +Lists of countries by GDP +List of countries by GDP sector composition +List of countries by GDP (nominal) +List of countries by GDP (nominal) per capita +List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita +List of countries by GDP (PPP) +List of countries by real GDP growth rate +List of countries by tax revenue to GDP ratio +List of countries by largest historical GDP + +=== Education and innovation === +List of countries by spending on education (% of GDP) +List of countries by 25- to 34-year-olds having a tertiary education degree +Global Social Mobility Index +Education Index +Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study +Programme for International Student Assessment +Progress in International Reading Literacy Study +List of countries by literacy rate +World Intellectual Property Indicators +List of countries by tertiary education attainment +List of countries by secondary education attainment +EF English Proficiency Index +Programming Ability Index +Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) +International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study +Educational Testing Service: 2003-2004 TOEFL Test Year Data Summary +Webometrics Ranking of World Universities +List of Nobel laureates by country +QS World University Rankings + +=== Environment === +List of countries by air pollution +List of countries by natural disaster risk +Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) +Environmental Performance Index (EPI) +Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) +Environmental Vulnerability Index (EVI) +Happy Planet Index (HPI) +List of countries by ecological footprint +Sustainable Society Index (SSI) +The Global 100 (G100) +List of countries by freshwater withdrawal +List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions per capita +List of countries by carbon dioxide emissions + +=== Exports === +List of countries by net exports +List of countries by exports per capita +List of countries by aluminium exports +List of countries by merchandise exports +List of countries by service exports and imports +List of countries by natural gas exports +List of countries by net oil exports +List of countries by oil exports +List of countries by refined petroleum exports +List of countries by gold exports +List of countries by copper exports +List of countries by iron-ore exports +List of countries by diamond exports +List of countries by electricity exports +List of countries by truck exports +List of countries by ship exports +List of countries by automotive component exports +List of countries by aircraft component exports +List of countries by aircraft and spacecraft exports +List of countries by engine exports +List of countries by gas turbine exports +List of countries by computer exports +List of countries by integrated circuit exports +List of countries by telephone exports +List of countries by telecommunications equipment exports +List of countries by pharmaceutical exports +List of countries by maize exports +List of countries by wheat exports +List of countries by coffee exports +List of countries by cotton exports + +=== General === +Good Country Index +Linguistic diversity index +Soft Power 30 (on Wikipedia) +Country Brand Index +Henley Passport Index + +=== Geography === +List of political and geographic subdivisions by total area (all) +List of countries and dependencies by area + +=== Health === +List of countries by health insurance coverage +List of countries by health expenditure covered by government +List of countries by hospital beds +List of countries by cancer rate +List of countries by risk of death from non-communicable disease +Euro health consumer index (EHCI) +Global Hunger Index (GHI) +List of countries by life expectancy +List of countries by infant mortality rate +List of average human height worldwide +List of countries by body mass index +List of countries by obesity rate +List of countries by HIV/AIDS adult prevalence rate +Prevalence of tobacco consumption +List of countries by cigarette consumption per capita +List of countries by alcohol consumption per capita +List of countries by suicide rate +List of the oldest people by country \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_rankings-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_rankings-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..55ffc9609 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_rankings-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,169 @@ +--- +title: "List of international rankings" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_rankings" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:44.128566+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Industry === +List of countries by electricity production +List of countries by electricity production from renewable sources +List of countries by uranium production +List of countries by platinum production +List of countries by gold production +List of countries by silver production +List of countries by nickel production +List of countries by copper production +List of countries by steel production +List of countries by aluminium production +List of countries by aluminium oxide production +List of countries by bismuth production +List of countries by mercury production +List of countries by bentonite production +List of countries by feldspar production +List of countries by lithium production +List of countries by palladium production +List of countries by iridium production +List of countries by manganese production +List of countries by magnesium production +List of countries by tin production +List of countries by zinc production +List of countries by salt production +List of countries by silicon production +Lists of countries by mineral production +List of countries by oil production +List of countries by natural gas production +List of countries by coal production +List of countries by bauxite production +List of countries by cement production + +=== Military === +List of aircraft carriers by country +List of countries by firearms holding +List of countries by military expenditures +List of countries by military expenditures per capita +List of countries by number of military and paramilitary personnel +Composite Index of National Capability + +=== Politics === +UN e-Government +Transparency International: Global Corruption Barometer and Corruption Perceptions Index +V-Dem Democracy indices +Democracy Index (The Economist) +Freedom House: Freedom in the World +Reporters Without Borders: Worldwide Press Freedom Index +List of countries by consultation on rule-making +Global Terrorism Index +Worldwide Governance Indicators +Fragile States Index +World Justice Project Rule of Law Index +Presidentialism index +Citizen-initiated component of direct popular vote index +Polity data series +Democracy-Dictatorship Index +Gallagher index +Effective number of parties +Democracy Ranking + +=== Reserves === +Coal +Natural gas +Oil +Thorium +Uranium +Foreign-exchange reserves +Foreign-exchange reserves (excluding gold) + +=== Society === +List of countries and dependencies by population +List of countries and dependencies by population density +List of countries by guaranteed minimum income +List of countries by gun ownership +List of countries by homeless population +List of countries by incarceration rate +List of countries by intentional homicide rate +List of countries by public spending in tertiary education +List of countries ranked by ethnic and cultural diversity level +Dashboard of Sustainability (includes a ranking by Millennium Development Goals) +Economist Intelligence Unit: Where-to-be-born Index +Gender Development Index +Gender Empowerment Measure +Gender Inequality Index +Global Gender Gap Report +Global Organized Crime Index +Global Retirement Index +Legatum Prosperity Index +Save the Children: State of the World's Mothers report +Social Progress Index +Urbanization by country +United Nations Development Programme: Human Development Index +Walk Free Foundation: Global Slavery Index +World Giving Index +World Happiness Report + +=== Sport === +Archery +Athletics +Badminton (junior) +Beach soccer +Baseball & softball +Basketball (men, women) +Boxing +Chess +Cricket (Test, ODI, T20I) +Curling +Cycling (road) +Darts (PDC) +Figure skating +Floorball +Football (men, women) +Golf (men, women, amateur) +Field hockey +Ice hockey +Korfball +Muay Thai +Netball +Olympic Medals +Paralympic Medals +Roller hockey +Rugby league (men, women, wheelchair) +Rugby union +Snooker +Squash (men, women) +Table tennis +Tennis (men, women, team) +Volleyball (beach) +Water Polo + +=== Technology === +UN International Telecommunication Union: ICT Development Index +List of countries by Internet connection speeds +List of countries by 4G LTE penetration +List of countries by mobile banking usage +Google: List of countries by smartphone penetration +List of countries by stem cell research trials +OECD: List of countries by number of broadband Internet subscriptions +List of countries by number of Internet hosts +Space Competitiveness Index (SCI) +World Wide Web Foundation: Web Index + +=== Transport === +Logistics Performance Index +List of countries by rail usage +List of countries by rail transport network size +List of countries by traffic-related death rate +List of countries by vehicles per capita +List of countries by waterways length + +== See also == +Index number +List of globalization-related indices +List of freedom indices +List of democracy indices + +== External links == +CSGR Global Benchmarking Database +Catalogue of Indices 2016 - Global Observatory \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_subsystems-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_subsystems-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d3fa52016 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_subsystems-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "List of language subsystems" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_subsystems" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:41:41.732411+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In linguistics, languages are often studied in terms of seven major subsystems, which relate to major subfields within linguistics. In addition, particular subfields of linguistic inquiry may divide their subject matter into more specific subsystems. This list contains links to commonly studied language subsystems. + + +== Major subsystems == +Linguists recognize seven major language subsystems: + +Phonetics, the sounds of human speech, including their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory perception, and neurophysiological status; +Phonology, the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language (natural language or constructed language); +Morphology, the structure of meaningful units of a language, such as words and affixes; +Lexicology, the study of words; +Syntax, the principles and rules for constructing phrases, clauses, and the like in human languages; +Semantics, the meaningful content of words, sentences, or other language elements; and +Pragmatics, the ways in which context contributes to meaning in natural language use. +This division varies among linguists and authors. For example, phonetics and phonology are occasionally merged into one subsystem. Morphology and lexicology can also be merged. + + +== Sociolinguistics == +The term variety in sociolinguistics is used as a cover term for dialects, registers, and other forms of language, including standard languages. +Dialect refers to a variety that is used by a particular group of speakers. +Accent refers to a specific system of pronunciation. +Idiolect refers to the variety that is used by an individual speaker. +Register or style refer to a variety that is used in a particular setting or for a particular purpose. +Standard language is a variety promoted by some social group, either officially or unofficially, as the preferred form. +Abstand and ausbau languages are concepts developed by sociolinguists to describe related language varieties, ranging from dialects of a single language to distinct languages. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form_(linguistics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1b6bb999f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Logical form (linguistics)" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form_(linguistics)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:00.422699+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In generative grammar and related approaches, the logical form (LF) of a linguistic expression is the variant of its syntactic structure which undergoes semantic interpretation. It is distinguished from phonetic form, the structure which corresponds to a sentence's pronunciation. These separate representations are postulated in order to explain the ways in which an expression's meaning can be partially independent of its pronunciation, e.g. scope ambiguities. +LF is the cornerstone of the classic generative view of the syntax-semantics interface. However, it is not used in Lexical Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, as well as some modern variants of the generative approach. + +== Syntax interfacing with semantics == +The notion of Logical Form was originally invented for the purpose of determining quantifier scope. As the theory around the Minimalist program developed, all output conditions, such as theta-criterion, the case filter, Subjacency and binding theory, are examined at the level of LF. The study of LF is more broad than the study of syntax. + +=== The notion of scope === +The scope of an operator is the domain within which it has the ability to affect the interpretation of other expressions. In other words, an operator has scope of operation, or affecting the interpretation of other phrases, only within its own domain. Three uncontroversial examples of scope affecting some aspect of the interpretation are: quantifier-quantifier, quantifier-pronoun, quantifier-negative polarity item. +In instances where a negation has an indefinite article in its scope, the reader's interpretation is affected. The reader is not able to infer the existence of a relevant entity. If negation (or a negation phrase) is within the subject quantifier scope, negation is not affected by the quantifier. +If the Quantified Expresstion1 (QE1) is in the domain of QE2, but not vice versa, QE1 must take a narrow scope; if both are in the domain of the other, the structure is potentially ambiguous. If neither QE is in the domain of the other, they must be interpreted independently. These assumptions explain the cases where the direct object of the main clause is not within the domain of the embedded subject. For example, that every boy left upset a teacher, it cannot be interpreted as for every boy, there is a possibly different teacher who was upset by the fact that the boy left. The only available interpretation is that one single teacher was upset. + +=== Ambiguity motivation === +In syntax, LF exists to give a structural account of certain kinds of semantic ambiguities. + +==== Example ==== +Everyone loves someone. +This sentence is semantically ambiguous. Specifically, it contains a scope ambiguity. This ambiguity cannot be resolved at surface structure, since someone, being within the verb phrase, must be lower in the structure than everyone. This case exemplifies the general fact that natural language is insufficiently specified for strict logical meaning. Robert May argued for the postulation of LF partly in order to account for such ambiguities (among other motivations). At LF, the sentence above would have two possible structural representations, one for each possible scope-reading, in order to account for the ambiguity by structural differentiation. In this way it is similar in purpose to, but not the same as, logical form in logic. + +== Quantification == + +=== Key historical developments === +There has been discussion about quantification since the 1970s. In 1973, Richard Montague argued that a grammar for a small fragment of English contains the logicosyntactic and semantic devices to handle practically any scope phenomenon. The tool that he mainly relied on is a categorial grammar with functional application; in terms of recent formulations, it can be considered Minimalist syntax with Merge only. However, this approach does not make predictions for some examples with inverse scope (wide scope in object position). +For example, everyone loves someone. +When there is no scope interaction in the relevant portion of the sentence, making either choice shows no difference in semantics. +A short time later, May suggested a different idea. In contrast to Montague, May did not propose any syntax that generates the surface string. He proposed a rule called Quantifier Raising (QR), which explains that movement operations of wh-movement continue to operate on the level of LF, and each phrase continues to possess the quantifier in its domain. May suggested that QR applies to all quantifier phrases with no exception. +The study of Quantification carried on in the 1980s. In contrast to May and Montague, it was suggested that independently motivated phrase structure, such as the relative clause, imposes a limitation on scope options. +This clause boundedness somewhat restricts the QR. May also noticed a subject-object asymmetry with respect to the interaction of wh-words and quantifier phrases. A modified version of his past work that QR determines quantifier scope but does not disambiguate it was brought up. To regulate the interaction, The Scope Principle that if two operators govern each other, they can be interpreted in either scopal order was also brought up. However, this solution has eventually been abandoned. +Alternative analyses have been proposed, since the emergence of Minimalism in the 1990s. This includes attempts to eliminate QR as an operation, and analyze its copal effects as by-products of independent grammatical processes. The other strategy is to modify QR and show it can be fitted into a Minimalist structure. + +=== Quantificational noun phrases === +Danny Fox discusses syntactic positions of QNPs as a way of introducing and illustrating the basic semantic and syntactic relations found in LF. By looking at the meaning of QNPs in relation to the property they are given, or their predicate, we can derive the meaning of the whole sentence. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form_(linguistics)-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form_(linguistics)-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9aa7d6244 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form_(linguistics)-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +title: "Logical form (linguistics)" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form_(linguistics)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:00.422699+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +To understand the Logical Form of these examples, it is important to identify what the basic predicate is and which segments make up the QNPs. In these examples, the predicate is tall and the QNPs are a girl, many girls, every girl and no girl. The logical meaning of these sentences indicates that the property of being tall is attributed to some form of the QNP referring to girl. Along with the QNP and the predicate, there is also an inference of truth value. Either the truth value is True for a person who is tall, otherwise the truth value is False. +Each of the examples above will have different conditions that make the statement true according to the quantifier that precedes girl. + +In a syntactic tree, the structure is represented as such: "the argument of a QNP is always the sister of the QNP." + +== Wh-movement == +In linguistics, wh-phrases are operators binding variables at LF, like other quantifier noun phrases. Scope interpretations can be constrained by syntactic constraints as shown in LF when regarding the scope of wh-phrases and quantifiers. When wh-movement is from the subject position it is unambiguous, but when wh-movement is from the object position it is ambiguous. + +=== Examples === + +This example demonstrates the effect of the Path Containment Condition (PCC). An A′-path is a line of dominating nodes that go from the trace to a c-commanding A′-binder. If two of the A′ paths intersect then one must be contained in the other. If the paths are overlapping without having one being contained in the other, then it is ill-formed. (2)'s paths are overlapping, violating PCC, therefore in order to obtain a grammatical LF structure, everything needs to join the VP. The LF structure then becomes: + +== Cross-linguistic examples == + +=== Hungarian === + +In the sentence, "Five doctors prescribed few new pills to every patient.", the scope in Hungarian is largely disambiguated by the linear order of quantifiers on the surface. Two facts that should be kept in mind are (1) the linear order is not obtained by putting quantifiers together in the desired order, which contradicts the predictions made by Montague or May's theory; (2) the linear order is not determined by case or grammatical functions, which supports the prediction of Hornstein's theory. + +=== Chinese === + +The significance of A-chains has been emphasized in the Chinese language. Scope in Chinese is disambiguated by case positions in some examples. In this example, the active sentence only has subject wide scope, but the passive sentence is ambiguous. The active sentence only has one interpretation: +if there are two women who read every book, which is in the subject wide scope. According to Aoun and Li, Chinese does not have VP-internal subjects, thus, liangge nuren cannot be reconstructed in LF. So the sentence has no ambiguous interpretation. However, the passive sentence has two interpretations, 1. everyone finds the same two clues; 2. everyone finds two clues, while two clues can be different ones. That is because liangge xiansuo is in VP-internal complement position, then in LF, it can be reconstructed. So the passive sentence has two different interpretations. + +=== English === + +This phrase is ambiguous in that it can be interpreted as the noun 'boy' referring to a particular individual or to a different individual for each instance of 'tree' under the quantifier 'every'. The interpretation that a single boy climbed all the trees takes a wide scope, while the other interpretation that for every tree there is a boy, who may be different for each tree takes a narrow scope. + +== See also == +Scope (formal semantics) +Antecedent-contained deletion +Categorial grammar +Government and binding theory (precursor to the minimalist program) +Logic form + +== References == + +== Bibliography == + +== External links == +SEP entry for Logical Form (general concept) covers LF in the Transformational Grammar section \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_grammar-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_grammar-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..eb830d1a7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_grammar-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "Logical grammar" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_grammar" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:01.618755+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Logical grammar or rational grammar is a term used in the history and philosophy of linguistics to refer to certain linguistic and grammatical theories that were prominent until the early 19th century and later influenced 20th-century linguistic thought. These theories were developed by scholars and philosophers who sought to establish a logical and rational basis for understanding the relationship between reality, meaning, cognition, and language. Examples from the classical and modern period represent a realistic approach to linguistics, while accounts written during the Age of Enlightenment represent rationalism, focusing on human thought. +Logical, rational or general grammar was the dominant approach to language until it was supplanted by romanticism. Since then, there have been attempts to revive logical grammar. The idea is today at least partially represented by categorial grammar, formal semantics, and transcendental phenomenology, + +== Method and history == +Logical grammar consists of the analysis of the sentence into a predicate-argument structure and of a commutation test, which breaks the form down paradigmatically into layers of syntactic categories. Through such procedure, formal grammar is extracted from the material. Applying the rules of the grammar produces grammatical sentences, which may be recursive. + +=== Subject and predication === +The foundation of logical grammar was laid out by the Greek philosophers. According to Plato, the task of the sentence is to make a statement about the subject by means of predication. In the Sophist, he uses the example of "Theaetetus is sitting" to illustrate the idea of predication. This statement involves the subject "Theaetetus" and the predicate "is sitting". Plato then delves into questions about the relationship between these two elements and the nature of being and non-being. +In the Parmenides, Plato uses examples like "Theaetetus is a man" and "Theaetetus is not a man" to illustrate the complexities and challenges of predication, particularly concerning the relationship between particulars and universal concepts. Plato's discussions of predication in these dialogues are part of his broader exploration of metaphysics, epistemology, and the nature of reality. +After Plato, Aristotle's syllogism relies on the concept of predication, as it forms the basis for his system of deductive reasoning. In Aristotelian syllogism, predication plays a central role in establishing the relationships between different terms within categorical statements. Syllogistic reasoning consists of a series of subjects (S) and predicates (p). + +Premise 1: All humans (S) are mortal (p). +Premise 2: Socrates (S) is a human (p). +Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates (S) is mortal (p). +Following these philosophers, the analysis of the sentence into a subject-predicate structure became the cornerstone of classical grammar. Building on the Greek classics, Thomas of Erfurt's 14th-century Latin grammar expounds the role of linguistics within natural sciences. The task of language is to make statements concerning reality by means of predication. Erfurt's Modistae grammar also includes a transitive sentence. In his example "Plato strikes Socrates," Plato is the subject and "strikes Socrates" is the predicate relating to Plato. +More examples of predication are found in the rational grammars of the Age of Enlightenment, such as the Port-Royal grammar. This approach is also elaborated by Edmund Husserl in the second edition of his Logical Investigations (1921). Husserl's phenomenological 'pure logical grammar' entails the study of the interconnectedness of language and the structures of consciousness. It influenced Rudolph Carnap's 1935 logical syntax, which later formed the basis of categorial grammar. Such logical concepts of language, constructed by mathematicians and philosophers, represent the first approaches to generative grammar. But linguists adopted the technique and replaced the logical and rational concept with biologism and psychologism. +In the 20th century, the subject-centered view was supplanted in mathematical logic by predicate-argument structure, which focuses on the event (cf. predicate) and the relationship between the arguments, whose number is in principle unlimited: P(x,y,...). In modern linguistics, the mechanism familiar from classical predication often goes under the name of information structure but is considered as part of innate syntax in generative grammar. Formal semantics, as well as dependency grammar, employs transitive or n-ary predicates, but categorial grammar remains based on the unary predicate. Predicate-argument structure has been proposed for phenomenological linguistics, but such an enterprise is yet to materialize. + +=== Categories and substitution === +The first philosopher to extensively discuss categories (or "predicables") in Western philosophy was Aristotle. In his work "Categories" (also known as "Categories of Being"), Aristotle systematically examined different types of predicables or categories, which are fundamental concepts for understanding the nature of reality and how language represents it. These include ten basic types that he identified as fundamental for understanding and classifying things in the world. + +substances (individual entities like humans or animals), +quantities (measurements of size, number, etc.), +qualities (attributes or characteristics such as color or shape), +relations (ways things are related to one another), +places (locations or positions), +times (temporal references), +situations (conditions or states of affairs), +conditions (circumstances or modes of being), +actions (what things do), and +passions (what happens to things). +The concept of syntactic categories, also known as parts of speech or word classes (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs etc.), is related to but separable from the categories of being in the study of Ancient Greek grammar. Dionysius Thrax's work "Art of Grammar" is one of the earliest systematic grammatical treatises in Western tradition. Thrax classified words into eight parts of speech: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_grammar-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_grammar-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2b09a7b16 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_grammar-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,26 @@ +--- +title: "Logical grammar" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_grammar" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:01.618755+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +noun and pronoun (cf. substances), +verb (cf. actions and passions), +adjective (cf. qualities), +adverb (cf. places, times, situations and conditions), +preposition and conjunction (cf. relations), and +interjection. +The substitution of one element with another of the same syntactic category is discussed in the general and rational grammar of Port-Royal (1660) and elaborated by Husserl in his Logical Investigations, which introduces the commutation test (see also constituent test), which is based on such substitution. The identification of the elements belonging to a category is based on their grammaticality. For example, the adjective white in the statement 'This paper is white' is substituted by another adjective such as green or careless. In Husserl's taxonomy, a statement like 'This paper is careless' has a structured meaning but is "nonsense". By contrast, the statement 'This careless is green' violates the laws of structured meaning and is therefore "senseless". In modern terminology, the first statement is grammatical but the second one is ungrammatical. +From another angle, pure logical grammar constitutes phrases, which represent a higher-level syntactic category, employing predication. The underlying logical proposition 'This paper is white' is transformed into the adjective phrase white paper. The whole sentence is constituted according to the principle of predication; and phrases are identified by means of substitution. +This insight led to the development of categorial and type logical grammar. Sentences, whether acquired via empirical or introspective inquiry, are analyzed and synthesized into different-level syntactic categories to build a formal grammar. When the acquired rewrite rules are employed in reverse (i.e. starting from the sentence level and proceeding to clauses, phrases, single elements and terminals), the grammar generates all the grammatical sentences of the language, and an unrestricted (or "infinite") number of sentences. + +== Criticism == +In general linguistics, logical and rational grammar was supplanted by romanticism in the beginning of the 19th century. One prominent figure who critiqued Enlightenment grammar during the Romantic era was Friedrich Schlegel. In his work Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier ('On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians'), Schlegel advocated for a more flexible and organic approach to language. He argued that language should be seen as a living and evolving entity, rather than a fixed set of rules. +Another key figure was Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), who expressed the idea that language was a dynamic and creative force, and that it should reflect the richness of human experience and emotions. Novalis wrote about the importance of poetic language and the need for language to capture the depths of the soul. However, the most influential figure in linguistic romanticism was Wilhelm von Humboldt, who argued that all languages have their own logic, or 'inner form,' rather than all languages being based on universal logic. +Romanticism followed a time period when language education became politicized as education became accessible to a larger demographic, and language standardization became influenced by nationalism. Discussing language and authority from a modern and historical viewpoint, James Milroy and Lesley Milroy argue that logical explanations (alongside mathematical, functional and aesthetic considerations) of linguistic phenomena have no place in descriptive linguistics, which has the purpose of helping linguists guide the education authorities to more scientifically grounded policies. According to Milroy and Milroy, more appropriate theories for the purpose include those proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, Noam Chomsky, and David Crystal. Modern theorists including Chomsky and George Lakoff have counteracted contemporary efforts to revive logicism in linguistics, especially the Montague grammar and formal semantics. + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_linguistics-0.md index 1f6680bcd..1c5b2c3ec 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_linguistics-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_linguistics-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:37:58.346133+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:02.910597+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_linguistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8649142ae --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_linguistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +title: "Media linguistics" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:04.240332+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Media linguistics is the linguistic study of language use in the media. It studies the functioning of language in the media sphere, or modern mass communication presented by print, audiovisual, digital, and networked media. Media linguistics investigates the relationship between language use, which is regarded as an interface between social and cognitive communication practice, and public discourse conveyed through media. +Media linguistics is being formed in the process of the differentiation of linguistics as a general theory of language, and is a sub-field of linguistics similar to other fields such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, developmental linguistics, legal linguistics, political linguistics, etc. + +== Definition == + +Modern media linguistics examines not only the written language of media, but also media speech. Media linguistics includes media speech studies that examine (1) the speech behavior of mass communication participants and (2) specific areas, textures, and genres of media texts. Media linguistics analyses texts, as well as their production and reception. +Thus, in principle, media linguistics seeks to explain the particular case of the functioning of language—in mass communication with its complex structure and changing properties—amid the overall trends of language and speech culture. It studies language in relation to medium-specific aspects, such as the specific properties of media texts or platforms, and sometimes includes analysis of multimodality. Other purposes include analyzing patterns of language use within certain historical contexts, and establishing differences between "normal" language and media language. Media linguistics is closely related to contemporary media practices and intends to impact them, in particular, by means of media education. Studying language use in the media can be used to help develop critical media literacy, for example in relation to stereotypes. +Media linguistics includes the study of traditional mass media texts (typically print or broadcast news) as well as social media and other digital media such as blog posts or SMS messages. Advertisements, amongst other multimodal media, are commonly analyzed in the context of media linguistics. The study of fictional film and television has recently emerged as an important area of media linguistics. +In recent years, media linguistics has been influenced by "transnational and translocal" communication and the relationship between a country's culture and its use of language. + +== Importance == +Media linguistics includes the use of the media as a source of both historical and contemporary data for research. It is critical in examining regional language and regional dialect models of media involving the portrayal of society and culture. Media linguistics is crucial for understanding how the media broadcasts language ideologies and is able to strengthen representation of a less common, minority language or maintain representation of a dominant language. +Media language is used in second language courses given its ties to culture and its surrounding context as well as its role in exposing students to native-speaker syntax and vocabulary. + +=== Impact === +The study of media linguistics can address questions surrounding power, resistance, societies and identities. A study conducted by Peng in 2020 utilised online surveys and principal component analysis to analyse the results, subsequently finding "an intertwined relationship in which the effects of media exposure on acceptability judgments are moderated by language attitudes." + +== Applications == +The advent of digital communication technologies from the mid-1990s onwards blurred the boundaries between individual and mass communication. +Since the early 21st century, linguists have been studying how "computer-mediated communication (CMC)" differs from older forms of media communication. While the level of interactivity between readers and writers remains the same, CMC shows increasing evidence of the media attempting to gain more and more of their reader's attention. +The variables that have some of the strongest effect on how language changes over time are the number of speakers of a language and how connected they are to the other speakers. This is especially evident within social media, which has the ability to connect many speakers of the same language. CMC also shows how people might form exclusive "groups" online, and form a sense of relatedness with these groups or other online users. +A technical medium (or device) can have different communication forms, so it is not enough to just study the medium. This is even more apparent with the emergence of new media. +Language and media ideologies intertwine in complex ways. People's ideas about different communicative media and different media functions shape the ways they use these media, similar to how language ideologies impact the way people speak. Some scholars found that the perception of message in new media environments was highly influenced by ideologies surrounding the generic type. For example, text messages from prominent political figures were reconstructed in TV newscasts to be more standard, adult, and official than the original transcripts. + +=== Participation frameworks === +The phrase 'participation framework' originated from Erving Goffman in 1981. With the advent of new media, the interactions that take place in media discourse has changed, and therefore the way we approach media participation framework also has to change. +Traditionally, in written discourse, the participation framework is made up of the author(s), who disseminate their message through the written medium to the reader(s), and their work can be read at any time after publication. +However, at the current stage of media discourse, there are greater levels of intertextuality, with a blurring of lines between spoken and written media. Readers are no longer reading works in protracted isolation, and can send the articles to others or post their own comments, oftentimes also eliciting a response from the journalist. + +== Theories == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_linguistics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_linguistics-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8c1d162db --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_linguistics-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +title: "Media linguistics" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:04.240332+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Hyperreality === +Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality is closely linked to his previous idea of Simulacra and Simulation. Hyperreality introduces the concept of blending reality and representation so that there is no clear distinction between the reality and fiction. It is highly used in media representations such as films and movies. Hyperreality builds on the foundation on four historical phase of signs that Simulacra and Simulation has. For example, reality might not be the same in representations as in John Atkinson Grimshaw's paintings of Liverpool and Hull where it portray life to be glamorised and romanticised when it was in fact grim and dull. + +=== Binary opposition === +Claude Levi Strauss' concept of binary opposition can be used in analysing media language. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought which is tied to the concept of two theoretical opposites being strictly defined and they set off against each other. It focuses on the contrast between mutually exclusive terms such as on and off. + +=== Multimodality === +Multimodality is an inter-disciplinary approach which looks beyond the language aspect of the relationship between communication and representation. Media involves the usage of different modes in its representation. This approach provides different ideas, methodology in approaching the relationship between communication and representation through the collection and analysis of visual, aural, embodied and spatial aspects of interaction and environments. + +== In different countries == +In English-speaking countries the terms media study and media discourse analysis are used, while interdisciplinary approaches such as critical discourse analysis are often used to study news media. See, for example, Teun A. van Dijk's book News as Discourse. Some scholars have recently started using the term media linguistics, while others prefer the more narrow term media stylistics. +In German-speaking countries the term Medienlinguistik is used, and the field is regarded as "one of the most dynamic fields of applied linguistics". +In Russia, active usage of the term Медиалингвистика is associated with the publications of T.G. Dobrosklonskaya, where English media speech is investigated. Russian media linguistics is the successor of different linguistic fields, which were designated as and called "the language of newspaper", "the language of radio", "the language of media". + +== Overview of closely related linguistic fields == + +=== Sociolinguistics === +Sociolinguistics is the study of the relationship between society and language. It is concerned with the reason for speaking differently in different social contexts and the social functions of languages. It also looks into the ways a language is used to convey social meaning. For example, a concept called language choice or diglossia involves two varieties present in a language called "high" and "low" and they are used in different conditions. +Sociolinguistics has 3 main areas of focus. They look at the language use in multilingual speech communities, language variation involving its users and its uses. Language use in multilingual speech communities includes language maintenance and shift. Language variation involving its users includes language changes while language variation involving its uses includes politeness theory. + +=== Internet Linguistics === +Internet linguistics is a field advocated by linguist David Crystal. +It is defined as the synchronic analysis of language in all areas of Internet activity, including email, the various kinds of chatroom and games interaction, instant messaging, and Web pages, and including associated areas of computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as SMS messaging (texting). +As David Crystal posits, "Netspeak is more than an aggregate of spoken and written features... it does things that neither of these other mediums do, and must accordingly be seen as a new species of communication". +According to Marilyn Deegan, they display fluidity, simultaneity (being available on an indefinite number of machines), and non- degradability in copying. They also transcend the traditional limitations on textual dissemination; and they have permeable boundaries (because of the way one text may be integrated within others or display links to others). +Several of these properties have consequences for language, and these combined with those associated with speech and writing to make Netspeak a genuine 'third medium'. + +=== Political Linguistics === +Political linguistics is an interdisciplinary subject of study that encompasses language, media and politics. Media platforms have played increasingly larger and dominant roles in modern politics with the rapid advancement of technology allowing for greater political discourse. +Language has the ability to shape political reality by influencing thought, guiding public discourse., and subconsciously alters the way people speak and think. The political power of language is apparent in propaganda and linguistic stereotyping, as well as through verbal nuances employed by politicians. However, it is important to realise that one may not always be aware of the extent to which their knowledge and identity have been shaped through language. Mass persuasion also has to be linguistically unobtrusive, because the more subtle the language manipulation appears, the more insidious its effect on an unsuspecting public. + +== See also == +Media studies +Media stylistics + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediated_stylistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediated_stylistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..847f3aa53 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediated_stylistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Mediated stylistics" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediated_stylistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:05.450536+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Mediated stylistics or media stylistics is a new and still emerging approach to the analysis of media texts (e.g. news programs, newspaper articles). It aims to take seriously two ideas: first, that media texts involve 'the construction of stories by other means'; and second, that in an age marked by digital connectivity, media texts are inherently interactive phenomena. To meet this twofold aim, mediated stylistics has brought together the analytic toolkits of discursive psychology—which is finely attuned to the contextual specificities of interaction—and stylistics—which is finely attuned to the grammatical/rhetorical/narratorial specificities of texts as texts. Recent research in which mediated stylistics has been put to work, for instance, has shown how mediated representation of issues like sexism, sexualisation, alleged rape and violence against women can differ, and differ in rhetorically consequential ways, from the original un-mediated source material. + +== History == +As a broadly ethnomethodological approach, mediated stylistics is strongly influenced by discursive psychology (DP), as well as the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), membership categorization analysis (MCA), and the work of stylisticians like Mick Short, Paul Simpson and Lesley Jeffries, in which the analytic utility of stylistics for an understanding of data other than strictly 'literary' texts becomes immediately apparent. What unites these approaches is their rejection of a particularly widespread understanding of language in which words-in-here-on-a-page name things-out-there-in-the-world. Because this understanding assumes a natural link between descriptions and the events so described it also assumes a non-linguistic sense of the world as the final arbiter of the in/accuracy of descriptions. For DP, SSK and MCA, however, there can be no socially meaningful sense of the non-linguistic without the founding, constitutive force of language. Although language might not be all there is in the world, it is, nevertheless, all there is in the world that allows for the world to become accountable and knowable to ourselves and others. And once you reject—as these approaches reject—the possibility of some non-linguistic arbiter of accuracy, it follows that all descriptions (whether those we decide to treat as accurate or those we do not) have to be understood as the products of particular, locally specific contexts. The issue is no longer whether mediated texts transmit in/accurate in-formation, but how they act as "vehicles for action", where such actions might include defending someone, accusing someone, confessing to something, or any number of other things. It is here that we see how an ethnomethodological approach to language opens the possibility for a mediated stylistics; that is, for analytical tools traditionally associated with stylistics to be adopted for use within media studies. A journalist writing a news article about 'real events' and a novelist constructing a plausible-yet-imaginary-world may well be working with different materials, but they are both engaged in essentially the same kind of literary task: building descriptive vehicles with the potential to pull off a certain set of contextually specific actions such as detailing, characterizing, informing, confessing, defending, accusing, and so on, in what constitutes an infinitely extendable list of other such social actions. + +== Study == +So what does this all of this mean in practice? Traditionally, stylistics has treated literature—whether institutionally sanctioned Literature (with a capital "L") or more popular non-canonical forms of literary writing—as its primary focus. Mediated stylistics, however, in taking seriously the idea that journalists are the "professional storytellers of our age", orients towards the types of creativity and innovation in language-use that are required in and for the construction of mediated stories. This shift in empirical focus requires a shift in analytic focus. For although literary and mediated texts both tell stories, they do so in differing ways. In that stylistics asks how certain aesthetic effects are achieved through the language of a literary text, it is able to assume that the text in question represents a story in which characters, plot, events, etc. have all been constructed by that text's author (e.g. Burton's analysis of Plath's prose, 1982). Media texts, on the other hand, almost always involve attempts to translate—or recontextualise—characters, plots and events that have already been constructed elsewhere, by others, in a different context. Unlike other forms of stylistics, then, mediated stylistics is interested not in one-off stories, but in the various iterations of a story that are reproduced over time and across various contexts. This contrasts with the extremely insightful, but different, form of stylistics developed by Leslie Jeffries known as critical stylistics. + +== An example == +One recent example is Attenborough's article 'Rape is rape (except when it's not): the media, recontextualisation and violence against women' (2014). This article studies mediated reportage of the charges of rape and sexual molestation made against Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the organisation WikiLeaks, in late 2010. This event was rich with recontextualising possibilities: during the appeal hearing in which Assange's lawyers challenged the warrant for his arrest, transcripts of the witness statements that had led to the warrant being issued were leaked online. Media commentators took this opportunity to build their own recontextualised descriptions of what actually happened as the (apparently) factual starting points for their own, subsequent evaluations of the (un)fairness and/or (il)legitimacy of the allegations. An analysis of media reports in which those witness statements were passed-on to the public subsequently reveals the textual practices through which Assange's allegedly violent actions were often recontextualised such that their status as violent was readably downgraded, mitigated or even deleted. + +== Eastern Europe == +Media stylistics as a research approach is widely known in Eastern Europe and especially in Russia, through the work of A. Vasileva, M. Kozhina, V. Kostomarov, L. Maydanova, I. Lysakova, K. Rogova, G. Solganik and others. + +== See also == +Useful journals +Language and Literature +Journal of Literary Semantics +Discourse & Communication +Media linguistics +Stylistics + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediated_stylistics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediated_stylistics-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ead1acb60 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediated_stylistics-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Mediated stylistics" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediated_stylistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:05.450536+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Further reading == +Ashmore, M. (1993) The theatre of the blind: starring a Promethean prankster, a phoney phenomenon, a prism, a pocket, and a piece of wood. Social Studies of Science, 23(1): 67–106 +Attenborough, F. (2014) 'Rape is rape (except when it's not): the media, recontextualisation and violence against women', Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 2(2): 183-203. +Attenborough, F. (2014) Jokes, pranks, blondes and banter: recontextualising sexism in the British print press, Journal of Gender Studies, 23(2): 137-154. +Attenborough, F., 2012b. Severe acute respiratory syndrome and the rhetorical construction of 'bad' scientific work. Public understanding of science, 21 (2), 211–225. +Bou-Franch, P. (2014) 'An introduction to language aggression against women', Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 2(2): 177-182. +Carter, R. (2004) Language and Creativity: the art of common talk. London: Routledge. +Davies, M. (2007) The attraction of opposites: the ideological function of conventional and created oppositions in the construction of in-groups and out-groups in news texts, in L. Jeffries, D. McIntyre, D. Bousfield (eds.) Stylistics and Social Cognition. Amsterdam: Rodopi. +Jeffries, L. (2007) Journalistic constructions of Blair's "apology" for the intelligence leading to the Iraq War, in S. Johnson, A. Ensslin (eds.) Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies. London: Continuum, pp. 48–69. +Jeffries, L. (2010) Critical Stylistics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. +Short, M. (1988) Speech presentation, the novel and the press, in W. van Peer (ed.) The taming of the text: explorations in language, literature and culture. London: Routledge +Simpson, P. (1993) Language, ideology and point of view. London: Routledge. +Simpson, P. (2004) Stylistics. London: Routledge \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menzerath's_law-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menzerath's_law-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..928c4b9f2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menzerath's_law-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,272 @@ +--- +title: "Menzerath's law" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menzerath's_law" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:06.644857+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Menzerath's law, also known as the Menzerath–Altmann law (named after Paul Menzerath and Gabriel Altmann), is a linguistic law according to which the increase of the size of a linguistic construct results in a decrease of the size of its constituents, and vice versa. +For example, the longer a sentence (measured in terms of the number of clauses), the shorter the clauses (measured in terms of the number of words), or: the longer a word (in syllables or morphs), the shorter the syllables or morphs in sounds. + + +== History == +In the 19th century, Eduard Sievers observed that vowels in short words are pronounced longer than the same vowels in long words. Menzerath & de Oleza (1928) expanded this observation to state that, as the number of syllables in words increases, the syllables themselves become shorter on average. + +From this, the following hypothesis developed:The larger the whole, the smaller its parts.In particular, for linguistics:The larger a linguistic construct, the smaller its constituents.In the early 1980s, Altmann, Heups, and Köhler demonstrated using quantitative methods that this postulate can also be applied to larger constructs of natural language: the larger the sentence, the smaller the individual clauses, etc. A prerequisite for such relationships is that a relationship between units (here: sentence) and their direct constituents (here: clause) is examined. + + +== Mathematics == +According to Altmann (1980), it can be mathematically stated as: + + + + + y + = + a + ⋅ + + x + + b + + + ⋅ + + e + + − + c + x + + + + + {\displaystyle y=a\cdot x^{b}\cdot e^{-cx}} + + +where: + + + + + y + + + {\displaystyle y} + + is the constituent size (e.g. syllable length); + + + + + x + + + {\displaystyle x} + + is the size of the linguistic construct that is being inspected (e.g. number of syllables per word); + + + + + a + + + {\displaystyle a} + +, + + + + b + + + {\displaystyle b} + +, + + + + c + + + {\displaystyle c} + + are positive parameters. +The law can be explained by assuming that linguistic segments contain information about their structure (besides the information that needs to be communicated). The assumption that the length of the structure information is independent of the length of the other content of the segment yields the alternative formula that was also successfully empirically tested. + + +== Examples == + + +=== Linguistics === +Gerlach (1982) checked a German dictionary with about 15,000 entries: + +Where + + + + x + + + {\displaystyle x} + + is the number of morphs per word, + + + + n + + + {\displaystyle n} + + is the number of words in the dictionary with length + + + + x + + + {\displaystyle x} + +; + + + + y + + + {\displaystyle y} + + is the observed average length of morphs (number of phonemes per morph); + + + + + y + + ∗ + + + + + {\displaystyle y^{*}} + + is the prediction according to + + + + y + = + a + + x + + b + + + + + {\displaystyle y=ax^{b}} + + where + + + + a + , + b + + + {\displaystyle a,b} + + are fitted to data. The F-test has + + + + p + < + 0.001 + + + {\displaystyle p<0.001} + +. +As another example, the simplest form of Menzerath's law, + + + + y + = + a + + x + + b + + + + + {\displaystyle y=ax^{b}} + +, holds for the duration of vowels in Hungarian words: + +More examples are on the German Wikipedia pages on phoneme duration, syllable duration, word length, clause length, and sentence length. +This law also seems to hold true for at least a subclass of Japanese Kanji characters. + + +=== Non-linguistics === +Beyond quantitative linguistics, Menzerath's law can be discussed in any multi-level complex systems. Given three levels, + + + + x + + + {\displaystyle x} + + is the number of middle-level units contained in a high-level unit, + + + + y + + + {\displaystyle y} + + is the averaged number of low-level units contained in middle-level units, Menzerath's law claims a negative correlation between + + + + y + + + {\displaystyle y} + + and + + + + x + + + {\displaystyle x} + +. +Menzerath's law is shown to be true for both the base-exon-gene levels in the human genome, and base-chromosome-genome levels in genomes from a collection of species. In addition, Menzerath's law was shown to accurately predict the distribution of protein lengths in terms of amino acid number in the proteome of ten organisms. +Furthermore, studies have shown that the social behavior of baboon groups also corresponds to Menzerath's Law: the larger the entire group, the smaller the subordinate social groups. +In 2016, a research group at the University of Michigan found that the calls of geladas obey Menzerath's law, observing that calls are abbreviated when used in longer sequences. + + +== See also == + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +Schindelin, Cornelia (2017) [2015]. "Menzerath's Law". Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics Online. Brill. doi:10.1163/2210-7363_ecll_COM_000161. ISSN 2210-7363. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafunction-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafunction-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9cdfe14cf --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafunction-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "Metafunction" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafunction" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:07.862446+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The term metafunction originates in systemic functional linguistics and is considered to be a property of all languages. Systemic functional linguistics is functional and semantic rather than formal and syntactic in its orientation. As a functional linguistic theory, it claims that both the emergence of grammar and the particular forms that grammars take should be explained "in terms of the functions that language evolved to serve". While languages vary in how and what they do, and what humans do with them in the contexts of human cultural practice, all languages are considered to be shaped and organised in relation to three functions, or metafunctions. Michael Halliday, the founder of systemic functional linguistics, calls these three functions the ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The ideational function is further divided into the experiential and logical. +Metafunctions are systemic clusters; that is, they are groups of semantic systems that make meanings of a related kind. The three metafunctions are mapped onto the structure of the clause. For this reason, systemic linguists analyse a clause from three perspectives. Halliday argues that the concept of metafunction is one of a small set of principles that are necessary to explain how language works; this concept of function in language is necessary to explain the organisation of the semantic system of language. Function is considered to be "a fundamental property of language itself". +According to Ruqaiya Hasan, the metafunctions in SFL "are not hierarchised; they have equal status, and each is manifested in every act of language use: in fact, an important task for grammatics is to describe how the three metafunctions are woven together into the same linguistic unit". Hasan argues that this is one way in which Halliday's account of the functions of language is different from that of Karl Bühler, for example, for whom functions of language are hierarchically ordered, with the referential function the most important of all. For Buhler, the functions were considered to operate one at a time. In SFL, the metafunctions operate simultaneously, and any utterance is a harmony of choices across all three functions. + + +== Ideational function == +The ideational function is language concerned with building and maintaining a theory of experience. It includes the experiential function and the logical function. + + +=== Experiential function === +The experiential function refers to the grammatical choices that enable speakers to make meanings about the world around us and inside us: + +"Most obviously, perhaps, when we watch small children interacting with the objects around them we can see that they are using language to construe a theoretical model of their experience. This is language in the experiential function; the patterns of meaning are installed in the brain and continue to expand on a vast scale as each child, in cahoots with all those around, builds up, renovates and keeps in good repair the semiotic "reality" that provides the framework of day-to-day existency and is manifested in every moment of discourse, spoken or listened to. We should stress, I think, that the grammar is not merely annotating experience; it is construing experience." +Halliday argues that it was through this process of humans making meaning from experience that language evolved. Thus, the human species had to "make sense of the complex world in which it evolved: to classify, or group into categories, the objects and events within its awareness". These categories are not given to us through our senses; they have to be "construed". In taking this position on the active role of grammar in construing "reality", Halliday was influenced by Whorf. + + +=== Logical function === +Halliday describes the logical function as those systems "which set up logical–semantic relationships between one clausal unit and another" The systems which come under the logical function are taxis and logico-semantic relations. When two clauses are combined, a speaker chooses whether to give both clauses equal status or to make one dependent on the other. In addition, a speaker chooses some meaning relation in the process of joining or binding clauses together. Halliday argues that the meanings we make in such processes are most closely related to the experiential function. For this reason, he puts the experiential and logical functions together into the ideational function. + + +== Interpersonal function == +The interpersonal function refers to the grammatical choices that enable speakers to enact their complex and diverse interpersonal relations. This tenet of systemic functional linguistics is based on the claim that a speaker not only talks about something, but is always talking to and with others. Language not only construes experience, but simultaneously acts out "the interpersonal encounters that are essential to our survival". Halliday argues that these encounters: + +"range all the way from the rapidly changing microencounters of daily life – most centrally, semiotic encounters where we set up and maintain complex patterns of dialogue – to the more permanent institutionalized relationships that collectively constitute the social bond." +The grammatical systems that relate to the interpersonal function include Mood, Modality, and Polarity. + + +== Textual function == +Halliday argues that both experiential and interpersonal functions are intricately organized, but that between the two "there is comparatively very little constraint". This means that "by and large, you can put any interactional 'spin' on any representational content". What allows meanings from these two modes to freely combine is the intercession of a third, distinct mode of meaning that Halliday refers to as the textual function. The term encompasses all of the grammatical systems responsible for managing the flow of discourse. These systems "create coherent text – text that coheres within itself and with the context of situation" They are both structural (involving choices relating to the ordering of elements in the clause), and non-structural (involving choices that create cohesive ties between units that have no structural bond). The relevant grammatical systems include Theme, Given and New, as well as the systems of cohesion, such as Reference, Substitution, and Ellipsis. Halliday argues that the textual function is distinct from both the experiential and interpersonal because its object is language itself. Through the textual function, language "creates a semiotic world of its own: a parallel universe, or 'virtual reality' in modern terms". + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..682cb73b7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,366 @@ +--- +title: "Metalanguage" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:09.159715+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to describe another language, often called the object language. Expressions in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in the object language by the use of italics, quotation marks, or writing on a separate line. The structure of sentences and phrases in a metalanguage can be described by a metasyntax. For example, to say that the word "noun" can be used as a noun in a sentence, one could write "noun" is a . + + +== Types of metalanguage == +There are a variety of recognized types of metalanguage, including embedded, ordered, and nested (or hierarchical) metalanguages. + + +=== Embedded === +An embedded metalanguage is a language formally, naturally and firmly fixed in an object language. This idea is found in Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, in a discussion of the relationship between formal languages and number theory: "... it is in the nature of any formalization of number theory that its metalanguage is embedded within it." +It occurs in natural, or informal, languages, as well—such as in English, where words such as noun, verb, or even word describe features and concepts pertaining to the English language itself. + + +=== Ordered === +An ordered metalanguage is analogous to an ordered logic. An example of an ordered metalanguage is the construction of one metalanguage to discuss an object language, followed by the creation of another metalanguage to discuss the first, etc. + + +=== Nested === +A nested (or hierarchical) metalanguage is similar to an ordered metalanguage in that each level represents a greater degree of abstraction. However, a nested metalanguage differs from an ordered one in that each level includes the one below. +The paradigmatic example of a nested metalanguage comes from the Linnean taxonomic system in biology. Each level in the system incorporates the one below it. The language used to discuss genus is also used to discuss species; the one used to discuss orders is also used to discuss genera, etc., up to kingdoms. + + +== In natural language == +Natural language combines nested and ordered metalanguages. In a natural language there is an infinite regress of metalanguages, each with more specialized vocabulary and simpler syntax. +Designating the language now as + + + + + L + + 0 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{0}} + +, the grammar of the language is a discourse in the metalanguage + + + + + L + + 1 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{1}} + +, which is a sublanguage nested within + + + + + L + + 0 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{0}} + +. + +The grammar of + + + + + L + + 1 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{1}} + +, which has the form of a factual description, is a discourse in the meta–metalanguage + + + + + L + + 2 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{2}} + +, which is also a sublanguage of + + + + + L + + 0 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{0}} + +. +The grammar of + + + + + L + + 2 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{2}} + +, which has the form of a theory describing the syntactic structure of such factual descriptions, is stated in the meta–meta–metalanguage + + + + + L + + 3 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{3}} + +, which likewise is a sublanguage of + + + + + L + + 0 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{0}} + +. +The grammar of + + + + + L + + 3 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{3}} + + has the form of a metatheory describing the syntactic structure of theories stated in + + + + + L + + 2 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{2}} + +. + + + + + + L + + 4 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{4}} + + and succeeding metalanguages have the same grammar as + + + + + L + + 3 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{3}} + +, differing only in reference. +Since all of these metalanguages are sublanguages of + + + + + L + + 0 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{0}} + +, + + + + + L + + 1 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{1}} + + is a nested metalanguage, but + + + + + L + + 2 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{2}} + + and sequel are ordered metalanguages. Since all these metalanguages are sublanguages of + + + + + L + + 0 + + + + + {\displaystyle L_{0}} + + they are all embedded languages with respect to the language as a whole. +Metalanguages of formal systems all resolve ultimately to natural language, the 'common parlance' in which mathematicians and logicians converse to define their terms and operations and 'read out' their formulae. + + +== Types of expressions == +There are several entities commonly expressed in a metalanguage. In logic usually the object language that the metalanguage is discussing is a formal language, and very often the metalanguage as well. + + +=== Deductive systems === + +A deductive system (or, deductive apparatus of a formal system) consists of the axioms (or axiom schemata) and rules of inference that can be used to derive the theorems of the system. + + +=== Metavariables === + +A metavariable (or metalinguistic or metasyntactic variable) is a symbol or set of symbols in a metalanguage which stands for a symbol or set of symbols in some object language. For instance, in the sentence: + +Let A and B be arbitrary formulas of a formal language + + + + L + + + {\displaystyle L} + +. +The symbols A and B are not symbols of the object language + + + + L + + + {\displaystyle L} + +, they are metavariables in the metalanguage (in this case, English) that is discussing the object language + + + + L + + + {\displaystyle L} + +. + + +=== Metatheories and metatheorems === + +A metatheory is a theory whose subject matter is some other theory (a theory about a theory). Statements made in the metatheory about the theory are called metatheorems. A metatheorem is a true statement about a formal system expressed in a metalanguage. Unlike theorems proved within a given formal system, a metatheorem is proved within a metatheory, and may reference concepts that are present in the metatheory but not the object theory. + + +=== Interpretations === + +An interpretation is an assignment of meanings to the symbols and words of a language. + + +== Role in metaphor == +Michael J. Reddy (1979) argues that much of the language we use to talk about language is conceptualized and structured by what he refers to as the conduit metaphor. This paradigm operates through two distinct, related frameworks. +The major framework views language as a sealed pipeline between people: + +The minor framework views language as an open pipe spilling mental content into the void: + + +== Metaprogramming == +Computers follow programs, sets of instructions in formal languages. The development of a programming language involves the use of a metalanguage. The act of working with metalanguages in programming is known as metaprogramming. +Backus–Naur form, developed in the 1960s by John Backus and Peter Naur, is one of the earliest metalanguages used in computing. Examples of modern-day programming languages which commonly find use in metaprogramming include ML, Lisp, m4, and Yacc. + + +== See also == + + +== Dictionaries == +Audi, R. 1996. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. +Baldick, C. 1996. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. +Cuddon, J. A. 1999. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin Books. +Honderich, T. 1995. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. +Matthews, P. H. 1997. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280008-4. +McArthur, T. 1996. The Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. + + +== References == + + +== External links == + +Metalanguage, Principia Cybernetica. +Willard McCarty (submitted 2006) Problematic Metaphors, Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 92. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalinguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalinguistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1bde22ea5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalinguistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,22 @@ +--- +title: "Metalinguistics" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalinguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:10.325033+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Metalinguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to other cultural behaviors. It is the study of how different parts of speech and communication interact with each other and reflect the way people live and communicate together. Jacob L. Mey in his book, Trends in Linguistics, describes Mikhail Bakhtin's interpretation of metalinguistics as "encompassing the life history of a speech community, with an orientation toward a study of large events in the speech life of people and embody changes in various cultures and ages." + +== Literacy development == +Metalinguistic skills involve understanding of the rules used to govern language. Scholar Patrick Hartwell points out how substantial it is for students to develop these capabilities, especially heightened phonological awareness, which is a key precursor to literacy. An essential aspect to language development is focused on the student being aware of language and the components of language. +This idea is also examined in the article, 'Metalinguistic Awareness and Literacy Acquisition in Different Languages', that centers on how the construction of a language and writing strategy shape an individual's ability to read. It also discusses the manner in which bilingualism increases particular elements of metalinguistic awareness. +Published research studies by Elizabeth McAllister have concluded that metalinguistic abilities are associated to cognitive development and is contingent on metalinguistic awareness which relates to reading skill level, academic success and cultural environment that starts at infancy and continues through preschool. +According to Text in Education and Society, some examples of metalinguistic skills include discussing, examining, thinking about language, grammar and reading comprehension. The text also states that a student's recognition or self-correction of language in verbal and written form helps them further advance their skills. The book also illustrates manners in which literature can form connections or create boundaries between educational intelligence and practical knowledge. +Gail Gillon wrote the book, Phonological Awareness, which illustrates the connection between phonological awareness and metalinguistic awareness's in literacy learning. It essentially states that a student's ability to understand the spoken word and their ability to recognize a word and decode it are dependent on each other. The text also discusses ways in which students struggling with speech impairments and reading difficulties can improve their learning process. + +== In linguistics == +Linguists use this term to designate activities associated with metalanguage, a language composed of the entirety of words forming linguistic terminology (for example, syntax, semantics, phoneme, lexeme... as well as terms in more current usage, such as word, sentence, letter, etc.) Metalinguistics is used to refer to the language, whether natural or formalized (as in logic), which is itself used to speak of language; to a language whose sole function is to describe a language. The language itself must constitute the sole sphere of application for the entire vocabulary. +Experts are undecided about the value of awareness of metalanguage to language learners, and some "schools of thought" in language learning have been heavily against it. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalinguistics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalinguistics-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..bc2cddfba --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalinguistics-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Metalinguistics" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalinguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:10.325033+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Metalinguistic awareness and bilingualism == +Metalinguistic awareness refers to the understanding that language is a system of communication, bound to rules, and forms the basis for the ability to discuss different ways to use language (Baten, Hofman, & Loeys, 2011). In other words, it is the ability to consciously analyze language and its sub-parts, to know how they operate and how they are incorporated into the wider language system (Beceren, 2010). An individual with such ability is aware that linguistic forms and structure can interact and be manipulated to produce a vast variety of meanings. Words are only arbitrarily and symbolically associated with their referents, and are separable from them. For example, a dog is named "Cat", but the word "Cat" is only a representation for the animal, dog. It does not make the dog a cat. +The term was first used by Harvard professor Courtney Cazden in 1974 to demonstrate the shift of linguistic intelligence across languages. Metalinguistic awareness in bilingual learners is the ability to objectively function outside one language system and to objectify languages’ rules, structures and functions. Code-switching and translation are examples of bilinguals’ metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistics awareness was used as a construct in research extensively in the mid 1980s and early 1990s. +Metalinguistic awareness is a theme that has frequently appeared in the study of bilingualism. It can be divided into four subcategories, namely phonological, word, syntactic and pragmatic awareness (Tunmer, Herriman, & Nesdale, 1988). Amongst the four, phonological and word awareness are the two aspects of metalinguistic awareness that have garnered the greatest attention in bilingual literacy research. Research has shown metalinguistic awareness in bilinguals to be a crucial component because of its documented relationship and positive effects on language ability, symbolic development and literacy skills. Indeed, many studies investigating the impact of bilingualism on phonological and word awareness have indicated a positive bilingual effect (Baten, et al., 2011; Chen et al., 2004; Goetz, 2003; Kang, 2010; Ransdell, Barbier, & Niit, 2006; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Bilinguals are simultaneously learning and switching between two languages, which may facilitate the development of stronger phonological awareness. It is postulated that bilinguals’ experiences of acquiring and maintaining two different languages aid them in developing an explicit and articulated understanding of how language works (Adesope, Lavin, Thompson, & Ungerleider, 2010). Hence they are equipped with stronger metalinguistic awareness as compared to their monolingual counterparts. +In their book Literacy and Orality, scholars David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance explore the relationship between literacy and metalinguistic awareness, citing a link that arises from the fact that, in both reading and writing, language can become the object of thought and discussion. Prose reading and writing can be an instrument of metalinguistic reflection and in those cases one must assess the particular meaning of terms and of grammatical relations between them in order, either to understand such texts or write them. +The self-referential capacity of language and metalinguistics has also been explored as problematic for interpreters and translators, who necessarily work between languages. The issue has been studied to determine how signed language interpreters render self-referential instances across languages. Because spoken and signed languages share no phonological parameters, interpreters working between two modalities use a variety of tactics to render such references, including fingerspelling, description, modeling signs, using words, pointing to objects, pointing to signs, using metalanguage, and using multiple strategies simultaneously or serially. Deaf-hearing interpreting teams, in which an interpreter who can hear and an interpreter who is deaf work together in a relay fashion, also employ a variety of strategies to render such metalinguistic references. + +== See also == +Metacognition +Metalinguistic awareness + +== References == + +== Other sources == +Baten, K., Hofman, F., & Loeys, T. (2011). Cross-linguistic activation in bilingual sentence processing: The role of word class meaning. Bilingualism: language and cognition, 14(3), 351-359. doi:10.1017/S1366728910000246 +Beceren, S. (2010). Comparison of metalinguistic development in sequential bilinguals and monolinguals. The International Journal of Educational Researchers 2010, 1(1), 28-40. +Tunmer, W. E., Herriman, M. L., & Nesdale, A. R. (1988). Metalinguistic abilities and beginning reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 23(2), 134-158. +Chen, X., Anderson, R. C., Li, W., Hao, M., Wu, X., & Shu, H. (2004). Phonological awareness of bilingual and monolingual Chinese children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(1), 142-151. +Kang, J. (2010). Do bilingual children possess better phonological awareness? Investigation of Korean monolingual and Korean-English bilingual children. Reading and Writing, 1-21. doi:10.1007/s11145-010-9277-4 +Ransdell, S., Barbier, M.-L., & Niit, T. (2006). Metacognitions about language skill and working memory among monolingual and bilingual college students: When does multilingualism matter? International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 9(6), 728-741. +Whitehurst, G. J., & Lonigan, C. J. (1998). Child development and emergent literacy. Child Development, 69(3), 848-872. +Adesope, O. O., Lavin, T., Thompson, T., & Ungerleider, C. (2010). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the cognitive correlates of bilingualism. Review of Educational Research, 80(2), 207-245. doi:10.3102/0034654310368803 +Goetz, P. J. (2003). The effects of bilingualism on the theory of mind development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6(1), 1-15. doi:10.1017/S1366728903001007 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapolitics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapolitics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b586b87ed --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapolitics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "Metapolitics" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metapolitics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:11.496895+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Metapolitics (sometimes written meta-politics) describes political attempts to speak in a metalinguistic sense about politics; that is, to have a political dialogue about politics itself. Activists who use the phrase often view metapolitics as a form of "inquiry" in which the discourse of politics, and the political itself, is reimagined and reappropriated. The term was coined by Marxists and is almost always used in the context of ideological discourse among the far-left and far-right, unlike the wider academic field of political philosophy. Those citing the term often do so in an attempt to take a "self-conscious" role in describing their preferred form of political inquiry. + + +== Contemporary thought == + +The term "metapolitics" originated from left-wing French academics, being first popularized by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. Discussing Badiou's Metapolitics, Bruno Bosteels asserts that: + +“Badiou argues against the tradition of political philosophy, which he associates with the likes of Hannah Arendt and Claude Lefort, by proposing to think not of ‘the political’ (le politique) but of ‘politics’ (la politique) as an active form of thinking, or thought-practice, in its own right. He then goes on to evaluate the proximity of this proposal for a ‘metapolitical’ orientation to the work of his teacher Louis Althusser and his contemporaries Jacques Rancière and Sylvain Lazarus, before offering case studies on the concepts of democracy, justice and Thermidoreanism.” + + +=== Contemporary politics === + + +== References == + + +== Sources == + + +== Further reading == +Carlo Gambescia, Metapolitica. L’altro sguardo sul potere, Edizioni Il Foglio Letterario 2009, ISBN 978-8876062476. +Carlo Gambescia, Trattato di metapolitica, Edizioni Il Foglio, 2023, 2 voll.: - vol. I. Storia, concetti e metodo, ISBN 978-88-7606-981-9; - vol. II. Laboratorio storico, ISBN 978-88-7606-966-6 +Felix Schilk (2025). The Metapolitics of Crises: How the New Right Weaponises Narratives to Mainstream Far-Right Ideology. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. doi:10.1007/s10767-025-09519-3 + + +== External links == +A. J. Gregor. Metascience and Politics. Dictionary definition +Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler, 2003. ISBN 978-0-7658-0510-2. +Peter Viereck, Metapolitics Revisited +Commentary on Alain Badiou's book Metapolitics +Leo Zaibert, Toward Meta-politics +Igor Efimov. Metapolitics: our choice and history (in Russian). Leningrad, 1991. 224 pages. ISBN 5-289-01365-2 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_Integration_Policy_Index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_Integration_Policy_Index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e2ad14cb0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_Integration_Policy_Index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +title: "Migrant Integration Policy Index" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_Integration_Policy_Index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:45.355233+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +First published in 2004, the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) is a country index and accompanying study that evaluates integration policies for migrants in all EU countries and three other non-EU countries based on established criteria. +The study was conducted jointly by 25 organizations, including the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation, under the leadership of the British Council. Co-financed by the EU INTI program for the integration of non-EU foreigners, it is usually updated every four years. + + +== Criteria == +MIPEX measures indicators in various areas, such as: + +Labor market mobility +Possibility of family reunification +Access to educational opportunities +Access to health services +Possibility of long-term residence +Possibility of political participation +Access to citizenship of the host country +Anti-discrimination measures + + +== Country ranking == +In 2011, Sweden was the only European country to be awarded the rating "favorable" (the top level in the favorable half). Access to the labor market for migrants was outstanding there, which earned it the "best practice" award. Germany ranked 12th overall at that time. By the end of 2025, Finland (84 pts. / 2024) and Portugal (83 pts. / 2023) ranked just two and three points, respectively, behind Sweden (86 pts. / 2023). "Sweden's comprehensive approach to integration has remained largely unchanged since 2019, as reflected in its consistent overall score of 86 on the 100-point MIPEX scale." + + +== Criticism == +Leading migration and integration experts did not agree upon the definition of ideal cases ("best practice") used in a study without binding legal requirements for all categories. The study measures the quality of the framework conditions in particular countries that can promote the potential integration of immigrants into that country without assessing the actual state of integration, which could be measured using other indicators (marriage patterns, labor force participation, average income, etc.). Furthermore, countries' policies and legal frameworks are only comparable to a limited extent, as they are the result of different welfare models and different migration histories. According to experts, "naming, blaming, and shaming" countries with such different histories based on the ranking would be a gross simplification of complex circumstances and is scientifically unfair. +Another type of criticism has been voiced in Switzerland: "Rankings are unfair because their creators have a great deal of freedom in selecting and weighting indicators determining what is positive and what is negative." Much of what those responsible for MIPEX consider to be "failures" is entirely intentional on the part of politicians and/or the majority of the population in the countries criticized. In Switzerland, for example, short deadlines for naturalization or residence permits for foreigners are not necessarily viewed positively, unlike with MIPEX. +In 2017, political scientist Ruud Koopmans criticized the index by contrasting assimilation with multiculturalism. + + +== External links == +Migrant Indication Policy Index +MIPEX 2025 Results Launch + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..39d94b583 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +--- +title: "Mit'a" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:06.946518+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu (Quechua pronunciation: [ˈmɪˌtʼa]) was a system of mandatory labor service in the Inca Empire, as well as in Spain's empire in America. Mit'a (federal work) was effectively a form of tribute to the Inca government in the form of labor, i.e. a corvée. Tax labor accounted for much of the Inca state tax revenue; beyond that, it was used for the construction of the road network, bridges, agricultural terraces, and fortifications in ancient Peru. Military service was also mandatory. +All citizens who could perform labor were required to do so for a set number of days out of a year (the basic meaning of the word mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu is a regular 'turn' or a 'season'). The Inca Empire's wealth meant a family often needed only 65 days to farm; the rest of the year was devoted entirely to the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . Mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu was repurposed by the Spanish Crown in 1573, drafting one-seventh of the adult male population to work in mines. +The regionally mandatory mink'acode: que promoted to code: qu is a close relative of mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . +It is still in use in small-scale Quechua communities today and known as faena in Spanish. Mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu was adopted during the 1960s on large-scale federal projects of Peru. + +== Religious worship == + +The Incas elaborated creatively on a preexisting system of not only the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu exchange of labor but also the exchange of the objects of religious veneration of the peoples whom they took into their empire. This exchange ensured proper compliance among conquered peoples. In this instance, wak'ascode: que promoted to code: qu and paqarinascode: que promoted to code: qu became significant centers of shared worship and a point of unification of their ethnically and linguistically diverse empire, bringing unity and citizenship to often geographically disparate peoples. That eventually led to a system of pilgrimages throughout all of these various shrines by the indigenous people of the empire prior to the introduction of Catholicism. +Enormous construction of highways and structures were possible in part only by the use of the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . All the people worked for the government for a certain period of time. This labor was free for the Inca ruler. During the Inca period, men were required to work 65 days in the field to provide food for his family. When someone's turn came, he joined the various works that used the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . A communal type of elemental provisions and needs was set up in order to care for the families of those who were absent for mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . People worked in building highways, the construction of homes for the emperor and nobility, monuments, bridges, fields belonging to priests and the emperor, and mines. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..71508f4a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Mit'a" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:06.946518+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== System == +All males starting at the age of fifteen were required to participate in the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu to do public services. This remained mandatory until the age of fifty. However, the Inca rule was flexible on the amount of time one could share on the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu turn. Overseers were responsible to make sure that a person after fulfilling his duty in the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu still had enough time to care for his own land and family. +The construction of bridges and oroyas was the responsibility of the local ethnic groups, who divided the work according to the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu system, with the population divided into hanancode: que promoted to code: qu and urincode: que promoted to code: qu or ichuqcode: que promoted to code: qu (ichoccode: que promoted to code: qu ) and allawqacode: que promoted to code: qu (allaucacode: que promoted to code: qu ) (upper and lower, left and right). During viceregal times, the Andean method of distributing labor obligations among the ethnic groups was preserved, which permitted the continued maintenance of these public works. The war mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu took men from their aylluscode: que promoted to code: qu to serve in the state armies. All labor in the Andean world was performed as a rotational service, whether for maintaining the tampuscode: que promoted to code: qu , roads, bridges or for guarding the storehouses or other such tasks. The craftspeople enjoyed a special status in the Inca state. Although they worked for the state, they did not take part in the agricultural or war mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . The agrarian mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu was distinct from the fishing mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu , and these labor groups never intervened in each other's occupations. In the señorio of Chincha, the fishermen numbered ten thousand, and went to sea in turns, the rest of the time enjoying themselves by dancing and drinking. The Spaniard criticized them as lazy drunkards because they did not go to sea daily and all at once. The mining mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu was also fulfilled at the level of aylluscode: que promoted to code: qu , of the local lord, and, in the last instance, of the state. +The significance of the term mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu goes beyond that of the system for organizing labor. It contains a certain Andean philosophical concept of eternal repetition. The constellation of the Pleiades, called cabrillas ('little goats') by the Spaniards, were known as unquycode: que promoted to code: qu (Quechua for 'disease', Hispanicized oncoy) during the rainy season mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu , and as qullqacode: que promoted to code: qu (Quechua for 'storehouse') during the season of harvest and abundance. The seasons were divided into the dry mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu and the rainy mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . The day mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu succeeded the night mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu in a repetition that reflected an ordering of time that the natives conceptualized as a cyclical organizational system of order and chaos. + +== Categorization of lands == + +During the Inca period, people were mostly dependent on the cultivation of their land. All the fields of the Empire were divided into four categories: the Field of the Temple, the Emperor, Kurakascode: que promoted to code: qu (Curacas), and People. Fields of the people were fields that belonged to the sick, widows, the elderly, wives of the soldiers and that of his own land. +At the beginning of plowing time, people started to work first at the fields of widows, of sick people and of wives of the soldiers under the direction of the village overseers. Then, they worked on their own field. Next, they worked on the temples' fields and kurakacode: que promoted to code: qu fields and finally, they set to work on the emperor's fields. While they worked on the emperor's field, they typically wore their best dress and men and women chanted songs in praise to the Inca. +When people were engaged in war, their fields were cultivated by people engaged in mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . That way, soldiers would go to war with their fields and family secured and protected, which enhanced the loyalty and the focus on the part of Incan soldiers. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..eade51d6e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Mit'a" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:06.946518+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Spanish rule == +Under the viceroyalty of Francisco de Toledo, communities were required to provide one seventh of their male labor force at any given time for public works, mines and agriculture. The system became an intolerable burden on the Inca communities and abuses were common. Complaints and revolts occurred and new laws were passed by Philip III but they only had a limited effect. The Inca and Spanish mit'ascode: que promoted to code: qu served different purposes. The Inca mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu provided public goods, such as maintenance of road networks and sophisticated irrigation and cropping systems that required intercommunity coordination of labor. The majority of Inca subjects performed their mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu obligations in or near their home communities, often in agriculture; service in mines was extremely rare. In contrast, the Spanish mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu acted as a subsidy to private mining interests and the Spanish nation, which used tax revenues from silver production largely to finance European wars. +A 2021 study in the Journal of Economic History found that the colonial mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu system in Peru caused the decimation of the male native-born population. According to David Brading, assignment to the mines was considered worse than the death sentence so that many rather ended their own life than comply. Already in the 17th century, Juan de Solórzano Pereyra argued that mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu mining was excessively cruel and should be abolished and mining replaced with domestically useful production. + +== Working in mines == +The Spanish conquistadors also used the same labor system to supply the workforce they needed for the silver mines, which was the basis of their economy in the colonial period. Under the leadership of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who was dispatched to Peru in 1569, the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu system greatly expanded as Toledo sought to increase silver outputs from the Potosí silver mine. +Toledo recognized that without a steady, reliable and inexpensive source of labor, mining would not be able to grow at the speed that the Spanish crown had requested. Under Toledo's leadership, the first mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu recruits arrived in Potosí in 1573 from the regions directly surrounding the Potosí mine. At its peak, recruitment for the Potosí mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu extended to an area that was nearly 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) and included much of southern Peru and present-day Bolivia. +The conquistadors used the concept of mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu to suit their own needs. The mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu is considered to be the ancient and original version of mandatory state service. The Spanish mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu system had severe impacts on the native population, which was of able-bodied workers at a time while their communities were experiencing demographic collapse. It also resulted in natives fleeing their communities to evade the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . With fewer workers able to work the fields, the farming production went down, resulting in famine and malnutrition for many native communities in the region. +Research by Melissa Dell found that the mining mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu resulted in negative long-term effects for the regions where it occurred. This included lower levels of education and household consumption, less developed road networks, and a decrease in public good provision (due to there being very few haciendas, whose owners generally supported greater provision of public goods). Abad and Maurer (2025) have challenged these results. Their research shows that there are no long-term effects in modern Peru or in the area studied by Dell when historically accurate coding of coerced labor locations are taken into account. + +== Mitma resettlement system == + +The mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu labor tribute is not to be confused with the related Inca policy of deliberate resettlements referred to by the Quechua word mitmacode: que promoted to code: qu (mitmaqcode: que promoted to code: qu means 'outsider' or 'newcomer') or its Hispanicized forms, mitima or mitimaes (plural). That involved transplanting whole groups of people of Inca background as colonists into new lands inhabited by newly conquered peoples. The aim was to spread awareness of and involvement in Inca systems, and to distribute loyal Inca subjects throughout their empire to limit the threat of localized rebellions. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9bd2a6b5b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Mit'a" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit'a" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:06.946518+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Lasting effects == +Mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu districts historically achieved lower levels of education, and today, they remain less integrated into road networks. Finally, data from the most recent agricultural census document that residents of mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu districts are substantially more likely to be subsistence farmers since haciendas, rural estates with an attached labor force, were banned in mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu districts to minimize the competition the state faced in accessing scarce mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu labor. It was the hacienda elite that possessed the political connections required to secure public goods such as roads. The hacienda elites were the ones who were lobbying for roads as many haciendas as possible, and empirical evidence links roads to increased market participation and higher household income. +The fact that farmers from mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu districts do not have greater access to paved roads means that they are unable to transport crops to larger, regional markets. It is unlikely that these farmers simply do not wish to participate in the market. In the case of Peru, throughout the 1980s, Shining Path, as part of their Maoist ideology, attempted to turn farmers away from commercial farming; their efforts were largely unpopular and met with resistance. +More recently, in 2004, residents of Ilave, a mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu district, lynched their local mayor, in part for his inability to follow through with promises to pave the town's access road and build a local market. Overall, former mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu districts suffer from lower economic performance, as demonstrated by generally lower household consumption and increased rates of stunted growth. Without haciendas to compete with the more exploitative Spanish system, mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu districts were subjected to greater economic and health pressures from their labor. Melissa Dell has shown that the repercussions of this disparity have persisted past the end of the mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu system as mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu districts were less integrated with the greater road network. + +== Government application in modern Peru == +The only example of re-applying the Inca-style mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu in a modern state, as a government policy, occurred in Peru during the two Popular Action governments under President Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1963–1968 and 1980–1985). Under this government, a state institution called Cooperación Popular ('Popular Cooperation') was launched, strongly inspired by the strategy of labor tribute in the Incan mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu . During the ten years this institution operated, more infrastructure projects were accomplished in Peru than in most of the 140-year Republican era (from 1821 to 1963). The results were hundreds of kilometers of roads, aqueducts, communal and municipal works and other infrastructure pieces. + +=== Cooperación Popular === +The principle of the institution was quite simple: given the rather scarce economic resources of the Peruvian state in the early 1960s, the public works that this institution would do should have been "co-financed" by the beneficiaries, namely through contributions of labor. +In any given public works project in Peru, it is estimated that between 60 and 70% of the cost goes to the acquisition of materials, and the remaining 30–40% are labor costs. Applying the principle of the Incan mit'a, the government fronted the acquisition of goods, and the beneficiaries provided the labor services without salary; this allowed the Peruvian state to save 30–40% for public works during this period – these savings were invested in further public works projects. The beneficiaries in turn contributed their communal workforce in exchange for accelerated development of their communities and the expansion of infrastructure in Peru. + +=== South Korean commission === +In 1964, the government of South Korea became aware of the significant results achieved in Peru, and sent a commission to meet with the Peruvian government. The commission studied the methodology and organization of the Peruvian labor tribute institution and the feasibility of applying it to the Republic of Korea. After a few months in Peru, the commission returned to South Korea and rolled out their own modern version of the Incan mit'acode: que promoted to code: qu to Korean production systems, including the manufacturing industry. The results obtained in Korea were even more positive than those obtained in Peru due to a different development approach. + +== See also == +Ayni (Quechuan personal reciprocity) +Repartimiento +Encomienda + +== Notes == + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitigated_speech-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitigated_speech-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..637c8e1d7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitigated_speech-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Mitigated speech" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitigated_speech" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:12.819078+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Mitigated speech is a linguistic term describing deferential or indirect speech inherent in communication between individuals of perceived High Power Distance which has been in use for at least two decades with many published references. +The term was popularized by Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers, where he defines mitigated speech as "any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said". He continues with reference to Fischer and Orasanu, to describe 6 degrees of mitigation with which we make suggestions to authority: + +Command – "Strategy X is going to be implemented" +Team Obligation Statement – "We need to try strategy X" +Team Suggestion – "Why don't we try strategy X?" +Query – "Do you think strategy X would help us in this situation?" +Preference – "Perhaps we should take a look at one of these Y alternatives" +Hint – "I wonder if we could run into any roadblocks on our current course" +Gladwell brings up the concept in the context of how crews relate to each other in the cockpit of a commercial airliner, graphically illustrating the degree to which mitigated speech can be detrimental in high-risk situations which require clear communication. + + +== See also == +Hedge (linguistics) +Politeness maxims + + +== References == + + +== External links == +www.gladwell.com +How To Give Orders Like a Man \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_language-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6662c6cbd --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_language-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,30 @@ +--- +title: "Mock language" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:14.068083+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Mock language is a way of using a language not spoken by or native to a speaker. +When talking, the speaker includes words or phrases from other languages that they think fit into the conversation. The term "Mock Spanish" was popularized in the 1990s by Jane H. Hill, a linguist at the University of Arizona. Mock Spanish is the most common form of mock language in the southwestern United States, where Hill first researched the phenomenon. The term "Mock" has since been applied to other languages, and the umbrella term "Mock language" developed. Mock language is commonly viewed as a form of appropriation, and is used to share meaning between the speaker and audience about the speech community the speaker is mocking. + +== Definition == +The term "Mock Spanish" was popularized in the 1990s by linguistic anthropologist Jane H. Hill. This naming convention led to similar cases being referred to as "Mock-Languages". Increasing globalization in modern history has contributed significantly to the spread and study of Mock-Language in linguistic anthropology. More languages are being encountered in daily interactions, and more people are able to travel. To show one's global perspective, it is common to incorporate words of foreign languages into one's speech. +When using mock language, the speaker is showing their 'cosmopolitanism' or global knowledge. Mock language borrows words from different languages and uses them in the speaker's context. In contrast with usages of languages that effectively borrow terms, mock language does not show awareness of the cultural or social meanings behind the words spoken. Using words outside the speaker's native language often ignores the context of the conversation, the meaning of the word or phrase, or any conceptual knowledge including historical injustices to the borrowed language, culture, and physical surroundings. +The usage of mock language may reinforce language ideologies. For example, an American speaker who uses mock language is indexing a language ideology that all Americans should speak English or that other languages are secondary in the US. A dominant language ideology is that English should be the official language spoken in the United States, establishing English as a hegemonic language. This hegemony creates a dominance of the hegemonic group over the ones that do not conform. Mock language reinforces this ideology, as it takes language and culture out of context to show the speaker's worldly knowledge, but does not celebrate or effectively use the language. The dominant ideology does not allow these groups to celebrate their language, yet "mock language involves borrowings and wordplay by speakers who require little comprehension of the other language." + +== Research == + +=== Inner and outer spheres === +In a 1998 study, Hill analyzes the 'inner sphere' and 'outer spheres' in which Puerto Ricans living in New York use their bilingualism. In the inner sphere, such as neighbors, family, and close friends, the boundaries between English and Spanish are blurred formally and functionally. However, in the outer sphere with strangers or government officials, the usage of Spanish becomes marked and "sharply objectified" to the point where the boundaries are so distinct that bilingual speakers may become too scared to speak at all. +This study investigates the hegemonic power of English as a predominant language in America and how Spanish speakers feel vulnerable and powerless to use Spanish. In contrast, when English speakers mock Spanish, their agency extends beyond English hegemony and into the power an English speaker holds in American society. Hill also discusses how semantic domains index a state. + +=== Mock White Girl === +"Mock White Girl" is a type of mock language that is inspired by the stereotypical "white girl's" vernacular. It commonly uses features such as 'like' in excess to imply that the speaker is not well-spoken or articulate. It also features uptalk, creaky voice, blondeness, and a stereotypical association with Starbucks. Mock White Girl is commonly used in movies where teenage girls speak in standard English with vocal fry and are portrayed as privileged, popular, and in power. +In a 2018 study of Mock White Girl, researcher Tyanna Slobe discussed the implications of a "mock language" whose target language is an English dialect rather than a foreign language. Slobe describes the phenomenon as "...complicating the moralizing gaze with which linguists have approached mock as uniformly reproducing white supremacist ideologies." Mock White Girl satirizes a white, upper-class, suburban, spoiled young adult demographic and conveys a shared meaning that the language the speaker is mocking is subordinate and not to be taken seriously. It indexes the characteristics of a stereotypical white girl and uses the n+1 level of Indexicality for the public to make the connection between the mockery and the speech community. + +== Language crossing == +Another semantic domain is language crossing. "Language crossing involves code alternation by people who are not part of the group associated with the second language that they are using. Code switching into varieties that are not generally thought to belong to them. This kind of switching involves movement across social or ethnic boundaries, which raises issues of legitimacy where participants must negotiate in their encounter." This is similar to mock language as the people code alternating are not members of the group. How mock-language speakers are English speakers not members of the language they are mocking is similar to this. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_language-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_language-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..816f8b215 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_language-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Mock language" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:14.068083+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Effects of globalization == +Studying mock language preserves the original foundations of languages or dialects that have become subject to the pressure of globalization. Each time a mock phrase is used, it reinforces the divergence from the original language. Globalization occurs at a much faster rate today than in the past, largely due to technological advancements that connect the world with no regard for national borders. American culture is overwhelmingly dominant in the field of online media, and thus American interpretations of other cultures often become somewhat of a universal standard, at least in terms of exposure. This makes it important for linguists to analyze such interpretations and recognize their origins. +Mock language is used in anthropology and linguistics to interpret different languages in a conversation and the characteristics of borrowing words from a language. The study of Mock Language also reveals several powerful racial ideologies in the way English speakers have the agency to use other languages without regard for their cultural and historical importance. This leads to ignorance, regarding the use of certain phrases. Misuses of certain words can eventually be attributed to legitimate cultures after overuse. + +== Additional examples == + +=== Mock Spanish === +Cinco de Mayo, a holiday that celebrates Mexico's defeat of the French on May 5, 1862, has become extremely popular in the United States as a celebration based largely on the consumption of alcohol. Due to this association, the term "Cinco de Drinko" has emerged. This is an example of the "add 'o'" phenomenon. The "add 'o'" phenomenon is the practice of English speakers adding an "o" to the end of an English word in order to give it the false appeal of being a Spanish word. Speakers may use "el" or add an "o" at the end of words as if they are speaking mock Spanish (such as el cheapo, no problemo). +Mock Spanish relies upon the semiotic construction of two stereotypes: the easygoing, humorous, and somewhat cosmopolitan white person, and the lazy, dirty, sexually "loose", and unintelligent Spanish speaker. + +=== Mock Hindi === + +Pictured is a T-shirt with the saying "namaste in bed". This borrows a traditional Hindi greeting and makes it into a pun, playing off of the slang term "imma stay in bed". It also associates the Hindi word as a yoga term, though this is used for greeting, not concluding a yoga session. It is in relation to being lazy. Mock Hindi has taken the word 'namaste' out of context. + +=== Mock German === + +Bars and pubs around the world have signs that imitate European bar and pub culture. Often times, German is incorporated due to the association of German culture with drinking. Danke is German for "thank you". The signs are using German as an international symbol of beer or drinking. The phrase "das boot" in German translates as "the boat" and has nothing to do with shoes or drinking. Using 'danke' shows knowledge of a direct translation. + +== References == + +== See also == +Mock Spanish +Mockney \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_adjective-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_adjective-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b40874ab1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_adjective-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,40 @@ +--- +title: "Modal adjective" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_adjective" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:15.273332+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Modal adjectives are adjectives, such as likely, probable and necessary, that express modality, i.e., possibility, necessity, or contingency. + + +== In English == +Modal adjectives can express modality regarding a situation or a participant in that situation. With situations, some usual syntactic patterns include an extraposed subject, such as the underlined elements in the following examples with the modal adjective in bold. Here the modal adjective is analyzed semantically as a sentential modal operator. + +It's possible that some of them are broken. +It's likely that they will come. +It is necessary (for us) to make a choice. +For participants, however, the usual syntactic construction has the adjective phrase in attributive modifier function, as in the following examples, where the modal adjective is again in bold and this time the participant in underlined. + +We've found a potential replacement. +They need to file the necessary papers. +We took the obligatory photo. +Other constructions are also possible. For example, contingency may be expressed as We've made an offer contingent on the sale of our house, which can be paraphrased as Our offer stands if and only if we sell our house. + + +== In Japanese == +In Japanese, possibility is often expressed with the adjectives 可能 (kanou 'possible') and 不可能 (fukanou 'impossible'), as in: + +Impossibility can also be expressed with the modal adjective 無理 (muri 'impossible') as in: + +The modern Japanese particle べき (beki 'should') derives from the traditional modal adjective べし (beshi) but no longer inflects. + + +== See also == +Modal word + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_adverbs-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_adverbs-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..59c736ee5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_adverbs-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +title: "Modal adverbs" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_adverbs" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:16.467351+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Modal adverbs are adverbs, such as probably, necessarily, and possibly that express modality, i.e., possibility, necessity, or contingency. + + +== In English == +The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language provides the following non-exhaustive list of modal adverbs at different levels of strength. +Strong: assuredly, certainly, clearly, definitely, incontestably, indubitably, ineluctably, inescapably, manifestly, necessarily, obviously, patently, plainly, surely, truly, unarguably, unavoidably, undeniably, undoubtedly, unquestionably +Quasi-strong: apparently, doubtless, evidently, presumably, seemingly +Medium: arguably, likely, probably +Weak: conceivably, maybe, perhaps, possibly + + +=== Syntax and meaning === +Modal adverbs often appear as clause-initial adjuncts, and have scope over the whole clause, as in (1) with the adverb in bold. + +Probably, the biggest push for corruption prosecutions came in the mid-2000s. +This has the same meaning as (2) with the paraphrase using the modal adjective (in bold). + + It is probable that the biggest push for corruption prosecutions came in the mid-2000s. + +Without the comma, the adverb has scope only over the NP only, as in (3). + + Probably the biggest push for corruption prosecutions came in the mid-2000s. + +This can be paraphrased as (4). + + It is probable that push for corruption prosecutions that came in the mid-2000s was the biggest such push. + +There is a tendency for modal adverbs to follow auxiliary verbs but precede lexical verbs, as shown in (5–8) with the adverbs in bold and the verb underlined. + + That's probably going to fail. + That probably failed because of poor planning. + It could possibly help me. + It possibly helped me. + + +== See also == +Modal word + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_word-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_word-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..659ea4b2c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_word-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +--- +title: "Modal word" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_word" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:17.731387+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Modal words are words in a language that express modality, i.e., possibility, necessity, or contingency. One kind of modal word is the modal verb (should, can, might, and ought, as well as oblige, need, and require). Other types of modal words in English include modal adjectives (likely, probable, necessary), modal adverbs (probably, perhaps, certainly), modal prepositions (despite, unless, if), and modal nouns (possibility, probability, certainty). + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..839c562d4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +title: "Models of communication" +chunk: 1/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:18.930678+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Models of communication simplify or represent the process of communication. Most communication models try to describe both verbal and non-verbal communication and often understand it as an exchange of messages. Their function is to give a compact overview of the complex process of communication. This helps researchers formulate hypotheses, apply communication-related concepts to real-world cases, and test predictions. Despite their usefulness, many models are criticized based on the claim that they are too simple because they leave out essential aspects. The components and their interactions are usually presented in the form of a diagram. Some basic components and interactions reappear in many of the models. They include the idea that a sender encodes information in the form of a message and sends it to a receiver through a channel. The receiver needs to decode the message to understand the initial idea and provides some form of feedback. In both cases, noise may interfere and distort the message. +Models of communication are classified depending on their intended applications and on how they conceptualize the process. General models apply to all forms of communication while specialized models restrict themselves to specific forms, like mass communication. Linear transmission models understand communication as a one-way process in which a sender transmits an idea to a receiver. Interaction models include a feedback loop through which the receiver responds after getting the message. Transaction models see sending and responding as simultaneous activities. They hold that meaning is created in this process and does not exist prior to it. Constitutive and constructionist models stress that communication is a basic phenomenon responsible for how people understand and experience reality. Interpersonal models describe communicative exchanges with other people. They contrast with intrapersonal models, which discuss communication with oneself. Models of non-human communication describe communication among other species. Further types include encoding-decoding models, hypodermic models, and relational models. +The problem of communication was already discussed in Ancient Greece but the field of communication studies only developed into a separate research discipline in the middle of the 20th century. All early models were linear transmission models, like Lasswell's model, the Shannon–Weaver model, Gerbner's model, and Berlo's model. For many purposes, they were later replaced by interaction models, like Schramm's model. Beginning in the 1970s, transactional models of communication, like Barnlund's model, were proposed to overcome the limitations of interaction models. They constitute the origin of further developments in the form of constitutive models. + +== Definition and function == +Models of communication are representations of the process of communication. They try to provide a simple explanation of the process by highlighting its most basic characteristics and components. As simplified pictures, they only present the aspects that, according to the model's designer, are most central to communication. Communication can be defined as the transmission of ideas. General models of communication try to describe all of its forms, including verbal and non-verbal communication as well as visual, auditory, and olfactory forms. In the widest sense, communication is not restricted to humans but happens also among animals and between species. However, models of communication normally focus on human communication as the paradigmatic form. They usually involve some type of interaction between two or more parties in which messages are exchanged. The process as a whole is very complex, which is why models of communication only present the most salient features by showing how the main components operate and interact. They usually do so in the form of a simplified visualization and ignore some aspects for the sake of simplicity. +Some theorists, like Paul Cobley and Peter J. Schulz, distinguish models of communication from theories of communication. This is based on the idea that theories of communication try to provide a more abstract conceptual framework that is strong enough to accurately represent the underlying reality despite its complexity. Communication theorist Robert Craig sees the difference in the fact that models primarily represent communication while theories additionally explain it. According to Frank Dance, there is no one fully comprehensive model of communication since each one highlights only certain aspects and distorts others. For this reason, he suggests that a family of different models should be adopted. +Models of communication serve various functions. Their simplified presentation helps students and researchers identify the main steps of communication and apply communication-related concepts to real-world cases. The unified picture they provide makes it easier to describe and explain the observed phenomena. Models of communication can guide the formulation of hypotheses and predictions about how communicative processes will unfold and show how these processes can be measured. One of their goals is to show how to improve communication, for example, by avoiding distortions through noise or by discovering how societal and economic factors affect the quality of communication. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..073d0bf5f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Models of communication" +chunk: 2/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:18.930678+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Basic concepts == +Many basic concepts reappear in the different models, like "sender", "receiver", "message", "channel", "signal", "encoding", "decoding", "noise", "feedback", and "context". Their exact meanings vary slightly from model to model and sometimes different terms are used for the same ideas. Simple models only rely on a few of these concepts while more complex models include many of them. +The sender is responsible for creating the message and sending it to the receiver. Some theorists use the terms source and destination instead. The message itself can be verbal or non-verbal and contains some form of information. The process of encoding translates the message into a signal that can be conveyed using a channel. The channel is the sensory route on which the signal travels. For example, expressing one's thoughts in a speech encodes them as sounds, which are transmitted using air as a channel. Decoding is the reverse process of encoding: it happens when the signal is translated back into a message. +Noise is any influence that interferes with the message reaching its destination. Some theorists distinguish environmental noise and semantic noise: environmental noise distorts the signal on its way to the receiver, whereas semantic noise occurs during encoding or decoding, for example, when an ambiguous word in the message is not interpreted by the receiver as it was meant by the sender. Feedback means that the receiver responds to the message by conveying some information back to the original sender. Context consists in the circumstances of the communication. It is a very wide term that can apply to the physical environment and the mental state of the communicators as well as the general social situation. + +== Classifications == +Models of communication are classified in many ways and the proposed classifications often overlap. Some models are general in the sense that they aim to describe all forms of communication. Others are specialized: they only apply to specific fields or areas. For example, models of mass communication are specialized models that do not aim to give a universal account of communication. Another contrast is between linear and non-linear models. Most early models of communication are linear models. They present communication as a unidirectional process in which messages flow from the communicator to the audience. Non-linear models, on the other hand, are multi-directional: messages are sent back and forth between participants. According to Uma Narula, linear models describe single acts of communication while non-linear models describe the whole process. + +=== Linear transmission === + +Linear transmission models describe communication as a one-way process. In it, a sender intentionally conveys a message to a receiver. The reception of the message is the endpoint of this process. Since there is no feedback loop, the sender may not know whether the message reached its intended destination. Most early models were transmission models. Due to their linear nature, they are often too simple to capture the dynamic aspects of various forms of communication, such as regular face-to-face conversation. By focusing only on the sender, they leave out the audience's perspective. For example, listening usually does not just happen, but is an active process involving listening skills and interpretation. However, some forms of communication can be accurately described by them, such as many types of computer-mediated communication. This applies, for example, to text messaging, sending an email, posting a blog, or sharing something on social media. Some theorists, like Uma Narula, talk of "action models" instead of linear transmission models to stress how they only focus on the actions of the sender. Linear transmission models include Aristotle's, Lasswell's, Shannon-Weaver's and Berlo's model. + +=== Interaction === + +For interaction models, the participants in communication alternate the positions of sender and receiver. So upon receiving a message, a new message is generated and returned to the original sender as a form of feedback. In this regard, communication is a two-way process. This adds more complexity to the model since the participants are both senders and receivers and they alternate between these two positions. +For interaction models, these steps happen one after the other: first, one message is sent and received, later another message is returned as feedback, etc. Such feedback loops make it possible for the sender to assess whether their message was received and had the intended effect or whether it was distorted by noise. For example, interaction models can be used to describe a conversation through instant messaging: the sender sends a message and then has to wait for the receiver to react. Another example is a question/answer session where one person asks a question and then waits for another person to answer. Interaction models usually put more emphasis on the interactive process and less on the technical problem of how the message is conveyed at each step. For this reason, more prominence is given to the context that shapes the exchange of messages. This includes the physical context, like the distance between the speakers, and the psychological context, which includes mental and emotional factors like stress and anxiety. Schramm's model is one of the earliest interaction models. + +=== Transaction === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..0f18467f0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +--- +title: "Models of communication" +chunk: 3/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:18.930678+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Transaction models depart from interaction models in two ways. On the one hand, they understand sending and responding as simultaneous processes. This can be used to describe how listeners use non-verbal communication, like body posture and facial expressions, to give some form of feedback. This way, they can signal whether they agree with the message while the speaker is talking. This feedback may in turn influence the speaker's message while it is being produced. On the other hand, transactional models stress that meaning is created in the process of communication and does not exist prior to it. This is often combined with the claim that communication creates social realities like relationships, personal identities, and communities. This also affects the communicators themselves on various levels, such as their thoughts and feelings as well as their social identities. +Transaction models usually put more emphasis on contexts and how they shape the exchange of information. They are sometimes divided into social, relational, and cultural contexts. Social contexts include explicit and implicit rules about what form of message and feedback is acceptable. An example is that one should not interrupt people or that greetings should be returned. Relational contexts are more specific in that they concern the previous relationship and shared history of the communicators. This includes factors like whether the participants are friends, neighbors, co-workers, or rivals. The cultural context encompasses the social identities of the communicators, such as race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and social class. Barnlund's model is an influential early transaction model. + +=== Constitutive and constructionist === +Constitutive models hold that meaning is "reflexively constructed, maintained, or negotiated in the act of communicating". This means that communication is not just the exchange of pre-established bundles of information but a creative process, unlike the outlook found in many transmission models. According to Robert Craig, this implies that communication is a basic social phenomenon that cannot be explained through psychological, cultural, economic, or other factors. Instead, communication is to be seen as the cause of other social processes and not as their result. Constitutive models are closely related to constructionist models, which see communication as the basic process responsible for how people understand, represent, and experience reality. According to social constructionists, like George Herbert Mead, reality is not something wholly external but depends on how it is conceptualized, which happens through communication. + +=== Interpersonal and intrapersonal === + +Interpersonal communication is communication between two distinct persons, like when greeting someone on the street or making a phone call. Intrapersonal communication, in contrast, is communication with oneself. An example is a person thinking to themself that they should bring in the laundry from outside because it is about to rain. Most models of communication focus on interpersonal communication by assuming that sender and receiver are distinct persons. They often explore how the sender encodes a message, how this message is transmitted and possibly distorted, and how the receiver decodes and interprets the message. +However, some models are specifically formulated for intrapersonal communication. Many of them focus on the idea that intrapersonal communication starts with the perception of internal and external stimuli carrying information. These stimuli are processed and interpreted in various ways, for example, by classifying them and by ascribing symbolic meaning to them. Later steps include thinking about them, organizing information, and then encoding the ideas conceived this way in a behavioral response. This response can itself produce new stimuli and act as a form of feedback loop for continued intrapersonal communication. Some models of communication try to provide a perspective that includes both interpersonal and intrapersonal communication in order to show how these two phenomena influence each other. + +=== Non-human === + +The discipline of communication studies and the models of communication proposed in it are not restricted to human communication. They include discussions of communication among other species, like non-human animals and plants. Models of non-human communication usually stress the practical aspects of communication, ie., what effects it has on behavior. An example is that communication provides an evolutionary advantage to the communicators. +Some models of animal communication are similar to models of human communication in that they understand the process as an exchange of information. This exchange helps the communicators to reduce uncertainty and to act in a way that is beneficial to them. A further approach is discussed in the manipulative model of animal communication. It argues that the central aspect of communication does not consist in the exchange of information but in causing changes to the behavior of other organisms. This influence provides primarily a benefit to the sender and does not need to involve the transmission of messages. In this way, the sender "exploits another animal's ... muscle power". A slightly different approach focuses more on the cooperative aspect of communication and holds that both sender and receiver benefit from the exchange. Models of plant communication usually understand communication in terms of biochemical changes and responses. According to Richard Karban, this process starts with a cue that is emitted by a sender and then perceived by a receiver. The receiver processes this information to translate it into some kind of response. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3b9a9b78d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Models of communication" +chunk: 4/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:18.930678+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Others === +Additional classifications of communication models have been suggested. The term encoding-decoding model is used for any model that includes the phases of encoding and decoding in its description of communication. Such models stress that to send information, a code is necessary. A code is a sign system used to express ideas and interpret messages. Encoding-decoding models are sometimes contrasted with inferential models. For the latter, the receiver is not only interested in the information sent but tries to infer the sender's intention behind formulating the message. +Hypodermic models, also referred to as magic bullet theories, hold that communication can be reduced to the transfer of ideas, information, or feelings from a sender to a receiver. In them, the message is like a magic bullet that is shot by active senders at passive and defenseless receivers. They are closely related to linear transmission models and contrast with reception models, which ascribe an active role to the receiver in the process of communication and meaning-making. +Relational models stress the importance of the relationship between communicators. For example, Wilbur Schramm holds that this relationship informs the expectations the participants bring to the exchange and the roles they play in it. These roles influence how the communicators try to contribute to the communicative goal. In the context of instruction, for example, the teacher's role includes sharing and explaining information while the student's role involves learning and asking clarifying questions. Relational models also describe how communication affects the relationship between the communicators. For example, the communication between patient and hospital staff affects whether the patient feels cared for or dehumanized. Relational models are closely related to convergence models. For convergence models, the goal of communication is convergence: to reach a mutual understanding. Feedback plays a central role in this regard: effective feedback helps achieve this goal while ineffective feedback leads to divergence. +Difference models emphasize the role of gender and racial differences in the process of communication. Some posit, for example, that men and women have different communication styles and aim to achieve different goals through communication. + +== History == +Communication was studied as early as Ancient Greece and one of the first models of communication is due to Aristotle. However, the field of communication studies only developed in the 20th century into a separate research discipline. In its early stages, it often borrowed models and concepts from other disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. But as it developed as a science, it started to rely more and more on its own models and concepts. Beginning in the 1940s and the following decades, many new models of communication were developed. Most of the early models were linear transmission models. For many purposes, they were replaced by non-linear models such as interaction, transaction, and convergence models. + +=== Aristotle === +One of the earliest models of communication was given by Aristotle. He speaks of communication in his treatise Rhetoric and characterizes it as a techne or an art. His model is primarily concerned with public speaking and is made up of five elements: the speaker, the message, the audience, the occasion, and the effect. +According to Aristotle's communication model, the speaker wishes to have an effect on the audience, such as persuading them of an opinion or a course of action. The same message may have very different effects depending on the audience and the occasion. For this reason, the speaker should take these factors into account and compose their message accordingly. Many of the basic elements of the Aristotelian model of communication are still found in contemporary models. + +=== Lasswell === + +Lasswell's model is an early and influential model of communication. It was proposed by Harold Lasswell in 1948 and uses five questions to identify and describe the main aspects of communication: "Who?", "Says What?", "In What Channel?", "To Whom?", and "With What Effect?". They correspond to five basic components involved in the communicative process: the sender, the message, the channel, the receiver, and the effect. For a newspaper headline, those five components are the reporter, the content of the headline, the newspaper itself, the reader, and the reader's response to the headline. Lasswell assigns a field of inquiry to each component, corresponding to control analysis, content analysis, media analysis, audience analysis, and effect analysis. The model is usually seen as a linear transmission model and was initially formulated specifically for mass communication, like radio, television, and newspapers. Nonetheless, it has been used in other fields, like new media. Many theorists treat it as a universal model applying to any form of communication. It is widely cited as a model of communication but some theorists, like Zachary S. Sapienza et al, have raised doubts about this characterization and see it instead as a questioning device, a formula, or a construct. +Lasswell's model is often criticized due to its simplicity. An example is that it does not include an explicit discussion of vital factors such as noise and feedback loops. It also does not talk about the influence of physical, emotional, social, and cultural contexts. These shortcomings have prompted some theorists to expand Lasswell's model. For example, Richard Braddock published an extension in 1958 including two additional questions: "Under What Circumstances?" and "For What Purpose?". + +=== Shannon and Weaver === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3d76c1afc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Models of communication" +chunk: 5/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:18.930678+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Shannon–Weaver model is another early and influential model of communication. It is a linear transmission model that was published in 1948 and describes communication as the interaction of five basic components: a source, a transmitter, a channel, a receiver, and a destination. The source is responsible for generating the message. This message is translated by the transmitter into a signal, which is then sent using a channel. The receiver has the opposite function of the transmitter: it translates the signal back into a message, which is made available to the destination. The Shannon–Weaver model was initially formulated in analogy to how telephone calls work but is intended as a general model of all forms of communication. In the case of a landline phone call, the person calling is the source and their telephone is the transmitter translating the message into an electric signal. The wire acts as the channel. The person taking the call is the destination, and their telephone is the receiver. +Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver categorize and address problems relevant to models of communication at three basic levels: technical, semantic, and effectiveness problems. They correspond to the issues of how to transmit the symbols in the message to the receiver, how these symbols carry meaning, and how to ensure that the message has the intended effect on the receiver. Shannon and Weaver focus their attention on the technical level by discussing how noise can interfere with the signal. This makes it difficult for the receiver to reconstruct the source's intention found in the original message. They try to solve this problem by making the message redundant so that it is easier to detect distortions. +The Shannon–Weaver model has been influential in the fields of communication theory and information theory. However, it has been criticized because it simplifies some parts of the communicative process. For example, it presents communication as a one-way process and not as a dynamic interaction of messages going back and forth between both participants. + +=== Newcomb === + +Newcomb's model was first published by Theodore M. Newcomb in his 1953 paper "An approach to the study of communicative acts". It is called the ABX model of communication since it understands communication in terms of three components: two parties (A and B) interacting with each other about a topic or object (X). A and B can be persons or groups, such as trade unions or nations. X can be any part of their shared environment like a specific thing or another person. The ABX model differs from earlier models by focusing on the social relation between the communicators in the form of the orientations or attitudes they have toward each other and toward the topic. The orientations can be favorable or unfavorable and include beliefs. They have a big impact on how communication unfolds. It is relevant, for example, whether A and B like each other and whether they have the same attitude towards X. +Newcomb understands communication as a "learned response to strain" caused by discrepancies between orientations. The social function of communication is to maintain equilibrium in the social system by keeping the different orientations in balance. In Newcomb's words, communication enables "two or more individuals to maintain simultaneous orientation to each other and towards objects of the external environment". The orientations of A and B are subject to change and influence each other. Significant discrepancies between them, such as divergent opinions on X, cause a strain in the relation. In such cases, communication aims to reduce the strain and restore balance through the exchange of information about the object. For example, if A and B are friends and X is someone both know, then equilibrium means that they have the same attitude towards X. However, there is a disequilibrium or strain if A likes X but B does not. This creates a tendency for A and B to exchange information about X until they arrive at a shared attitude. The more important X is to A and B, the more urgent this tendency is. + +An influential expansion of Newcomb's model is due to Westley and MacLean. They introduce the idea of asymmetry of information: the sender (A) is aware of several topics (X1 to X3) and has to compose the message (X') to communicate to the receiver (B). B's direct perception is limited to only a few of these topics (X1B). Another addition is the inclusion of feedback (fBA) from the receiver to the sender. Westley and MacLean also propose a further expansion to account for mass communication. For this purpose, they include an additional component, C, that has the role of a gatekeeper filtering the original message for the mass audience. + +=== Schramm === + +Schramm's model of communication is one of the earliest interaction models of communication. It was published by Wilbur Schramm in 1954 as a response to and an improvement over linear transmission models of communication, such as Lasswell's model and the Shannon–Weaver model. The main difference in this regard is that Schramm does not see the audience as passive recipients. Instead, he understands them as active participants that respond by sending their own message as a form of feedback. Feedback forms part of many types of communication and makes it easier for the participants to identify and resolve possible misunderstandings. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-5.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-5.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ea40cfe4b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-5.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Models of communication" +chunk: 6/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:18.930678+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +For Schramm, communication is based on the relation between a source and a destination and consists in sharing ideas or information. For this to happen, the source has to encode their idea in symbolic form as a message. This message is sent to the destination using a channel, such as sound waves or ink on paper. The destination has to decode and interpret the message in order to reconstruct the original idea. The processes of encoding and decoding correspond to the roles of transmitter and receiver in the Shannon–Weaver model. According to Schramm, these processes are influenced by the fields of experience of each participant. A field of experience includes past life experiences and affects what the participant understands and is familiar with. Communication fails if the message is outside the receiver's field of experience. In this case, the receiver is unable to decode it and connect it to the sender's idea. Other sources of error are external noise or mistakes in the phases of decoding and encoding. Schramm holds that successful communication is about realizing an intended effect. He discusses the conditions for this to be possible. They include making sure that one has the receiver's attention, that the message is understandable, and that the audience is able and motivated to react to the message in the intended way. +In the 1970s, Schramm proposed modifications to his original model to take into account the discoveries made in communication studies in the preceding decades. His new approach gives special emphasis to the relation between the participants. The relation determines the goal of communication and the roles played by the participants. + +=== Gerbner === +George Gerbner first published his model in his 1956 paper Toward a General Model of Communication. It is a linear transmission model. It is based on the Shannon–Weaver model and Lasswell's model but expands them in various ways. It aims to provide a general account of all forms of communication. One of its innovations is that it starts not with a message or an idea but with an event. The communicating agent perceives it and composes a message about it. +For Gerbner, messages are not packages that exist prior to communication. Instead, the message is created in the process of encoding and is affected by the code and the channel. Gerbner assumes that the goal of communication is to inform another person about something they are unaware of. He includes a total of ten essential components: (1) someone (2) perceives an event (3) and reacts (4) in a situation (5) through some means. This is done with the goal of (6) making available materials (7) in some form (8) and context (9) conveying content (10) of some consequence. Each of these components corresponds to a different area of study. For example, communicator and audience research studies the first component while perception research is concerned with the second component. In Gerbner's example, "a man notices a house burning across the street and shouts 'Fire!'". In this case, "someone" corresponds to the man and the perceived event is the burning house. Other components include his voice (means) and the fire (conveyed content). + +The relation between message and reality is of central importance to Gerbner. For this reason, his model includes two dimensions. The horizontal dimension corresponds to the relation between communicator and event. The vertical dimension corresponds to the relation between communicator and message. Communication starts in the horizontal dimension with an event perceived by the sender. The next step happens in the vertical dimension, where the percept is translated into a signal containing the message. The message has two key aspects: content and form. The content is the information about the event. The last step belongs again to the horizontal dimension: the audience perceives and interprets the message about the event. +All these steps are creative processes that select some features to be included. For example, the event is never perceived in its entirety. Instead, the communicator has to select and interpret its most salient features. The same happens when encoding the message: the percept is usually too complex to be fully communicated and only its most significant aspects are expressed. Selection also concerns the choice of the code and channel to be used. The availability of a channel differs from person to person and from situation to situation. For example, many people do not have access to mass media, like television, to send their message to a wide audience. Gerbner's emphasis on the relation between message and reality has been influential for subsequent models of communication. However, Gerbner's model still suffers from many of the limitations of the earlier models it is based on. An example is the focus on the linear transmission of information without an in-depth discussion of the role of feedback loops. Another issue concerns the question of how meaning is created. + +=== Berlo === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-6.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-6.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a487cf31b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-6.md @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +--- +title: "Models of communication" +chunk: 7/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:18.930678+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Berlo's model is a linear transmission model of communication. It was published by David Berlo in 1960 and was influenced by earlier models, such as the Shannon–Weaver model and Schramm's model. It is usually referred to as the Source-Message-Channel-Receiver (SMCR) model because of its four main components (source, message, channel, and receiver). Each of these components is characterized by various aspects and the main focus of the model is a detailed discussion of each of them. For Berlo, all forms of communication are attempts to influence the behavior of the receiver. To do so, the source has to express their purpose by encoding it into a message. This message is sent through a channel to the receiver, who has to decode it in order to understand it and react to it. Communication is successful if the reaction of the receiver matches the purpose of the source. +Berlo's main interest in discussing the components and their aspects is to analyze their impact on successful communication. Source and receiver are usually persons but can also be groups or institutions. On this level, Berlo identifies four features: communication skills, attitudes, knowledge, and social-cultural system. Communication skills are primarily the ability of the source to encode messages and the ability of the receiver to decode them. The attitude is the positive or negative stance that source and receiver have toward themselves, each other, and the discussed topic. Knowledge stands for the understanding of the topic and the social-cultural system includes background beliefs and social norms common in the culture and social context of the communicators. Generally speaking, the more source and receiver are alike in regard to these factors, the more likely successful communication is. Communication may fail, for example, if the receiver lacks the decoding skills necessary to understand the message or if the source has a demeaning attitude toward the receiver. +For the message, the main factors are code, content, and treatment, each of which can be analyzed in terms of its structure and its elements. The code is the sign system used to express the message, like a language. The content is the idea or information expressed in the message. Choosing an appropriate content and the right code to express it matters for successful communication. Berlo uses the term treatment to refer to this selection. It reflects the style of the source as a communicator. The channel is the medium and process of how the message is transmitted. Berlo analyzes it mainly based on the five senses used to decode messages: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. The SMCR model has inspired subsequent theorists. However, it is often criticized based on its simplicity because it does not discuss feedback loops and because it does not give enough emphasis on noise and other barriers to communication. + +=== Dance === + +Frank Dance's helical model of communication was initially published in his 1967 book Human Communication Theory. It is intended as a response to and an improvement over linear and circular models by stressing the dynamic nature of communication and how it changes the participants. Dance sees the fault of linear models as their attempt to understand communication as a linear flow of messages from a sender to a receiver. According to him, this fault is avoided by circular models, which include a feedback loop through which messages are exchanged back and forth. Dance criticizes the circular approach by holding that it "suggests that communication comes back, full circle, to exactly the same point from which it started". +Dance holds that a helix is a more adequate representation of the process of communication since it implies that there is always a forward movement. It shows how the content and structure of earlier communicative acts influence the content and structure of later communicative acts. In this regard, communication has a lasting effect on the communicators and evolves continuously as a process. The upward widening movement of the helix represents a form of optimism by seeing communication as a means of growth, learning, and improvement. The basic idea behind Dance's helical model of communication is also found in education theory in the spiral approach proposed by Jerome Bruner. Dance's model has been criticized based on the claim that it focuses only on some aspects of communication but does not provide a tool for detailed analysis. + +=== Barnlund === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-7.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-7.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6976ac322 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication-7.md @@ -0,0 +1,19 @@ +--- +title: "Models of communication" +chunk: 8/8 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:18.930678+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Barnlund's model is an influential transactional model of communication first published in 1970. Its goal is to avoid the inaccuracies of earlier models and account for communication in all its complexity. This includes dismissing the idea that communication is defined as the transmission of ideas from a sender to a receiver. For Barnlund, communication "is the production of meaning, rather than the production of messages". He holds that the world and its objects lack meaning on their own. They are only meaningful to the extent that people interpret them and assign meaning to them by engaging in the processes of decoding and encoding. In doing so, people try to decrease uncertainty and arrive at a shared understanding. +Barnlund's model rests on a set of basic assumptions. For Barnlund, any activity that creates meaning is a form of communication. He sees communication as dynamic because meaning is not fixed but depends on the human practice of interpretation, which is itself subject to change. Communication is continuous in the sense that it does not have a beginning or an end: people decode cues and encode responses all the time, even when no one else is present. For Barnlund, communication is also circular because there is no clear division between sender and receiver as found in linear transmission models. It is irreversible due to the diverse effects it has on the communicators that cannot be undone. It is also complex since many components are involved and many factors influence how it unfolds. Because of its complexity, communication is unrepeatable: it is not possible to control all these factors to exactly repeat a previous exchange. This is not even the case when the same communicators exchange the same messages. +Barnlund's model is based on the idea that communication consists of decoding cues by ascribing meaning to them and encoding appropriate responses to them. Barnlund distinguishes between public, private, and behavioral cues. Public cues are accessible to anyone in the situation, such as a tree in a park or a table in a room. Private cues are only available to one person, like a coin in one's pocket or an itch on one's wrist. Behavioral cues are under the control of the communicators and constitute the main vehicles of communication. They include verbal behavior, like discussing a business proposal, and non-verbal behavior, like raising one's eyebrows or sitting down in a chair. Barnlund's model has been influential, both for its innovations and for its criticisms of earlier models. Some objections to it include that it is not equally useful for all forms of communication and that it does not explain how exactly meaning is produced. + +== References == + +=== Citations === + +=== Sources === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolingual_fieldwork-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolingual_fieldwork-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..969a8604d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolingual_fieldwork-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Monolingual fieldwork" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolingual_fieldwork" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:20.148195+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Monolingual fieldwork is the practice of conducting linguistic fieldwork solely through the target language under investigation, without the use of interpreters or a lingua franca. In this approach, the linguist attempts to acquire proficiency in the target language in order to communicate directly with native speakers. Margaret Thomas writes that in monolingual approach it is "the linguist bears the burden of connecting the target language to the language(s) of analysis and of dissemination of research findings"; in the bilingual approach it is the native speaker who need to identify "equivalences across the target and contact languages, and communicating those equivalences to the linguist." +The monolingual approach was advocated by linguist-anthropologist Franz Boas, who studied Native American languages, in the early 20th century. Boas believed that gaining command of the language was essential for understanding the culture and worldview of the speech community. Nevertheless, Boas was not fluent in any language he studied and often used English as lingua franca. Edward Sapir, one of the best known student's of Boas, used only bilingual approach, even when he worked with Ishi, the last known speaker of the Yana language. Leonard Bloomfield also used monolingual fieldwork, and even wrote some letters to his American colleague in Ojibwe. +The monolingual approach was not very widespread, but gained some popularity in 1940s by "monolingual demonstrations". However, the use of interpreters and lingua francas became more common as linguistics grew more theoretical and removed from ethnography. +Another school of linguistics that used monolingual approach was the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a Christian missionary organization. Linguist Kenneth Lee Pike was the president and central figure of the organization. SIL linguists sometimes spend years learning the languages in distant communities, with the goal to learn a language on a level needed to translate the Bible; SIL linguists "embraced, even insisted on, the challenges of monolingual fieldwork". +Daniel Everett, who started his career at SIL, became the most notable proponent of monolingual fieldwork in the 1990s. He spent more than 20 years in Brazil, in the Amazonian jungles, studying Pirahã language. + + +== Further reading == +Bouquiaux, Luc; Thomas, Jacqueline M. C.; Bouquiaux, Luc (1992). Studying and describing unwritten languages. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics. ISBN 978-0883128145. Retrieved 12 June 2024. +Everett, Daniel L. (2012). "Monolingual field research". Linguistic Fieldwork. Cambridge University Press. pp. 166–188. ISBN 978-0-511-81020-6. +Everett, Daniel (2006). Linguistic Fieldwork: A Student Guide (PDF). Illinois State University. Retrieved 11 June 2024. (2006 draft) + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Language By Gesture, a televised 1966 example of one of Kenneth Lee Pike's "monolingual demonstrations" +"Monolingual Fieldwork" Demonstration by Daniel Everett \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Poverty_Index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Poverty_Index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a630e0919 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Poverty_Index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +title: "Multidimensional Poverty Index" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Poverty_Index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:46.591015+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Multidimensional Poverty Indices use a range of indicators (monetary, health, education and others) to calculate a summary poverty figure for a given population, in which a larger figure indicates a higher level of poverty. This figure considers both the proportion of the population that is deemed poor and the 'breadth' of poverty experienced by these 'poor' households, following the Alkire & Foster 'counting method'. The method was developed following increased criticism of monetary and consumption-based poverty measures, seeking to capture the deprivations in non-monetary factors that contribute towards well-being. While there is a standard set of indicators, dimensions, cutoffs and thresholds used for a 'Global MPI', the method is flexible and there are many examples of poverty studies that modify it to best suit their environment. The methodology has been mainly, but not exclusively, applied to developing countries. +The Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) was developed in 2010 by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme and uses health, education and standard of living indicators to determine the incidence and intensity of poverty experienced by a population. It has since been used to measure acute poverty across over 100 developing countries. The Global MPI is released annually by UNDP and OPHI and the results are published on their websites. The MPI is published along with the Human Development Index (HDI) in the Human Development Report. It replaced the Human Poverty Index. + +Multidimensional Poverty Indices typically use the household as their unit of analysis, though this is not an absolute requirement. A household is deprived for a given indicator if they fail to satisfy a given 'cutoff' (e.g. having at least one adult member with at least six years of education). A household is assigned a 'deprivation score' determined by the number of indicators they are deprived in and the 'weights' assigned to those indicators. Each dimension (health, education, standard of living, etc.) is typically given an equal weighting, and each indicator within the dimension is also typically weighted equally. If this household deprivation score exceeds a given threshold (e.g. 1/3) then a household is considered to be 'multiply deprived', or simply 'poor'. The final 'MPI score' (or 'Adjusted Headcount Ratio') is determined by the proportion of households deemed 'poor', multiplied by the average deprivation score of 'poor' households. +MPI advocates state that the method can be used to create a comprehensive picture of people living in poverty, and permits comparisons both across countries, regions and the world and within countries by ethnic group, urban/rural location, as well as other key household and community characteristics. MPIs are useful as an analytical tool to identify the most vulnerable people – the poorest among the poor, revealing poverty patterns within countries and over time, enabling policymakers to target resources and design policies more effectively. Critics of this methodology have pointed out that changes to cutoffs and thresholds, as well as the indicators included and weightings attributed to them can change MPI scores and the resulting poverty evaluation. + +== Dimensions and indicators == + +=== Dimensions === +The Global MPI uses three standard dimensions: Health; Education; Standard of Living and ten indicators. These mirror the Human Development Index (HDI). +Multidimensional Poverty Indices used for purposes other than global comparison have sometimes used different dimensions, including income and consumption. + +=== Indicators and cutoffs === +The Global MPI uses the following ten indicators with the following cutoffs. + +The indicators selected for other MPI-oriented studies vary according to the availability of data and the context, as well as the theoretical considerations of the researchers. + +== Calculation == + +=== The Alkire-Foster 'counting method' === +The Alkire-Foster (AF) method is a way of measuring multidimensional poverty developed by OPHI's Sabina Alkire and James Foster. Building on the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke poverty measures, it involves counting the different types of deprivation that individuals experience at the same time, such as a lack of education or employment, or poor health or living standards. These deprivation profiles are analysed to identify who is poor and then used to construct a multidimensional index of poverty (MPI). + +==== Constructing poverty measures ==== +The most common way of measuring poverty is to calculate the percentage of the population who are poor, known as the headcount ratio (H). Having identified who is poor, the AF methodology generates a unique class of poverty measures (Mα) that goes beyond the simple headcount ratio. Three measures in this class are of high importance: + +Adjusted headcount ratio (M0), otherwise known as the MPI: This measure reflects both the incidence of poverty (the percentage of the population who are poor) and the intensity of poverty (the percentage of deprivations suffered by each person or household on average). M0 is calculated by multiplying the incidence (H) by the intensity (A). M0 = H x A. +Adjusted Poverty Gap (M1): This measure reflects the incidence, intensity and depth of poverty. The depth of poverty is the average 'gap' (G) between the level of deprivation poor people experience and the poverty cut-off line. M1 = H x A x G. +Adjusted Squared Poverty Gap (M2): This measure reflects the incidence, intensity, and depth of poverty, as well as inequality among the poor (captured by the squared gap, S). M2 = H x A x S. +M0 can be calculated with ordinal as well as cardinal data, which is why it is most often used. Cardinal data are required to calculate M1 and M2. +The AF Method is unique in that by measuring intensity it can distinguish between, for example, a group of poor people who suffer two deprivations on average and a group of poor people who suffer five deprivations on average at the same time. + +=== Fictional example === +Country X consists of persons A, B and C. The following table shows the deprivation on each of the 10 indicators for persons A, B and C. +"0%" indicates no deprivation in that indicator, while "100%" indicates deprivation in that indicator. + +Factor H for country X is: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Poverty_Index-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Poverty_Index-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..82299d8ca --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Poverty_Index-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,96 @@ +--- +title: "Multidimensional Poverty Index" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Poverty_Index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:46.591015+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + + + + + + + + 1 + + + 1 + + + 0 + + 3 + + + = + 0.667 + + + {\displaystyle {\frac {1+1+0}{3}}=0.667} + + +Factor A for country X is: + + + + + + + + 33.33 + % + + + 50.00 + % + + 2 + + + = + 0.417 + + + {\displaystyle {\frac {33.33\%+50.00\%}{2}}=0.417} + + +Thus, the MPI for country X is: + + + + + 0.667 + × + 0.417 + = + 0.278 + + + {\displaystyle 0.667\times 0.417=0.278} + + +== Comparisons with other indicators == + +=== Comparison with HDI === +The Human Development Index (HDI) was developed by Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen in 1990, and was also developed by the UNDP. It is calculated as the geometric mean of the normalized indices of the three dimensions of human development; it takes into account: health, education and standard of living. UNDP has a separate version of the HDI named the IHDI (Inequality-adjusted HDI). +While both the HDI and the MPI use the three broad dimensions health, education and standard of living, the HDI uses indicators at the aggregate level while the MPI uses microdata and all indicators must come from the same survey. This, among other reasons, has led to the MPI only being calculated for just over 100 countries, where data is available for all these diverse indicators, while HDI is calculated for almost all countries. +However, though HDI is thus more universally applicable, its relative sparsity of indicators also makes it more susceptible to bias. Indeed, some studies have found it to be somewhat biased towards GDP per capita (GDPpc), as demonstrated by a high correlation between HDI and the log of GDPpc. Hence, HDI has been criticized for ignoring other development parameters. + +=== Comparison with other indicators === +Both the HDI and the MPI have been criticized by economists such as Ratan Lal Basu for not taking the "moral/emotional/spiritual dimensions" of poverty into consideration. It has been attempted to capture these additional factors in the "Global Happiness Index". + +== Impact of COVID-19 == +According to reports, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted education, employment and social protection of people in countries which have higher levels of multidimensional poverty such as Zambia. Risks of school nonattendance are informed by UNESCO data on daily school closures around the world. We derive a risk of 50% for children in school age to experience significant loss of schooling, and thus deprivation in school attendance due to school closures during the first year of the pandemic. + +== See also == +World Happiness Report + +== References == + +== Bibliography == +Duncan Green (2014), Are we measuring the right things? The latest multidimensional poverty index is launched today, Oxfam, archived from the original on June 24, 2014 +David Satterthwaite (2014), Multidimensional Poverty Index: Another underestimate of urban poverty, London: International Institute for Environment and Development +Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index: An Application to the United States (PDF), University of Wisconsin-Madison, Institute for Research on Poverty, 2015 + +== External links == +Website \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fed42e199 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +title: "Nash's Pyramid" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:13.366255+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Nash's Pyramid is a framework for ranking leisure activities, developed by Jay B. Nash. Nash was an early leader in the leisure field. His thinking was influenced by the prevalence of 'Spectatoritis' in America which he defines as, "a blanket description to cover all kinds of passive amusement". +The pyramid begins at the ‘spectatoris-type level’ which includes activities that require no critical thought, such as watching television. Leisure activities in higher tiers allow for the participant to develop as a person and are characterised by a higher level of individual engagement. The apex of the pyramid is the 'creative participation' level, where a person uses their own experience to create a new medium. This can include a painting or a composition. Activities which cause harm to either society or the individual, such as crime or gambling, fall below the pyramid. +The pyramid was formative in the creation of the 'leisure research' approach in the field of leisure studies. This approach relies heavily on social philosophy. It has become less relevant as contemporary post-modern and post-structural understandings of leisure have relied more on scientific theories and quantitative methods of analysis. + +Nash's understanding of leisure, and his pyramid, have been significant in the development of America's physical education program. To equip adults with the tools to lead a happy life, he believed the education curriculum should be sufficiently broad enough to teach children hobbies and skills. From its traditional emphasis on gymnastics and hygiene, the physical education system started to reform in the 1930s to include a greater variety of exercises. + +== Hierarchy == +Nash suggests historical perspectives towards leisure justify a new theory on play. A culture of severity and the Protestant reformation led to a de-valuing of leisure time throughout the Middle Ages. It is only with the Industrial Revolution and the mechanisation of work that leisure time could be considered an opportunity for stimulation. +When constructing his pyramid, Nash's description of recreation as a, "basic need," is based on two assumptions. Firstly, humans are inherently active. They are most fulfilled when either their body or mind is stimulated, the determination to achieve this state being called the ‘activity drive.’ +Secondly, there exists a work–life balance binary and, "leisure alone is not enough to satisfy [the activity drive], neither is work unless it has significance." Industrialisation, through labour-saving technology, routinised the work environment and allowed for more free time. Nash's pyramid suggests that recreation is a ‘need’ because it provides the intellectual and emotional stimulation required by humans. +The pyramid orders activities according to their opportunity for personal growth. It begins at a neutral level which describes activities used to "kill time." Any activity falling in the above three tiers, creative, emotional or active participation, provide a fulfilling experience as the participant is allowed an opportunity to be involved in the experience. +The criteria for higher-tier activities include those that have an associated ‘inner drive’, contribute to the fullness of life, build stature through self-confidence, include others and allow an individual to relax. +Any activity which is of detriment to the self or society, falls below the neutral section. This includes crime and delinquency. The general criteria for low-tier activities is that they undermine health, be routine, be carried on for reward only and be disliked. +Where an activity falls within the framework depends on the participant. Individual experiences are unique and people have different reactions to activities. + +=== Creative participation === +Maker of the Model, inventor, painter and composer +The participant creates a new medium from their own experiences. This includes the formation of language, social groups and dance. Nash uses these historical examples to show the importance of tier and how it is human nature to engage in the creative process. To challenge what he sees as society's fear of failure, Nash states, "There is tremendous creative capacity in the common people if only they have the freedom and opportunity to explore, to follow hunches, to find a talent niche.” + +=== Active participation === +Copying the model, playing the part +A participant follows the rules and systems established by a ‘creator’. This could include an athlete playing soccer or an actor performing a script. Nash suggests playing the part forces a unique appreciation for the model which cannot be achieved by just watching. + +=== Emotional participation === +A person moved to appreciation +A participant spectates, and experiences a reaction, to an activity. It is different to just passive watching. Potential responses include being moved to appreciation or experiencing an emotion. The level and extent of engagement depends on the participant's own experiences and emotions. + +=== Spectatoritis type === +Entertainment, amusement, escape from monotony, killing time – antidote to boredom +In this tier, activities do not engage a participant. They are instead an escape from life's routine. Nash suggested society had a tendency to participate in spectator -type activities, limiting the possibility for self-improvement. He called this phenomenon Spectatoritis. He warned that, "by constantly repeating the doses of primitive passive entertainment, man may become an addicts.” +Nash suggested the culture of mass media was contributing to the rise of spectatoritis. Radio tends not to be stimulating and only presents one view-point, limiting the potential for critical thinking. +Assuming mass media activities are, "properly chosen and properly used," Nash acknowledges they play some role in society. This is because they would require active engagement and belong to a higher tier within the pyramid. + +=== Zero-level === +Excesses +Activities in this tier cause harm against in the individual. It includes drinking and gambling. Nash believed in the development of a social ego within a social group. Individuals, when they chose to be self-preserving, prevent the creation of a social ego and can cause injury to themselves. + +=== Sub-zero level === +Delinquency, Crime +Nash stated crime and delinquency has been glorified. Acts performed against society belong to the lowest tier of the leisure pyramid. They create tension and undermine the social ego. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b6c2caa10 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Nash's Pyramid" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:13.366255+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Methodology and results == +Nash interviewed 1000 people. Each person was asked to nominate 10 happy people and describe their work and leisure activities, leading to an analysis of 10,000 individuals. +Of the individuals nominated as 'happy', there was wide variety in the careers and ages. Common characteristics used to describe happy people included; ambition, curiosity, emotional stability, aliveness, vitality and integrity. More correlation existed in the types of activities they participated in with "Few" people listing spectatoris activities, such as mass media forms, as enjoyable and important. +The data showed a link between happiness and enjoyment of activities. Nash suggested this is because recreation, such as sport, provides an opportunity for competition and risk. This helps fulfil an individual who should, "Die with your boots on, with a hundred interesting, unfinished activities for which there was just not time. On such prescription, one may live long and happy.” + +== Nash's perspective of leisure == +Nash stated a society should be judged on how effectively it used its leisure time as when, "civilians cease to face challenges they will deteriorate and die." Increases in leisure time could be counter-productive unless used intelligently. +For society to engage in higher-tier forms of leisure, Nash believed skill and hobby development should begin in young children. Children should be allowed to experience a wide-range of leisure pursuit and, through a trial-and-error approach, determine which hobby creates an intrinsic motivation to keep practising. This process is most effective in the young. Early adolescents are awarded more freedom by their parents and begin to have greater autonomy in their leisure pursuits. They are also receptive to learning new skills, being unafraid of both failure and the requirement to practice. As evidence, Nash suggests many young masters began the skill-development process early with Galileo being 17 when he founded the law of the pendulum. +For all people to be productive in their leisure time, the education system should be reformed to help young people develop hobbies. Nash suggested that education was a tool for shaping society and a well-rounded curriculum, through both formal and informal means, could result in an increase in the general level of skills. Physical activity was a key component of the proposed plan. The then-current emphasis on hygiene and gymnastics should be expanded to include a daily period of physical exercise. +Contemporary leisure scientists view leisure education as a life-long process, one not exclusive to adolescents. It is the process of maximising leisure potential to achieve a desirable quality of life. Proficiency in a serious leisure activity requires a systematic approach to learning the relevant skills. An activity is likened to a 'career' and requires a substantial amount of knowledge, training and skill. +It is accepted that the education system can prepare young people to participate in serious leisure activities. Informal education can help develop an 'intrinsic motivation', called the 'activity drive' by Nash, needed for personal development. Students would be trained for both vocational opportunities and the ability to participate in a variety of cultural and artistic pursuits. +Education of leisure-pursuits is not generally incorporated into the contemporary curriculum as extra-curricular activities, by definition, fall outside the school syllabus. There have been some attempts to provide a more holistic approach to skill development, such as the leisure education curriculum in Israel. It provides both informal and formal frameworks to achieve its aim of providing students with the necessary skills to best use leisure time intelligently. The culture of Israel is work-focused however allows for great cultural diversity. +The intelligent use of leisure time by young people is important because they are at risk for delinquency, or activities falling below the pyramid. Nash stated there exists similarities between patterns of play and crime, both involve a struggle to overcome a challenge and feelings of mastery. Unless young people are allowed the opportunity to develop hobbies and skills, they could satisfy the activity drive by engaging in unhealthy leisure pursuits such as gambling. +TimeWise is an experimental program established to promote healthy leisure behaviours in American Middle School Students. Through leisure education, it aimed to prevent the early onset of unhealthy behaviours such as substance abuse. The study was successful on a small-scale. The participants reported higher levels of motivation and engagement with new activities when compared to the control group. + +=== Effect on American physical education === +Nash has been considered a leader in the field of American physical education. He was part of a broader school of thought that used the ideas of Dewey to argue informal activities that develop a child's abilities and interests could create habits for a happy life. In the 1930s, the physical education curriculum started to expand from its traditional focus on gymnastics to be more broad in the activities taught. +Historical factors supported a greater focus on general physical development. WWII, and the findings of the Kraus-Weber test, created fears that American children were physical inferior. Commercial sporting groups also grew in influence, facilitating investment into new equipment and facilities. +The influence of Nash was helped by his professional appointments. He was the Physical Education Department Chair at NYU from 1930 to 1954 and helped found the American Academy of Physical Education, now known as the National Academy of Kinesiology. Nash is Fellow #5 in the Academy, served as its inaugural Secretary, and later was elected its President. The highest-possible awards from the AAHPER and the American Academy of Physical Education recognize his contributions to the field. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..aaa26d56b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +title: "Nash's Pyramid" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash's_Pyramid" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:13.366255+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Theories == +America was largely a rural-agrarian society during the colonial period and placed little value on leisure-pursuits. Instead, they valued hard-work. Industrialisation acted to transform society, creating urbanised cities and increasing access to new technology. A reduction in working hours and a rise in the general standard of living helped trigger a ‘leisure revolution’. This process was supported by Enlightenment-era ideas showing the importance of human development and freedom. +Leisure and technology become increasingly intertwined. Technology both increased people's access to leisure, through innovations such as cars and radio, and expanded existing forms of entertainment. For example, powerful sound systems supported music performances in a new open-air format. +Leisure theory originated with the organised play and recreation movement. It was closely linked to the emergence of parks in urbanised cities and eventually expanded to include the effects of leisure activities. Theories reflected an understanding that quality of life could be improved through recreation. +Early historians and leisure researches, such as Nash, were wary of the effects of industrialisation. When analysing the rise of spectator sport, there were criticisms it promoted passive observation instead of the active participation seen in rural areas. Historian Krout stated an increase in athletic interest, "has not made us a nation of participants in sports, but a nation of spectators at sporting events." +There existed three schools of through in North America to analyse leisure. Nash, along with Brightbill and Parker, were formative in the creation of the leisure research approach. This is where social philosophy is used to explain the purpose of leisure. +Social empiricism and social analysis are alternate schools of thought that analyse the behavioural decisions behind participation in leisure activities. Historically, North American models rely heavily on statistics and data collection. This contrasts to the European approach to leisure studies which preferences more general theories. +Nash's pyramid contributed to further academic work. Purple recreation are socially taboo recreational activities. Curtis's scale of purple recreation, which ranks activities from being extremely unacceptable to acceptable, draws from Nash's pyramid. For example creative activities rank highly as both a productive and acceptable form of leisure. + +=== Contemporary leisure–activity theories === +Leisure theories written after industrialisation and modernisation tend to suggest an individual can be made better through participation in leisure activities. Contemporary theories share Nash's view that recreational activities allow for feelings of success and achievement. +The most prominent framework for understanding leisure is the 'serious leisure framework' founded by Robert Stebbins. He defines serious leisure as a, "systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer activity that participants find so substantial and interesting that, in the typical case, they launch themselves on a career centred on acquiring and expressing its special skills, knowledge and experience." Characteristics include a participant's commitment to the career, identification with the 'unique ethos' of the activity and opportunity for durable individual benefits such as self-enrichment. +By contrast, casual leisure is immediate, intrinsically rewarding and relatively short-lived. It requires limited training to participate and is essentially hedonistic. The repeated use of casual leisure activities, such as gambling or watching TV, for recuperation can become habitual however provides no opportunity for a leisure-career. + +== Criticism == +Nash defines leisure by the activities a person engages with outside their work-time. Feminist scholars have criticised the leisure activity approaches as it fails to include women with non-traditional working lives. +The pyramid outlines the benefits of higher-tier activities and not the associated costs. Some high-tier activities can be exclusionary to the working class who lack either the time or specialist equipment to participate. +Whilst significant in the era created, other models of experiences have become more widespread. This includes Csikszentmihalyi's 1985 model of flow. It assess the likelihood of a skill being totally absorbed and can consider recreational activities. +The decline in Nash's work mirrors the decline of leisure research. This includes the use of conjecture. From the 1990s, post-structuralism and post-modernism attitudes towards leisure studies have better incorporated scientific methods into analysis. + +=== Criticisms of leisure–activity theories === +Serious Leisure is defined by an individual's level of commitment. If the commitment is focused on just one activity, general breadth of experience and the ability to respond to a change in circumstance such as injury can be limited. +In empirical studies of serious leisure, analysts assume participation in an activity carries automatic benefits. This assumption has been criticised for being too general as it does not consider many different activities could be serious or casual depending on the individual's level engagement. Some scholars have suggested the framework be expanded to define leisure as an 'experience' so that personal differences can be better accounted for. + +== See also == +Sociology of leisure +Leisure studies + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8fc8f0912 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,21 @@ +--- +title: "Natural rate of unemployment" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:47.834476+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The natural rate of unemployment is the name that was given to a key concept in the study of economic activity. Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps, tackling this 'human' problem in the 1960s, both received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work, and the development of the concept is cited as a main motivation behind the prize. A simplistic summary of the concept is: 'The natural rate of unemployment, when an economy is in a steady state of "full employment", is the proportion of the workforce who are unemployed'. Put another way, this concept clarifies that the economic term "full employment" does not mean "zero unemployment". It represents the hypothetical unemployment rate consistent with aggregate production being at the "long-run" level. This level is consistent with aggregate production in the absence of various temporary frictions such as incomplete price adjustment in labor and goods markets. The natural rate of unemployment therefore corresponds to the unemployment rate prevailing under a classical view of determination of activity. +The natural unemployment rate is mainly determined by the economy's supply side, and hence production possibilities and economic institutions. If these institutional features involve permanent mismatches in the labor market or real wage rigidities, the natural rate of unemployment may feature involuntary unemployment. The natural rate of unemployment is a combination of frictional and structural unemployment that persists in an efficient, expanding economy when labor and resource markets are in equilibrium. +Occurrence of disturbances (e.g., cyclical shifts in investment sentiments) will cause actual unemployment to continuously deviate from the natural rate, and be partly determined by aggregate demand factors as under a Keynesian view of output determination. The policy implication is that the natural rate of unemployment cannot permanently be reduced by demand management policies (including monetary policy), but that such policies can play a role in stabilizing variations in actual unemployment. +Reductions in the natural rate of unemployment must, according to the concept, be achieved through structural policies directed towards an economy's supply side. According to multiple surveys, two-thirds to three-quarters of economists generally agree with the statement, "There is a natural rate of unemployment to which the economy tends in the long run." + +== Development == +While Friedrich von Hayek had argued attempts to create full employment might trigger uncontrollable inflation, and David Hume noted that increases to the money supply would raise the price of labour as early as 1752, the classic statement regarding the natural rate appeared in Milton Friedman's December 1967 Presidential Address to the American Economic Association: +It should be pointed out that before formally stating the natural rate concept in his Presidential Address, in April 1966, Friedman intuitively introduced the concept based on discussing Brazil's disinflation program that had brought its inflation rate down from about 90 to 45 percent. In his presidential address, Friedman boldly postulated: + +At any moment of time, there is some level of unemployment which has the property that it is consistent with equilibrium in the structure of real wages ... The 'natural rate of unemployment' ... is the level that would be ground out by the Walrasian system of general equilibrium equations, provided there is embedded in them the actual structural characteristics of the labour and commodity markets, including market imperfections, stochastic variability in demands and supplies, the costs of gathering information about job vacancies, and labor availabilities, the costs of mobility, and so on. +However, this remained a vision – Friedman never wrote down a model with all of these properties. When he illustrated the idea of the Natural Rate he simply used the standard text-book labor market demand and supply model that was essentially the same as Don Patinkin's model of full employment. In this there is a competitive labor market with both labor supply and demand depend on the real wage and the natural rate is simply the competitive equilibrium where demand equals supply. Implicit in his vision is the notion that the natural rate is Unique: there is only one level of output and employment that is consistent with equilibrium. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..55c4df509 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Natural rate of unemployment" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rate_of_unemployment" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:47.834476+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Phillips curve == +Milton Friedman argued that a natural rate of inflation followed from the Phillips curve. This showed wages tend to rise when unemployment is low. Friedman argued that inflation was the same as wage rises, and built his argument upon a widely believed idea, that a stable negative relation between inflation and unemployment existed. This belief had the policy implication that unemployment could be permanently reduced by expansive demand policy and thus higher inflation. +Friedman and Phelps opposed this idea on theoretical grounds, as they noted that if unemployment were to be permanently lower, some real variable in the economy, like the real wage, would have changed permanently. That this should be the case because inflation was higher appeared to rely on systematic irrationality in the labor market. As Friedman remarked, wage inflation would eventually catch up and leave the real wage, and unemployment, unchanged. Hence, lower unemployment could only be attained as long as wage inflation and inflation expectations lagged behind actual inflation. This was seen to be only a temporary outcome. Eventually, unemployment would return to the rate determined by real factors independent of the inflation rate. According to Friedman and Phelps, the Phillips curve was therefore vertical in the long run, and expansive demand policies would only be a cause of inflation, not a cause of permanently lower unemployment. +Milton Friedman emphasized expectations errors as the main cause of deviation in unemployment from the natural rate. For Friedman, the notion that there was a unique Natural rate was equivalent to his assertion that there is only one level of unemployment at which inflation can be fully anticipated (when actual and expected inflation are the same). Edmund Phelps focused more in detail on the labor market structures and frictions that would cause aggregate demand changes to feed into inflation, and for sluggish expectations, into the determination of the unemployment rate. Also, his theories gave insights into the causes of a too high natural rate of unemployment (i.e., why unemployment could be structural or classical). + +== Criticisms == +The major criticism of a natural rate is that there is no credible evidence for it, as Milton Friedman himself said we "cannot know what the 'natural' rate is". The natural rate hypothesis makes the fundamental assumption that there exists a unique equilibrium level of unemployment. Importantly, Friedman himself never wrote down an explicit model of the natural rate; in his Nobel Lecture, he just uses the simple labor supply and demand model. Others have argued that there might be multiple equilibria, for example due to search externalities as in the Diamond coconut model or that there might exist a natural range of unemployment levels rather than a unique equilibrium. According to Roger Farmer of UCLA, the assumption that, after a shock, the unemployment rate returns to its natural rate does not hold in the data. + +== See also == +Classical dichotomy +Diamond coconut model +Frictional unemployment +Frisch elasticity of labor supply +NAIRU +NAIBER +Phillips curve +Reserve army of labour +Youth unemployment + +== Notes == + +== References == +K Clark and L Summers, ‘Labour Force Participation: Timing and Persistence’ (1982) 49(5) Review of Economic Studies 825 +M Friedman, ‘The Role of Monetary Policy’ (1968) 58(1) American Economic Review 1 +SP Hargreaves Heap, ‘Choosing the Wrong ‘Natural’ Rate: Accelerating Inflation or Decelerating Employment and Growth?’ (1980) 90(359) Economic Journal 611. +FA Hayek, ‘Full Employment, Planning and Inflation’ (1950) 4(6) Institute of Public Affairs Review 174 +E McGaughey, 'Will Robots Automate Your Job Away? Full Employment, Basic Income, and Economic Democracy' (2018) SSRN, part 2(1) + +== External links == +U.S. Natural Rate of Unemployment (Long-Term), 1949–present +U.S. Natural Rate of Unemployment (Short-Term), 1949–present \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a633a0632 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,64 @@ +--- +title: "Negative raising" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:21.413851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In linguistics, negative raising is a phenomenon that concerns the raising of negation from the embedded or subordinate clause of certain predicates to the matrix or main clause. The higher copy of the negation, in the matrix clause, is pronounced; but the semantic meaning is interpreted as though it were present in the embedded clause. + +== Background == +The NEG-element was first introduced by Edward Klima, but the term neg raising has been accredited to the early transformational analysis as an instance of movement. Charles J. Fillmore was the first to propose a syntactic approach called neg transportation but is now known solely as negative raising. This syntactic approach was supported in the early beginnings by evidence provided by Robin Lakoff, who used, in part, strong/strict polarity items as proof. Laurence R. Horn and Robin Lakoff have written on the theory of negative raising, which is now considered to be the classical argumentation on this theory. Chris Collins and Paul Postal have also written in more recent times in defense of the classical argumentation to negative raising. These early accounts attributed negative raising to be derived syntactically, as they thought that the NEG element was c-commanding onto two verbs. Not all agreed with the syntactic view of negative raising. To counter the syntactically derived theory of neg raising, Renate Bartsch and a number of others argued that a syntactic analysis was insufficient to explain all the components of the neg raising (NR) theory. Instead they developed a presuppositional, otherwise known as a semantically based account. However, it is suggested by Chris Collins, Paul Postal, and Laurence R. Horn that the divide between these approaches is not necessary. An approach combining the two is argued for by Chris Collins and Paul Postal, who claim that using an exclusionist method is not viable. + +== NEG-raising in English == +In the syntactic view of classical Neg-raising, a NEG raises from its origin, the place in which it originates underlyingly, to the host, the place in which sits in the surface representation. In English, negative raising constructions utilize negation in the form of, "not," where it is then subject to clausal raising. + +=== Examples of English NEG-raising === +In the phenomenon of negative raising, this negation cannot be raised freely with any given predicate. +Consider the following example proposed by Paul Crowley, in which the verb "say" attempts to display negative raising: + +Mary didn't say it would snow +Mary said it would not snow. +As seen in this example, "say" is not a predicate that can be used for Neg-raising, as the raising of the negation to the matrix clause creates the reading "Mary didn’t say it would snow," which holds a different meaning than "Mary said it would not snow," where the negation resides in the embedded clause. +To account for this fact, Laurence Horn has identified 5 distinct classes to account for the general predicates involved negative raising, as seen below in English: + +Chris Collins and Paul Postal refer to these predicates as classical negative raising predicates (CNRPs). It is important to note that some CNRPs such as reckon and guess, exhibit more dialectal variation in their acceptability to speakers. They define what constitutes a CNRP as follows: +"If NEG raises from one clause B into the next clause above B, call it clause A, then the predicate of clause A is a CNRP." +Consider the Perception predicate, "look like," in which we can posit the following readings: + +“It looks like [it will not rain today]” +“It does not look like [it will rain today]” +In this regard, “It does not look like [it will rain today]” is seen as a paraphrase of “It looks like [it will not rain today]." This is because even with the raising of the negation to the matrix clause, both sentences convey the same meaning, thus the matrix clause negation is to be interpreted as if it were within the embedded clause. + +=== Analysis of English NEG-raising === +In English, syntactically we can have negative phrase structures with the NEG in the matrix clause - the semantic interpretation of these phrases can be ambiguous; + +The negation could apply to the verb in the matrix clause +The negation could apply to the verb in the embedded clause + +==== Phrase structure with ambiguous and unambiguous NEG interpretation ==== + +Syntax Tree 1 + +Syntax Tree 2 + +The English language has a rich inventory of operators; these operators (in this case NEG specifically), differ from each other in terms of their scope orders with respect to other operators (in this case Verb). When we look at negative raising - we are thus looking at the operator NEG, and its scope over the Verbs in a phrase. Sentence with negative raising are thus ambiguous in terms of NEG - + +In one reading NEG has scope over the matrix verb (Tree 1) +in the other reading NEG has scope over the clausal verb (Tree 2) + +==== Phrase structure showing NEG raising - from lower to upper position ==== + +This tree illustrates how NEG can be raised from the embedded clause to the Matrix clause; thus it can be pronounced in the higher position while retaining its scope from the lower position. + +==== Horn clauses ==== +Horn clauses, named after the linguist Laurence R. Horn, who discovered the constructions, are clauses which feature a that clause complement containing an extracted NPI, triggering negative inversion, and further undergoing subject-auxiliary inversion. Take, for example, the following clause where the NPI is highlighted: +I don't think that ever before have the media played such a major role in a kidnapping. +Chris Collins and Paul Postal define rules that Horn clauses must abide by a few rules: + +They must be complements. +They must be a complement of a CNRP as these manifest a strong reading for main clause negation +The following table shows examples of permitted Horn clauses: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9d8d9e337 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: "Negative raising" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:21.413851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The first sentence is grammatical as the Horn clause is a complement of a CNRP expect, and can therefore raise up to the main clause while still being interpretable in the embedded clause. The second sentence is viewed as impossible because the Horn clause is a main clause, and lacks an initial complementizer, such as that. +While the standard view of fronted NPIs is that they are indefinites or existentials, this raises an issue for the existence of Horn clauses, as negative Inversion is prevented. However, the nonstandard view of NPIs containing an instance of negation can explain how NEG is able to raise to the host. This is due to the conditions of the phrases that can be fronted in negative Inversion being met by the NEG as a part of the fronted NPI. +Under the CNRP analysis of Horn clauses, the posited underlying structure does not yet have main clause negation or negative inversion. +The steps are detailed in the table below: + +==== Cloud of unknowing predicates ==== +While Horn clauses are claimed to only be licensed by CNRPs, it is the case that other predicates which are non-CNRPs can also license them, such as know. Take, for example: +I don't know that ever before have the media played such a major role in a kidnapping. +This is analyzed as having both an overt NEG in the main clause, which unlike the CNRP analysis, does not raise up from the embedded clause, and a NEG in the embedded clause. The NEG in the main clause accounts for the semantic negation of the main clause. The NEG in the embedded clause ensures that negative inversion can still occur by satisfying its requirements. Because the resulting negatives would not give a meaning similar to that of the above sentence, an additional covert NEG is added to the complement clause. Both occurrences of NEG in the complement clause would then undergo deletion. + +==== Strict negative polarity items (NPIs) ==== +Strict NPIs, like breathe a word, require a clause internal licenser as they are subject to syntactic locality constraints. However, negative raising is known to license strict NPIs, as seen in the following example, where the negation is in the main clause rather than the embedded clause: +Stanley doesn't believe that Carolyn will breathe a word about it +Phrase structure showing NEG- raising licensing a strict NPI + +This suggests that the negation originates in the embedded clause, as sister to the VP breathe a word, thus satisfying the locality of selection, being in the embedded clause before participating in raising, moving first to spec CP, and then to its host in the main clause. The analysis proposed by Chris Collins and Paul Postal draws on minimalist syntax, where the negation moves up to the specifier position of the functional projection, Negative Merge Phrase (NMP). Though the phrase is covert, the spec NM position acts as the host to the raised negation. + +==== Island constraints ==== +Movement of negation from the embedded clause to the main clause is blocked in a variety of cases where a syntactic island is formed, as exemplified by The Island Sensitivity of NEG Raising Condition: +"If K is a clause and an island, then NEG cannot extract from K." + +===== Wh- islands ===== +Neg-raising is not permitted in wh- islands. Consider the following examples, where negation is only permitted in the embedded clause and not the main clause, despite the ability of negation in the main clause to license strict NPIs: + +This can be explained by the wh- word how undergoing movement first, filling the space in spec CP. Once this happens, negation can no longer participate in cyclic movement by stopping in spec CP before moving to the host NM in the main clause. The resulting violation of cyclic movement gives us the ungrammatical sentence. + +== Negative raising in other languages == +Aside from English, negative raising has been an apparent phenomenon in a variety of languages: + +=== Modern Greek === +Negative raising works similar to English in Modern Greek but there appears to be clearer evidence of its existence in the language. +This is evidenced in the usage of negative polarity items and the usage of ακόμα (akóma) (the time αdverb) in this language. + +==== akόma (the time adverb) ==== +When the adverb akόma (translated as "yet" or "still" in English) is paired with a verb in the aorist, the negation δεν (den) makes the clause grammatical (e.g. δεν aorist αkόmα) as it imperfectivises it. This clause cannot stand as an independent clause if the negation is not present, showing that the pair appear together in the same context (for it to be grammatical, another verb form would have to be used). However, when the ungrammatical clause (e.g. * aorist αkόmα) is embedded in a matrix clause, a negation appears before a "Neg-raiser" verb that is located in the higher clause - suggesting that the negation was moved from the embedded clause into the matrix clause. + +==== Negative polarity items (NPI) ==== +When an embedded clause (consisting of an NPI) is embedded in a matrix clause (consisting a "Neg-raiser" verb), the negation could appear before or after the "Neg-raiser" verb. In both cases, the sentence would remain grammatical. However, when a non "Neg-raiser" verb is used in the matrix clause, the negation is only allowed after the verb, before the embedded clause. + +=== French === +In French, evidence of negative raising can be demonstrated through the use of tag questions and corrective responses, where negation is primarily depicted by the negative construction, "ne...pas." \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d6ac5ec05 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +title: "Negative raising" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_raising" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:21.413851+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +==== Tag questions ==== +When analyzing French tag questions, the tags 'oui' or 'non' are both seen with affirmative statements, while the tag 'non' is only selected by negative statements. +negative raising can be demonstrated through the observation that when the negation is in the embedded clause, it is able to take a tag. This can be seen through the use of the verb 'supposer,' to suppose, which coincides with Horn's proposed classes of negative-raising predicates: + +Through this depiction, with both the matrix clause negation in ii) and embedded clause negation in iii) possessing the ability to take a tag, evidence is given that ii) surfaces via negative raising from the structures like iii). Thus, despite the movement of the negative "ne...pas" to the matrix clause, the meaning of ii) is seen as a paraphrase of iii). + +==== Corrective responses ==== +The use of corrective responses in French is similar to that of tag questions, with the exception that there are three attested answers to corrective responses: 'oui', 'si,' and 'non.' 'Oui' or 'non' are used to express affirmation, while negative questions are expressed by 'si' or 'non.' +As seen through the continued use of the verb 'supposer,' to suppose, negative raising can be demonstrated in the following examples: + +In this data, it appears that the way in which the possible responses 'si'/'oui' are distributed relies upon the polarity of that to which it is a response. This statement further infers that negative raising is a process involved, given that ii) and iii) both permit the answer “Mais si!” or “Mais non!” despite the negation surfacing in separate clauses. This prompts evidence that they depict the same meaning despite the movement of the negation in the phrase, and thus, both structures originating their negation in the embedded clause. + +=== Japanese === +In Japanese, there are instances of neg-head raising. This is evidenced, in part, through negative polarity items and the negative nai 'not'. It is suggested that one of the main differences between Japanese and English is that the extent of negative scope is based on whether there is or is not any neg-head raising to a higher position. In addition, neg-head raising has been to attributed to being responsible for clause-wide negative scope in Japanese. This is different from English in that the negative scope in Japanese extends over the tense phrase (TP) because of neg-head raising. + +==== Negative polarity item (NPIs) ==== +In Japanese there are two types of NPIs: an argument modifier type and a floating modifier type. In Japanese, NPIs need to occur within the scope domain of the negator. What this means is that if the NPI were to occur in the matrix clause and the negator in the embedded clause, it would be considered to be ungrammatical, as it would not be within the scope domain of the negator. Another aspect which differentiates Japanese from English, in reference to Japanese NPIs, is that NPIs are considered to be legitimate regardless of whether they appear in the subject or the object position in simple verbal clauses. +Listed below are some example of Japanese NPIs. + +==== Negative nai 'not' ==== +Neg-head raising is also evidenced from the negative nai 'not'. The negative nai 'not' is neg-head raised, but it seems presently to only be raised when with a predicate with some verbal properties, as is shown by the NPI data. The evidence provided from the negative nai 'not' shows that the scope of nai moves from only being in the negative phrase (NegP) to extending over the tense phrase (TP). Additionally, when nai doesn't undergo neg-head raising, it results in subject-object/complement asymmetry. + +=== Serbo-Croatian === +In Serbo-Croatian there is obligatory NEG raising in sentences which contain the ni-NPI accompanied by the NEG ne. This happens, as unlike English, SC does not have no-forms i.e. Unary NEG structures, without a DP external NEG. Thus sentences in Serbo-Croatian, lacking a clausally located NEG are ungrammatical. + +==== Examples of NEG raising ==== + +Instead the raising process is employed; the underlying NEG ne originates in the lower embedded DP, and raises to the matrix, leaving behind a copy. Only the upper copy of the word is pronounced, so there is no possibility of an incorrect double negation analysis of the meaning. This can be seen as analogous to English sentences that contain a NEG internal to the DP combined with an NPI. +The structure of the sentence in these cases is as follows: + +== See also == +Verb phrase ellipsis +Minimalist program + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolinguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolinguistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c43ae6c70 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolinguistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +title: "Neolinguistics" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolinguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:22.691403+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Neolinguistics is the school of linguistics founded by Matteo Bartoli as a reaction to the Neogrammarians. Along with the Neoidealists it was one of the main rivals of the Neogrammarians, until structuralism, which emerged from the Neogrammarian tradition, superseded it. +The neolinguists deemphasized the importance of tree structures in the relationship of languages, and emphasized the importance of variation, especially geographic variation. + + +== References == +Bartoli, Matteo 1925. Introduzione alla neolinguistica (principi, scopi, metodi). Biblioteca dell'«Archivum Romanicum». Serie II: Linguistica, vol. 12. L.S. Olschki. +Hall, Robert A. Jr. 1946 Bartoli's 'Neolinguistica', Language, vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 273–283. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_(linguistics)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_(linguistics)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..19b60fa4b --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_(linguistics)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,61 @@ +--- +title: "Node (linguistics)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node_(linguistics)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:23.899900+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In formal syntax, a node is a point in a tree diagram or syntactic tree that can be assigned a syntactic category label. + + +== Nodes under phrase structure rules == + +Before the emergence of the X-bar theory, thus in the period between Chomsky (1957) and Jackendoff (1977), syntactic structures were represented based on phrase structure rules (PSR). + +The man studies linguistics enthusiastically. +This sentence involves the following five PSRs: + +S → NP VP +NP → Det N (the man) +NP → N (linguistics) +AdvP → Adv (enthusiastically) +VP → V NP AdvP (studies linguistics enthusiastically) +With a tree diagram, the sentence's structure can be depicted as in Figure 1. + +All the points illustrated by circles and diamonds are nodes in Figure 1, and the former are called nonterminal nodes and the latter terminal nodes. Note that the PSR does not specify how a node branches because the parent (the left side of the arrow) can diverge into any number of daughters (the right side of the arrow); thus, a node under the PSR can branch into any number of different nodes, allowing non-branching, binary-branching, ternary-branching, and so forth. + + +== Nodes under the X-bar theory == + +If we illustrate the structure of the sentence above in accordance with the X-bar schema, we obtain the structure in Figure 2 + +. + +Under the X-bar theory, a node necessarily divides into two branches because of the binarity principle. This also means that zero-level projections (heads) serve as terminal nodes and intermediate and maximal projections as nonterminal nodes. + + +== Nodes under the minimalist program == + +Under the minimalist program, syntactic structures are formed by iterative applications of the syntactic operation Merge, which serves to connect two elements into one. To yield a linguistic expression, lexemes are selected out of the lexicon and make a (non-ordered) set of syntactic objects called a lexical array, and a structure is derived by combining two of the objects (or combined objects) by Merge. In the case of the sentence The man studies linguistics enthusiastically, for example, the lexical array consists of {the, man, PRES, study, linguistics, enthusiastically}. When these syntactic objects are combined by Merge, that yields the structure in Figure 3. + +Since Merge is an operation that combines two elements, a node under the Minimalist Program needs to be binary just as in the X-bar theory, although there is a difference between the theories in that under the X-bar theory, the directionality of branching is fixed in accordance with the principles-and-parameters model (not with the X-bar theory itself), or more specifically, with the head parameter. (This means that the X-bar theory indirectly assumes that speakers have in their Universal Grammar a rule that determines the canonical linear order for them, depending on their native language.) On the other hand, under the Minimalist Program, there is no such canonical fundamentals since the lexical array does not constitute an ordered set. For this reason, linear order under the Minimalist Program is determined by the phonological operation of linearization applied to the partial string called a phase (under the Phase Theory) that is sent out to PF by Transfer. + + +== References == + + +== References == + + +== Related topics == +linguistics +syntax +generative grammar +constituent +syntactic tree +phrase structure rule +X-bar theory +Minimalist Program \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_identity-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_identity-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c71b99ae2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_identity-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Nominal identity" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_identity" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:25.110512+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Nominal identity is the identity in name only as opposed to the individual experience of that identity. The concept is often used in sociology, psychology and linguistics. + + +== Social sciences == +Nominal identity is the category, label, or name with which one identifies or is identified (e.g., "Irish," "African-American," "gay," "straight," "male," "female", etc.). Whereas virtual identity is the experience of that identity: "The latter is, in a sense, what the name means; this is primarily a matter of its consequences for those who bear it, and can change while the nominal identity remains the same (and vice versa)." +Among those who self-identify as "gay," the term may not confer the same experience for two people or even between various geographical or cultural regions. Similarly, while one may talk about a "chair," "chair" itself can entail many forms, from arm chair to ladder back to even tree stump, if the experience of "chair" is something upon which a person sits. +Pierre Bourdieu uses the term nominal identity in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste to mean both that which the identity of a subject is named and also where identity is an insignificant measurement or representation of the "perceived reality" of a subject or phenomenon. To further clarify, for Bourdieu nominal identity can often mean "face value" or "appearance." He often mentions the term nominal identity in order to illustrate the idea of a more complex reality, beyond the name, within the studied subject. + + +=== Nominal identity in ethnicity === +Ethnic identity is a "social identity arising through group formation, individual identification with a group, and interaction between different ethnic groups." +Henry E. Brady and Cynthia S. Kaplan compiled a study called "Categorically Wrong? Nominal versus Graded Measures of Ethnic Identity" that takes a look at ethnicity as a nominal identity. Their study proposed whether or not "the attitudes of members of the group with the more salient identity can be completely explained by its nominal identity while the attitudes of the members of the group with less salient identity require a graded measure of ethnicity." +Brady and Kaplan focused on the country Estonia, where they posited two groups: "Estonians," and one that they call the "Slavs," a collective group of Russians, Ukrainians, or Belarusians. They chose this geographical area in particular because of the "centrality of ethnicity in the politics of transition in the USSR." media usage (such as television, radio, or newspaper, whether it was the Estonia language Republic television or Russian-language media), individuals who identify themselves with another nationality, and the language used at home. +Brady and Kaplan concluded that "ethnicity is not always a nominal characteristic" for these two groups in Estonia. It is only nominal when most salient. "Ethnic identity ... causes individuals within a group to form their attitudes based upon their nominal identity". Individuals may generalize themselves in a certain category such as their nationality, but when it comes down to variables of different degrees in formulating their ethnicity, it is no longer nominal. It is their way of dividing themselves from a generalized name. + + +== Linguistics == +Nominal identity in linguistics pertains to the identity of a word or group of words functioning as a noun or an adjective within a sentence's structure. Specifically, it relates to how one can look at a sentence and propose a different understanding of that sentence through the analysis of its identity defined in its lexical construct, such as in the example used by Chris Barker when discussing one of Manfred Krifka's study "Four thousand ships passed through the lock: Object-induced measure functions on events": + +"(1) Four thousand ships passed through the lock last year." +On the surface, the proposition suggests that 4,000 distinct ships passed through the lock last year. However, as Krifka points out in his study, one could say that there were fewer than 4,000 distinct ships and that some of those ships passed through the lock more than once. Individuals reading this sentence could argue about the interpretation of this sentence. The outcome could be many interpretations when looking at the sentence more closely and determining what variables were taken into consideration when making this statement. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6b09c54d1 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +--- +title: "Non-lexical vocables in music" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:26.392606+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Non-lexical vocables, also known as wordless vocals, are a form of nonsense syllable used in a wide variety of music. Common English examples are "la la la", "na na na" and "da da da", or the improvised nonsense sounds used in scat singing. Non-lexical vocables are found in a wide range of music from around the world and across many genres of music, and may be mixed with meaningful text in a given song or performance. + +== Traditional music == +Non-lexical vocables are used in yodeling, Blackfoot music and other Native American music, Pygmy music, the music of the Maldives. In Irish traditional music and Highland Scots music, it is called lilting, and in English traditional music it is called diddling. Vocables frequently act as formal markers, indicating the beginning and end of phrases, sections or songs themselves, and also as onomatopoeic references, cueing devices, and other purposes. Wordless vocals are also found Georgian polyphony, both in and outside of any yodelling parts (k'rimanch'uli) or refrains. +The Blackfoot, like other Plains Indians, use the consonants h, w, y, and vowels. They avoid c, n, (ts) and other consonants. e and i tend slightly to be higher pitches, a, o, and u lower ones. +The AIM Song has its origins in the Plains; as such, it holds similar characteristics to Blackfoot song. It is intended as an intertribal song, so the use of non-lexical vocables prevents bias to one particular language. +Other traditional musical forms employing non-lexical vocables include: + +Puirt à beul (traditional Scottish and Irish song form that sometimes employs nonsense syllables) +Nigun in Jewish religious music +Joik or luohti (improvised Sami chant employing nonsense syllables and few or no lyrics) +Ululation + +== Jazz music == +Scat singing is a type of voice instrumental music. A scat is vocalized using wordless vocables and syllables (e.g. "bippity-bippity-doo-wop-razzamatazz-skoobie-doobie-shoobity-bee-bop-a-lula-shabazz") as employed by jazz singers. Scat singing gives singers the ability to sing improvised melodies and rhythms, to create the equivalent of an instrumental solo using their voice. Scatman John (John Paul Larkin) renewed interest in the genre briefly during the mid-1990s. +Vocal improviser Bobby McFerrin’s performances at major concert halls worldwide show that “wordless singing has traveled far from the concepts demonstrated by Louis Armstrong, Gladys Bentley, Cab Calloway, Anita O’Day, and Leo Watson”. +Another method of scat singing is practiced by guitarists who scat along with their guitar solos note for note. Notable practitioners include Theo Katzman, George Benson, Sheldon Reynolds, and Rik Emmett. + +== Orchestral accompaniment == +A non-lexical form of Latin is often used as accompaniment for orchestral movie and video game soundtracks. It utilizes strings of Dog Latin syllables and a deep tone to emulate ominous or grandiose Latin chants. + +== Vocal percussion == +Non-lexical vocables that take on percussive roles: + +Tabla Bols +Beatboxing +Konnakol + +== Musical training == +Solfège, or solfa, is a technique for teaching sight-singing, in which each note is sung to a special syllable (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti). +Canntaireachd is an ancient Scottish practice of noting music with a combination of definite syllables for ease of recollection and transmission. +In India, the origin of solmization was to be found in Vedic texts like the Upanishads, which discuss a musical system of seven notes, realized ultimately in what is known as sargam. In Indian classical music, the notes in order are: sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, and ni. +Byzantine music also uses syllables derived from a hymn to name notes: starting with A, the notes are pa, vu, ga, di, ke, zo, ni. +In Japan, the Iroha, an ancient poem, is sometimes used as solfège (i, chi, yo, ra, ya, a, we). + +== Popular music of the WWII era == +The song "Swinging the Alphabet" is sung by The Three Stooges in their short film Violent Is the Word for Curly (1938). It is the only full-length song performed by the Stooges in their short films, and the only time they mimed to their own pre-recorded soundtrack. The lyrics use each letter of the alphabet to make a nonsense verse of the song: + +The song "Mairzy Doats" (1943) used blurred lyrics that sound non-lexical: + +The lyrics of the bridge provide a clue: + +== Popular music == +Styles of popular music that frequently employ non-lexical vocables include: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..2a7f9ee8e --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +title: "Non-lexical vocables in music" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:26.392606+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A cappella (singing without instrumental accompaniment, sometimes accompanied by a chorus of nonsense syllables) +Doo-wop (style of rhythm and blues music that often employs nonsense syllables) +Scat singing influenced the development of doo-wop and hip hop. It was popular enough in doo-wop that Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin made it the subject of a 1961 song, Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)". Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, who worked with Mann and Goffin at the Brill Building at the same time, added non-lexical vocables at the start of their song "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" when they could not come up with a good lyric for the opening line; Sedaka's first recording of the song was such a success that they made it a trademark for their next several songs, including "Next Door to an Angel" and "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen". (Sedaka and Greenfield had become so attached to the idea that when Sedaka dissolved his partnership with Greenfield in the early 1970s, he labeled his final album with him The Tra-La Days Are Over.) It has also appeared in various genres of rock music. Jim Morrison of The Doors sings a chorus of slow scat on the song "Cars Hiss By My Window", trying to replicate a harmonica solo he had heard, as well as on the song "Roadhouse Blues"; scat singing also notably opens the B-side of Joe Walsh's 1973 album The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get with the song "Meadow". The technique was employed in the song "The Great Gig in the Sky" by Pink Floyd, as well as the R&B song "Rubber Biscuit" by The Chips (also as by The Blues Brothers). The list of scat singers includes such greats as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Cab Calloway, Scatman Crothers, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Sammy Davis Jr., Mel Tormé, Tony Bennett, Cleo Laine, Roger Miller, Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, and the Pointer Sisters. +Scatting also makes appearances in newer genres, including industrial music, in the chorus of Ministry's 1991 song "Jesus Built My Hotrod"; nu metal music, particularly in the band Korn (whose lead singer Jonathan Davis has incorporated scat singing into songs such as "Twist", "Ball Tongue", "Freak on a Leash", "B.B.K.", "Beat it Upright", "Liar", and "Rotting in Vain"); and the heavy metal subgenre of death metal, where scat singing is used by John Tardy of the band Obituary. Jack Black incorporates scat into several Tenacious D songs, most notably: "Tribute", "Cosmic Shame", "Classico", "Jesus Ranch", Low Hangin' Fruit", and "Bowie". Singer JoJo performs ad-libbed scats on the track "Yes or No". Other modern examples include "Under Pressure" by Queen, "Rag Doll" by Aerosmith, "Under My Voodoo" by Sublime, "No! Don't Shoot" by Foxy Shazam, "Ma Meeshka Mow Skwoz" by Mr. Bungle, "In My Bed" by Amy Winehouse, and "Stuck in the Middle" by Mika. Scatman John combined scat and early-1990s electronic dance music. +Folderol, a nonsense refrain in songs, is used in genres as diverse as Christmas songs ("Deck the Halls") and naval songs like "Don't Forget Your Old Shipmate". +The European pop genre yé-yé was named after the frequent use of English-derived "Yeah!" as filler. +Spanish yeyé signer Massiel won the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest with La, la, la. +Due to the wide-ranging vocal styles used in popular music, occasionally songs have been mistakenly categorized as having non-lexical vocables, when in fact the singers are performing actual lyrics rendered partially (or completely) unintelligible to the ear of some (but not all) listeners. Two famous 1960s examples are "Louie Louie" as recorded by The Kingsmen and "Wooly Bully" by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fb5dbb310 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +--- +title: "Non-lexical vocables in music" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-lexical_vocables_in_music" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:26.392606+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Examples == +Some bands have invented a language for their lyrics; examples include Kobaïan, used by French progressive rock band Magma, and Vonlenska, also called Hopelandic, employed by the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. +Adriano Celentano's 1972 song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" is sung in gibberish that is meant to sound like American English. +Jack Black uses non-lexical vocables whilst singing as Tenacious D. +"Da Da Da" by German group Trio uses the phrase "da da da" throughout the song. +The chorus to the Simon and Garfunkel hit "The Boxer" contains the repeated phrase "lie-la-lie". +One of the most famous examples comes from The Beatles' song "Hey Jude", which ends with a long run of "Na na na na na na na". Similarly Elton John's "Crocodile Rock" employs "la, la la la la la" for much of the chorus. +Other notable songs to include non-lexical vocables include The Police's song "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da", The Delfonics song "La-La (Means I Love You)", and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich's song "Zabadak!". +Van Morrison employed scat in his performances. +The Dandy Warhols used non-lexical vocables throughout the song "The Dandy Warhols' T.V. Theme Song", which was on their 1995 album Dandys Rule OK. +Hanson used non-lexical vocables in the chorus of their 1997 song "MMMBop". +Alcest used an invented language made up of spontaneous and improvised sounds on a fourth of their songs. +French singer Antoine Tomé has used vocal percussions and sung several of his songs in an imaginary language since the 1970's. +Examples by popular non-anglophone singers using such techniques include "Bla Bla Bla" by Gigi D'Agostino, "Eena Mina Dika" in the Bollywood film Aasha, Eduard Khil's "I Am Very Glad, As I Am Finally Returning Back Home" (known as "Trololo") sung entirely without lyrics, "Fuzao" by Faye Wong, "Lagu Lagu" by Sa Dingding, "Din Daa Daa" by George Kranz, and much (but not all) of the lyrics to Finnish folk song and meme phenomenon "Ievan Polkka". +Russian ska punk band Nogu Svelo! tends to use various non-lexical vocables in their songs. Their popular song "Haru Mamburu" (Russian: Хару Мамбуру) is composed completely from pseudoword vocables without any meaningful text. +Pseudo-Latin is sometimes used in new-age music, especially when it imitates Gregorian chant or other choral church music, e.g. "Ameno" by Era or "Adiemus" by Adiemus. +Franco Godi, in songs like Parapapa Perepepe, on his "Signor Rossi" album, perhaps an Italian sounding variation of the name of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. + +== Disney songs == +A signature of some Disney musical films is their songs' use of nonsense words, the longest and most famous of which is from Mary Poppins, entitled "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". A close second is "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from Song of the South, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Nonsense word song titles include: + +"Heigh-Ho" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) +"Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from Song of the South (1946) +"Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" from Cinderella (1950) +"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and "Chim Chim Cher-ee" from Mary Poppins (1964) +"Substitutiary Locomotion" from Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), which includes the incantation "Treguna Mekoides and Tracorum Satis Dee" +"Whistle-Stop" from Robin Hood (1973), which was reused in "The Hampsterdance Song" (2000) +"Whoop-de-Dooper Bounce" from The Tigger Movie (2000) +Nonsense lyrics also feature in the following Disney songs: + +"I Wanna Be Like You" from The Jungle Book features a segment of improvisational nonsense words. +"Trashing the Camp" from Tarzan also contains a segment of improvisational nonsense words. +"Everybody Wants to Be a Cat" from The Aristocats, sung by Scatman Crothers as "Scat Cat", contains lengthy scat sequences. + +== See also == +Idioglossia +Kakegoe +Lilting +Nigun +Mondegreen +Nonsense song – Type of song + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Chambers, "Non-Lexical Vocables in Scottish Traditional Music", PhD Thesis (1980). +de Cornulier, Benoît (2005). "Les tralalas ou « syllabes non significatives » illustrés par des chansons vendéennes", published in J.-P. Bertrand, A.-M Despringre et al. (eds.) (2009). Chansons en mémoire – Mémoire en chanson, Hommage à Jérôme Bujeaud (1834-1880). Paris: L’Harmattan. pp. 209–219. ISBN 978-2-296-10747-2. (in French) \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonmanual_feature-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonmanual_feature-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..9fa469f39 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonmanual_feature-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +--- +title: "Nonmanual feature" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonmanual_feature" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:27.648329+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A nonmanual feature, also sometimes called nonmanual signal or sign language expression, is any feature of a sign language aside from those produced using the hands, including body postures and facial expressions. Nonmanual features are necessary components of the grammars of sign languages, in the same way that manual features are. Nonmanual features serve many functions, including negation, grammatical mood, and some functions often served by intonation in spoken languages. Expression is one of five components of a sign, along with handshape (dez), orientation (ori), location (tab), and movement (sig). A major component of expression is mouthing. However, not all signs have an inherent expression. + + +== Purpose == +Nonmanual features in signed languages do not function the same way that general body language and facial expressions do in spoken ones. In spoken languages, they can give extra information but are not necessary for the receiver to understand the meaning of the utterance (for example, an autistic person may not use any facial expressions but still get their meaning across clearly, and people with visual impairments may understand spoken utterances without the need for visual aides). Conversely, nonmanual features are needed to understand the full meaning of many signs, and they can drastically change the meaning of individual signs. For example, in ASL the signs HERE and NOT HERE have the same manual sign, and are distinguished only by nonmanual features. +Nonmanual features also do not function the same way as gestures (which exist in both spoken and signed languages), as nonmanual features are grammaticised. For this reason, nonmanual features need to be included in signwriting systems. + + +== Form == + +In sign languages, the hands do the majority of the work, forming phonemes and giving denotational meaning. Extra meaning, however, is created through the use of nonmanual features. Despite the literal meaning of manual, not all signs that use other body parts are nonmanual features of the language, and it generally refers to information expressed in the upper half of the body such as the head, eyebrows, eyes, cheeks, and mouth in various postures or movements. +Nonmanual features have two main aspects—place and setting. These are the nonmanual equivalents to HOLM (handshape, orientation, location, and movement) in manual sign components. Place refers to the part of the body used, while setting refers to the state it is in. For example, the Auslan sign for WHY has nonmanual features necessary to distinguish it from the sign BECAUSE. One of these nonmanual features can be described as having the place of [eyebrows] and the setting of [furrowed]. +Although it is done using the face, mouthing is not always considered a nonmanual feature, as it is not a natural feature of signed languages, being taken from the local spoken language(s). Because of this, there is debate as to whether mouthing is a sign language feature or a form of codeswitching. + + +== Types == + + +=== Lexical === +Many lexical signs use nonmanual features in addition to the manual articulation. For instance, facial expressions may accompany verbs of emotion, as in the sign for angry in Czech Sign Language. +Nonmanual elements can be lexically contrastive. An example is the ASL sign for NOT YET, which requires that the tongue touch the lower lip and that the head rotate from side to side, in addition to the manual part of the sign. Without these features the sign would be interpreted as LATE. Mouthings can also be contrastive, as in the manually identical signs for DOCTOR and BATTERY in Sign Language of the Netherlands. +In some languages, a small number of words are formed entirely by nonmanual features. For example, in Polish Sign Language, a sign is used to express that the user wishes to self-correct or rephrase an utterance, perhaps best translated as I MEAN. The sign is made by closing the eyes and shaking the head. Because it does not use the hands, this can be used simultaneously as the user rephrases their statement. +Intensifiers can be expressed through nonmanual features, as they have the benefit of being expressed at the same time as manual signs. In Auslan, puffed cheeks can be used simultaneously with the manual sign LARGE for a meaning better translated as gigantic. +Nonmanual features are also a part of many sign names. + + +=== Phrasal === +Many grammatical functions are produced nonmanually, including interrogation, negation, relative clauses and topicalisation, and conditional clauses. ASL and BSL use similar nonmanual marking for yes–no questions—they are shown through raised eyebrows and a forward head tilt, which functions similarly to English's pitch rise in these questions. +Nonmanual features are frequently used to grammatically signify role shift, which is when the signer switches between two or more individuals they are quoting. For example, in German Sign Language this can be done by the signer using signing space to tie quoted speech to pronouns. It can also be expressed by gaze-shifting or head-shifting. +Adjective phrases can be formed using nonmanual features. For instance, in ASL a slightly open mouth with the tongue relaxed and visible in the corner of the mouth means 'carelessly', but a similar nonmanual in BSL means 'boring' or 'unpleasant'. + + +=== Discourse === +Discourse functions such as turn taking are largely regulated through head movement and eye gaze. Since the addressee in a signed conversation must be watching the signer, a signer can avoid letting the other person have a turn by not looking at them, or can indicate that the other person may have a turn by making eye contact. + + +== Recognition in academia == +In early studies of signed languages done by hearing researchers, nonmanual features were largely ignored. In the 1960s, William Stokoe established a system of sign language phonology for American Sign Language and was one of the first researchers to discuss nonmanual features in his writings when he used diacritics to signify six different facial expressions based on their meanings in English. +From Stokoe's writings until the 1990s, facial expressions were discussed in some studies on signed languages, and awareness of them as a grammaticised aspect of signed languages began to grow. In the 21st century, discussion of nonmanual signs in both research on individual languages and sign language education has become more common, partially due to the increased awareness of minimal pairs in automatic sign language recognition technology. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_particle-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_particle-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c4a861324 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_particle-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "Noun particle" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_particle" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:28.842839+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A noun particle is any morpheme that denotes or marks the presence of a noun. They are a common feature of languages such as Japanese and Korean. + + +== Korean particles == + +Korean noun particles are postpositional, following the word they mark, as opposed to prepositions which precede the marked word. +Korean noun particles include the subject particle i/ga (이/가), the object-marking particle eul/reul (을/를), and the topic-marking particle eun/neun (은/는), all of which show allomorphy. + + +== Japanese particles == + +Like Korean, Japanese noun particles follow the noun being marked, and can serve any of several functions in a given sentence. + +In this example, "e" is the noun particle for "sūpā" ("supermarket"). This particular noun particle denotes direction towards a place, being "supermarket." + +The three noun particles ("wa," "ga," and "o") all serve different functions: + +"wa" - topic marker ("hirugohan" - lunch) +"ga" - subject marker ("watashi" - I) +"o" - object marker ("piza" - pizza) + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_language-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_language-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..38e7d681f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_language-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "Olfactory language" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_language" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:30.101052+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Olfactory language refers to language associated with the sense of smell. It involves the naming and categorisation of odours by humans according to each odour's perceived source or attributes. The study of olfactory language is part of the field of linguistics and is distinct from the study of semiochemical communication, which involves communication between organisms using chemical substances detected through olfaction. + + +== Cross-linguistic variation == + + +=== Olfactory perception and identification === +Different speech communities tend to display differences in both the perception and linguistic categorisation of odours. In general, Europeans find it harder to identify odours than hunter-gatherer communities. The ease with which odours are identified by speakers is related to the primary type of olfactory vocabulary used in their speech community. Some speech communities, including Jahai- and Thai-speaking hunter-gatherers, mostly use dedicated abstract vocabulary for referring to odour qualities, while others, such as Dutch and English speakers, mostly use concrete terms that identify the source itself. When presented with common odours and asked to name them, Jahai speakers are likely to use the same abstract descriptor and answer more quickly, while English and Dutch speakers tend to take longer to answer and use a more diverse range of mostly concrete descriptors, suggesting that abstract and concrete odour names are encoded differently. The nature of odour-colour associations also differs between speech communities based on their vocabulary. Dutch speakers who use concrete terms associate a particular odour with the colour of its source (e.g., banana odour associated with the colour yellow), while Maniq and Thai speakers who use abstract terminology do not show consistent odour-colour associations. + + +=== Olfactory metaphor === +Cross-linguistically, olfactory metaphor is traditionally thought to be the least important of all the senses, especially when compared to visual or auditory metaphors, although emerging research suggests the phenomenon is more common than previously thought. In English, olfactory metaphors with negative connotations are often used to describe bad character ("he's a stinker") or the detection of bad qualities ("I smell something fishy about this deal"). In the Seri language, olfactory metaphor and metonymy are salient features. One example is the expression hiisax cheemt iha ("I am angry"), literally 'my.spirit stinks (Declarative)'. + + +== Variation within languages == +Different populations speaking the same language and sharing cultural traditions may still display varied perceptions of an odour, based on its prevalence and most common source in each location. For example, one study showed that French speakers in Quebec find the scent of wintergreen more pleasant and edible than speakers in France. This is because the odour is commonly used in candies and sodas in North America, while in Europe it is used mainly in medicinal products. However, providing concrete names of the source of the odours caused cultural differences in responses to decrease or disappear, suggesting that providing more linguistic information about an odour tends to make its perception more salient in the mind of the smeller. + + +== Clinical applications == +In a clinical setting, patients may undergo olfactory tests to aid in the diagnosis of mental disorders. A common test involves the use of "Sniffin' Sticks", a set of marker pens imbued with different scents at varying dilutions. Sniffin' Sticks are used both for diagnosis and for research into olfaction, including olfactory language. Due to linguistic variation across speech communities, the Sniffin' Sticks test must be validated for each country in which medical professionals wish to use it for diagnosis. Rather than using a literal translation of scent descriptors, researchers validating the test in a new country may need to change the translated descriptors to more culturally-appropriate terms for the speech community in question. For example, researchers validating the Sniffin' Sticks test for the Portuguese population changed the original translation of the grapefruit scent descriptor, toranja, to the Portuguese word for orange, laranja. This is because grapefruit are not commonly eaten in Portugal, which resulted in participant familiarity falling below the benchmark of 75%. Altering lesser known descriptors such as "grapefruit" to less literal but more culturally-relevant translations increased familiarity to within the range expected for healthy populations. This validated the Sniffin' Sticks test for the Portuguese population without requiring the scents themselves to be altered. + + +== See also == +Olfactory memory +Sociolinguistics + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-ended_question-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-ended_question-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..78fc6ae60 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-ended_question-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +--- +title: "Open-ended question" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-ended_question" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:31.336428+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +An open-ended question is a question that cannot be answered with a "yes" or "no" response, or with a static response. Open-ended questions are phrased as a statement which requires a longer answer. They can be compared to closed-ended questions which demand a “yes”/“no” or short answer. + + +== Examples == +Examples of open-ended questions include: + +Tell me about your relationship with your supervisor? +How do you see your future? +Tell me about the children in this photograph? +What is the purpose of government? +Why did you choose that answer? + + +== In education == +The received wisdom in education is that open questions are broadly speaking 'good' questions. They invite students to give longer responses that demonstrate their understanding. They are preferable to closed questions (i.e. one that demands a yes/no answer) because they are better for discussions or enquiries, whereas closed questions are only good for testing. +Peter Worley argues that this is a false assumption. This is based on Worley's central arguments that there are two different kinds of open and closed questions: grammatical and conceptual. He argues that educational practitioners should be aiming for questions that are "grammatically closed, but conceptually open". For example, in standard parlance, 'is it ever right to lie?' would be regarded as a closed question: it elicits a yes/no response. Significantly, however, it is conceptually open. Any initial yes/no answer to it can be 'opened up' by the questioner ('why do you think that?,' 'Could there be an instance where that's not the case?), inviting elaboration and enquiry. +This grammatically closed but cognitively open style of questioning, Worley argues, "gives [educators] the best of both worlds: the focus and specificity of a closed question (this, after all, is why teachers use them) and the inviting, elaborating character of an open question". Closed questions, simply require 'opening up' strategies to ensure that conceptually open questions can fulfil their educational potential. +Worley's structural and semantic distinction between open and closed questions is integral to his pedagogical invention 'Open Questioning Mindset', or OQM. OQM refers to the development, in educators, of an open attitude towards the process of learning and the questioning at the heart of that process. It is a mind-set that is applicable to all subject areas and all pedagogical environments. Teachers who develop an Open Questioning Mindset listen openly for the cognitive content of student's contributions and looks for ways to use what is given for learning opportunities, whether right, wrong, relevant or apparently irrelevant. OQM encourages a style of pedagogy that values genuine enquiry in the classroom. It provides teachers with the tools to move beyond what Worley calls 'guess what's in my head' teaching, that relies on closed and leading questions. + + +== See also == +Clean language + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f4fbee4e9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "Optimality theory" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:32.575480+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Optimality theory (frequently abbreviated OT) is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints. OT differs from other approaches to phonological analysis, which typically use rules rather than constraints. However, phonological models of representation, such as autosegmental phonology, prosodic phonology, and linear phonology (SPE), are equally compatible with rule-based and constraint-based models. OT views grammars as systems that provide mappings from inputs to outputs; typically, the inputs are conceived of as underlying representations, and the outputs as their surface realizations. It is an approach within the larger framework of generative grammar. +Optimality theory has its origin in a talk given by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky in 1991 which was later developed in a book manuscript by the same authors in 1993. + +== Overview == +There are three basic components of the theory: + +Generator (Gen) takes an input, and generates the list of possible outputs, or candidates, +Constraint component (Con) provides the criteria, in the form of strictly ranked violable constraints, used to decide between candidates, and +Evaluator (Eval) chooses the optimal candidate based on the constraints, and this candidate is the output. +Optimality theory assumes that these components are universal. Differences in grammars reflect different rankings of the universal constraint set, Con. Part of language acquisition can then be described as the process of adjusting the ranking of these constraints. +Optimality theory as applied to language was originally proposed by the linguists Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky in 1991, and later expanded by Prince and John J. McCarthy. Although much of the interest in OT has been associated with its use in phonology, the area to which OT was first applied, the theory is also applicable to other subfields of linguistics (e.g. syntax and semantics). +Optimality theory is like other theories of generative grammar in its focus on the investigation of universal principles, linguistic typology and language acquisition. +Optimality theory also has roots in neural network research. It arose in part as an alternative to the connectionist theory of harmonic grammar, developed in 1990 by Géraldine Legendre, Yoshiro Miyata and Paul Smolensky. Variants of OT with connectionist-like weighted constraints continue to be pursued in more recent work (Pater 2009). + +== Input and Gen: the candidate set == +Optimality theory supposes that there are no language-specific restrictions on the input. This is called "richness of the base". Every grammar can handle every possible input. For example, a language without complex clusters must be able to deal with an input such as /flask/. Languages without complex clusters differ on how they will resolve this problem; some will epenthesize (e.g. [falasak], or [falasaka] if all codas are banned) and some will delete (e.g. [fas], [fak], [las], [lak]). +Gen is free to generate any number of output candidates, however much they deviate from the input. This is called "freedom of analysis". The grammar (ranking of constraints) of the language determines which of the candidates will be assessed as optimal by Eval. + +== Con: the constraint set == +In optimality theory, every constraint is universal. Con is the same in every language. There are two basic types of constraints: + +Faithfulness constraints require that the observed surface form (the output) match the underlying or lexical form (the input) in some particular way; that is, these constraints require identity between input and output forms. +Markedness constraints impose requirements on the structural well-formedness of the output. +Each plays a crucial role in the theory. Markedness constraints motivate changes from the underlying form, and faithfulness constraints prevent every input from being realized as some completely unmarked form (such as [ba]). +The universal nature of Con makes some immediate predictions about language typology. If grammars differ only by having different rankings of Con, then the set of possible human languages is determined by the constraints that exist. Optimality theory predicts that there cannot be more grammars than there are permutations of the ranking of Con. The number of possible rankings is equal to the factorial of the total number of constraints, thus giving rise to the term factorial typology. However, it may not be possible to distinguish all of these potential grammars, since not every constraint is guaranteed to have an observable effect in every language. Two total orders on the constraints of Con could generate the same range of input–output mappings, but differ in the relative ranking of two constraints which do not conflict with each other. Since there is no way to distinguish these two rankings they are said to belong to the same grammar. A grammar in OT is equivalent to an antimatroid. If rankings with ties are allowed, then the number of possibilities is an ordered Bell number rather than a factorial, allowing a significantly larger number of possibilities. + +=== Faithfulness constraints === +McCarthy and Prince (1995) propose three basic families of faithfulness constraints: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..85dd6cee0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Optimality theory" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:32.575480+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Max prohibits deletion (from "maximal"). +Dep prohibits epenthesis (from "dependent"). +Ident(F) prohibits alteration to the value of feature F (from "identical"). +Each of the constraints' names may be suffixed with "-IO" or "-BR", standing for input/output and base/reduplicant, respectively—the latter of which is used in analysis of reduplication—if desired. F in Ident(F) is substituted by the name of a distinctive feature, as in Ident-IO(voice). +Max and Dep replace Parse and Fill proposed by Prince and Smolensky (1993), which stated "underlying segments must be parsed into syllable structure" and "syllable positions must be filled with underlying segments", respectively. Parse and Fill serve essentially the same functions as Max and Dep, but differ in that they evaluate only the output and not the relation between the input and output, which is rather characteristic of markedness constraints. This stems from the model adopted by Prince and Smolensky known as containment theory, which assumes the input segments unrealized by the output are not removed but rather "left unparsed" by a syllable. The model put forth by McCarthy and Prince (1995, 1999), known as correspondence theory, has since replaced it as the standard framework. +McCarthy and Prince (1995) also propose: + +I-Contig, violated when a word- or morpheme-internal segment is deleted (from "input-contiguity") +O-Contig, violated when a segment is inserted word- or morpheme-internally (from "output-contiguity") +Linearity, violated when the order of some segments is changed (i.e. prohibits metathesis) +Uniformity, violated when two or more segments are realized as one (i.e. prohibits fusion) +Integrity, violated when a segment is realized as multiple segments (i.e. prohibits unpacking or vowel breaking—opposite of Uniformity) + +=== Markedness constraints === +Markedness constraints introduced by Prince and Smolensky (1993) include: + +Precise definitions in literature vary. Some constraints are sometimes used as a "cover constraint", standing in for a set of constraints that are not fully known or important. +Some markedness constraints are context-free and others are context-sensitive. For example, *Vnasal states that vowels must not be nasal in any position and is thus context-free, whereas *VoralN states that vowels must not be oral when preceding a tautosyllabic nasal and is thus context-sensitive. + +=== Alignment constraints === + +=== Local conjunctions === +Two constraints may be conjoined as a single constraint, called a local conjunction, which gives only one violation each time both constraints are violated within a given domain, such as a segment, syllable or word. For example, [NoCoda & VOP]segment is violated once per voiced obstruent in a coda ("VOP" stands for "voiced obstruent prohibition"), and may be equivalently written as *VoicedCoda. Local conjunctions are used as a way of circumventing the problem of phonological opacity that arises when analyzing chain shifts. + +== Eval: definition of optimality == +In the original proposal, given two candidates, A and B, A is better, or more "harmonic", than B on a constraint if A incurs fewer violations than B. Candidate A is more harmonic than B on an entire constraint hierarchy if A incurs fewer violations of the highest-ranked constraint distinguishing A and B. A is "optimal" in its candidate set if it is better on the constraint hierarchy than all other candidates. However, this definition of Eval is able to model relations that exceed regularity. +For example, given the constraints C1, C2, and C3, where C1 dominates C2, which dominates C3 (C1 ≫ C2 ≫ C3), A beats B, or is more harmonic than B, if A has fewer violations than B on the highest ranking constraint which assigns them a different number of violations (A is "optimal" if A beats B and the candidate set comprises only A and B). If A and B tie on C1, but A does better than B on C2, A is optimal, even if A has however many more violations of C3 than B does. This comparison is often illustrated with a tableau. The pointing finger marks the optimal candidate, and each cell displays an asterisk for each violation for a given candidate and constraint. Once a candidate does worse than another candidate on the highest ranking constraint distinguishing them, it incurs a fatal violation (marked in the tableau by an exclamation mark and by shaded cells for the lower-ranked constraints). Once a candidate incurs a fatal violation, it cannot be optimal, even if it outperforms the other candidates on the rest of Con. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..367f270c0 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "Optimality theory" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:32.575480+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Other notational conventions include dotted lines separating columns of unranked or equally ranked constraints, a check mark ✔ in place of a finger in tentatively ranked tableaux (denoting harmonic but not conclusively optimal), and a circled asterisk ⊛ denoting a violation by a winner; in output candidates, the angle brackets ⟨ ⟩ denote segments elided in phonetic realization, and □ and □́ denote an epenthetic consonant and vowel, respectively. The "much greater than" sign ≫ (sometimes the nested ⪢) denotes the domination of a constraint over another ("C1 ≫ C2" = "C1 dominates C2") while the "succeeds" operator ≻ denotes superior harmony in comparison of output candidates ("A ≻ B" = "A is more harmonic than B"). +Constraints are ranked in a hierarchy of strict domination. The strictness of strict domination means that a candidate which violates only a high-ranked constraint does worse on the hierarchy than one that does not, even if the second candidate fared worse on every other lower-ranked constraint. This also means that constraints are violable; the winning (i.e. the most harmonic) candidate need not satisfy all constraints, as long as for any rival candidate that does better than the winner on some constraint, there is a higher-ranked constraint on which the winner does better than that rival. Within a language, a constraint may be ranked high enough that it is always obeyed; it may be ranked low enough that it has no observable effects; or, it may have some intermediate ranking. The term the emergence of the unmarked describes situations in which a markedness constraint has an intermediate ranking, so that it is violated in some forms, but nonetheless has observable effects when higher-ranked constraints are irrelevant. +An early example proposed by McCarthy and Prince (1994) is the constraint NoCoda, which prohibits syllables from ending in consonants. In Balangao, NoCoda is not ranked high enough to be always obeyed, as witnessed in roots like taynan (faithfulness to the input prevents deletion of the final /n/). But, in the reduplicated form ma-tayna-taynan 'repeatedly be left behind', the final /n/ is not copied. Under McCarthy and Prince's analysis, this is because faithfulness to the input does not apply to reduplicated material, and NoCoda is thus free to prefer ma-tayna-taynan over hypothetical ma-taynan-taynan (which has an additional violation of NoCoda). +Some optimality theorists prefer the use of comparative tableaux, as described in Prince (2002b). Comparative tableaux display the same information as the classic or "flyspeck" tableaux, but the information is presented in such a way that it highlights the most crucial information. For instance, the tableau above would be rendered in the following way. + +Each row in a comparative tableau represents a winner–loser pair, rather than an individual candidate. In the cells where the constraints assess the winner–loser pairs, "W" is placed if the constraint in that column prefers the winner, "L" if the constraint prefers the loser, and "e" if the constraint does not differentiate between the pair. Presenting the data in this way makes it easier to make generalizations. For instance, in order to have a consistent ranking some W must dominate all L's. Brasoveanu and Prince (2005) describe a process known as fusion and the various ways of presenting data in a comparative tableau in order to achieve the necessary and sufficient conditions for a given argument. + +== Example == +As a simplified example, consider the manifestation of the English plural: + +/dɒɡ/ + /z/ → [dɒɡz] (dogs) +/kæt/ + /z/ → [kæts] (cats) +/dɪʃ/ + /z/ → [dɪʃɪz] (dishes) +Also consider the following constraint set, in descending order of domination: + +No matter how the constraints are re-ordered, the allomorph [ɪs] will always lose to [ɪz]. This is called harmonic bounding. The violations incurred by the candidate [dɒɡɪz] are a subset of the violations incurred by [dɒɡɪs]; specifically, if you epenthesize a vowel, changing the voicing of the morpheme is a gratuitous violation of constraints. In the /dɒɡ/ + /z/ tableau, there is a candidate [dɒɡz] which incurs no violations whatsoever. Within the constraint set of the problem, [dɒɡz] harmonically bounds all other possible candidates. This shows that a candidate does not need to be a winner in order to harmonically bound another candidate. +The tableaux from above are repeated below using the comparative tableaux format. + +From the comparative tableau for /dɒɡ/ + /z/, it can be observed that any ranking of these constraints will produce the observed output [dɒɡz]. Because there are no loser-preferring comparisons, [dɒɡz] wins under any ranking of these constraints; this means that no ranking can be established on the basis of this input. +The tableau for /kæt/ + /z/ contains rows with a single W and a single L. This shows that Agree, Max, and Dep must all dominate Ident; however, no ranking can be established between those constraints on the basis of this input. Based on this tableau, the following ranking has been established: + +Agree, Max, Dep ≫ Ident +The tableau for /dɪʃ/ + /z/ shows that several more rankings are necessary in order to predict the desired outcome. The third row says nothing; there is no loser-preferring comparison in the third row. The first row reveals that either *SS or Agree must dominate Dep, based on the comparison between [dɪʃɪz] and [dɪʃz]. The fourth row shows that Max must dominate Dep. The second row shows that either *SS or Ident must dominate Dep. From the /kæt/ + /z/ tableau, it was established that Dep dominates Ident; this means that *SS must dominate Dep. +So far, the following rankings have been shown to be necessary: + +*SS, Max ≫ Dep ≫ Ident +While it is possible that Agree can dominate Dep, it is not necessary; the ranking given above is sufficient for the observed [dɪʃɪz] to emerge. +When the rankings from the tableaux are combined, the following ranking summary can be given: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..323f65fe9 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "Optimality theory" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimality_theory" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:32.575480+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +*SS, Max ≫ Agree, Dep ≫ Ident +or +*SS, Max, Agree ≫ Dep ≫ Ident +There are two possible places to put Agree when writing out rankings linearly; neither is truly accurate. The first implies that *SS and Max must dominate Agree, and the second implies that Agree must dominate Dep. Neither of these is truthful, which is a failing of writing out rankings in a linear fashion like this. These sorts of problems are the reason why most linguists utilize a lattice graph to represent necessary and sufficient rankings, as shown below. + +A diagram that represents the necessary rankings of constraints in this style is a Hasse diagram. + +== Criticism == +Optimality theory has attracted substantial amounts of criticism, most of which is directed at its application to phonology (rather than syntax or other fields). +It is claimed that OT cannot account for phonological opacity (see Idsardi 2000, for example). In derivational phonology, effects that are inexplicable at the surface level but are explainable through "opaque" rule ordering may be seen; but in OT, which has no intermediate levels for rules to operate on, these effects are difficult to explain. +For example, in Quebec French, high front vowels triggered affrication of /t/, (e.g. /tipik/ → [tˢpɪk]), but the loss of high vowels (visible at the surface level) has left the affrication with no apparent source. Derivational phonology can explain this by stating that vowel syncope (the loss of the vowel) "counterbled" affrication—that is, instead of vowel syncope occurring and "bleeding" (i.e. preventing) affrication, it says that affrication applies before vowel syncope, so that the high vowel is removed and the environment destroyed which had triggered affrication. Such counterbleeding rule orderings are therefore termed opaque (as opposed to transparent), because their effects are not visible at the surface level. +The opacity of such phenomena finds no straightforward explanation in OT, since theoretical intermediate forms are not accessible (constraints refer only to the surface form and/or the underlying form). There have been a number of proposals designed to account for it, but most of the proposals significantly alter OT's basic architecture and therefore tend to be highly controversial. Frequently, such alterations add new types of constraints (which are not universal faithfulness or markedness constraints), or change the properties of Gen (such as allowing for serial derivations) or Eval. Examples of these include John J. McCarthy's sympathy theory and candidate chains theory. +A relevant issue is the existence of circular chain shifts, i.e. cases where input /X/ maps to output [Y], but input /Y/ maps to output [X]. Many versions of OT predict this to be impossible (see Moreton 2004, Prince 2007). +Optimality theory is also criticized as being an impossible model of speech production/perception: computing and comparing an infinite number of possible candidates would take an infinitely long time to process. Idsardi (2006) argues this position, though other linguists dispute this claim on the grounds that Idsardi makes unreasonable assumptions about the constraint set and candidates, and that more moderate instantiations of OT do not present such significant computational problems (see Kornai (2006) and Heinz, Kobele and Riggle (2009)). Another common rebuttal to this criticism of OT is that the framework is purely representational. In this view, OT is taken to be a model of linguistic competence and is therefore not intended to explain the specifics of linguistic performance. +Another objection to OT is that it is not technically a theory, in that it does not make falsifiable predictions. The source of this issue may be in terminology: the term theory is used differently here than in physics, chemistry, and other sciences. Specific instantiations of OT may make falsifiable predictions, in the same way specific proposals within other linguistic frameworks can. What predictions are made, and whether they are testable, depends on the specifics of individual proposals (most commonly, this is a matter of the definitions of the constraints used in an analysis). Thus, OT as a framework is best described as a scientific paradigm. + +== Theories within optimality theory == +In practice, implementations of OT often make use of many concepts of phonological theories of representations, such as the syllable, the mora, or feature geometry. Completely distinct from these, there are sub-theories which have been proposed entirely within OT, such as positional faithfulness theory, correspondence theory (McCarthy and Prince 1995), sympathy theory, stratal OT, and a number of theories of learnability, most notably by Bruce Tesar. Other theories within OT are concerned with issues like the need for derivational levels within the phonological domain, the possible formulations of constraints, and constraint interactions other than strict domination. + +== Use outside of phonology == +Optimality theory is most commonly associated with the field of phonology, but has also been applied to other areas of linguistics. Jane Grimshaw, Geraldine Legendre and Joan Bresnan have developed instantiations of the theory within syntax. Optimality theoretic approaches are also relatively prominent in morphology (and the morphology–phonology interface in particular). +In the domain of semantics, OT is less commonly used. But constraint-based systems have been developed to provide a formal model of interpretation. OT has also been used as a framework for pragmatics. +For orthography, constraint-based analyses have also been proposed, among others, by Richard Wiese and Silke Hamann/Ilaria Colombo. Constraints cover both the relations between sound and letter as well as preferences for spelling itself. + +== Notes == + +== References == + +== External links == +Rutgers University Optimality Archive +Optimality Theory and the Three Laws of Robotics +OT Syntax: an interview with Jane Grimshaw \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..780ee8ebb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +--- +title: "Orality" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orality" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:33.800281+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Orality is thought and verbal expression in societies, distinct from the technologies of literacy (especially writing and print). The study of orality is closely allied to the study of oral tradition. +The term "orality" has been used in a variety of ways, often to describe, in a generalised fashion, the structures of consciousness found in cultures that do not employ, or employ minimally, the technologies of writing. +Walter J. Ong's work was foundational for the study of orality, and exemplifies the fact that despite the striking success and subsequent power of written language, the vast majority of languages are never written, and the basic orality of language is permanent. +In his later publications Ong distinguishes between two forms of orality: 'primary orality' and 'secondary orality'. Primary orality refers to thought and expression un-touched by the culture of writing of print; secondary orality is explained by Ong as oral culture defined (implicitly influenced) by the written and printed word, and includes oral culture made possible by technology such as a newscaster reading a news report on television. +In addition, 'residual orality' is also defined – it is the remnants, legacy, or influence of a predominantly oral culture carried over into the written realm – an example might include the use of dialogue as a philosophical or didactic tool in written literature, such as used by the Greek thinker Plato. + + +== Origins of philosophy and definition == + + +=== Impact of literacy on culture === +Before writing became a way for many cultures, there was already orality. Unfortunately much of the retained orality has been lost or drastically changed. Those that were able to be preserved give us insight into past cultures and the scale of societal changes throughout history. In Orality and Literacy (2nd ed. Ong 2002), Ong sums up his own work over the previous three decades as well as the work of numerous other scholars. With regard to oral tradition and primary orality he draws on pioneering work by Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, and Eric A. Havelock. Marshall McLuhan was among the first to fully appreciate the significance of the Ong's earlier work about print culture and the written and printed word as a technology. In his work, The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan 1962, McLuhan quotes and discusses works by Ong in the 1950s regarding print culture. + + +=== Primary orality === +'Primary orality' refers to thought and its verbal expression within cultures "totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print." Ong argues that the immediacy of sound, and the longevity of writing, correspond to the intrinsically different ways in which oral and literate societies and people function. +In his studies of the Homeric Question, Milman Parry was able to show that the poetic metre found in the Iliad and the Odyssey had been 'packaged' by oral Greek society to meet its information management needs. These insights first opened the door to a wider appreciation of the sophistication of oral traditions, and their various methods of managing information. Later, ancient and medieval mnemonic tools were extensively documented by Frances Yates in her book The Art of Memory (Yates 1966). + + +=== Residual orality === + +‘Residual orality’ refers to thought and its verbal expression in cultures that have been exposed to writing and print, but have not fully ‘interiorized’ (in McLuhan's term) the use of these technologies in their daily lives. As a culture interiorizes the technologies of literacy, the ‘oral residue’ diminishes. + + +=== Importance of the concept === + +It has been a habit of literate cultures to view oral cultures simply in terms of their lack of the technologies of writing. This habit, argues Ong, is dangerously misled. Oral cultures are living cultures in their own right. While literacy extends human possibilities in both thought and action, all literate technologies ultimately depend on the ability of humans to learn oral languages and then translate sound into symbolic imagery. + + +== Theory of the characteristics of oral culture == +Drawing on hundreds of studies from anthropology, linguistics and the study of oral tradition, Ong summarizes ten key aspects of the 'psychodynamics of orality', including the following. These are subject to continuing debate. + +Formulaic styling: Information is expressed through common and repeated structures, for ease of memorization. +Additive rather than subordinative: Oral cultures tend to avoid complex clause structures in sentences, rather opting for simpler and more sequential ones. +Aggregative rather than analytic: Oral expression is characterized by habitual stock phrases which are used unaltered. +Redundant or 'copious': A speaker may repeat concepts for emphasis and reconsideration throughout a story or discussion. +Conservative or traditionalist: Because oral societies have no effective access to writing and print technologies, they must invest considerable energy in basic information management. To qualify for storage, information must usually concern matters of immediate practical concern, or familiarity to most members of the society. +Situational rather than abstract: Concepts are used in a way that minimizes abstraction, focusing to the greatest extent possible on objects and situations directly known by the speaker. + + +== See also == + + +== References == + + +=== Sources === +Cronin, Nessa; Crosson, Seán; Eastlake, John, eds. (2009). Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. +Goody, Jack; Watt, Ian (1968). Goody, Jack (ed.). "The Consequences of Literacy". Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. +Jousse, Marcel (1978). "Le Parlant, la parole, et le souffle". L'Anthropologie du Geste. 3. Gallimard, Paris: Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. +McLuhan, Marshal (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. +Ong, Walter J. (2002) [1982]. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge. +Yates, Frances A. (1966). The Art of Memory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. + + +== Further reading == +Goody, Jack (1987). The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. +Havelock, Eric A. (1986). The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present. New Haven: Yale University Press. +Innis, Harold A. (1951). The Bias of Communication. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802060273. {{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help) +Martin, Henri-Jean (1994). The History and Power of Writing. Translated by Cochrane, Lydia G. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-50835-8. +Misztal, Barbara (2003). Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. +Ong, Walter J. (1967). The Presence of the Word. New Haven: Yale University Press.. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostension_(folklore)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostension_(folklore)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5eb0c905d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostension_(folklore)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +--- +title: "Ostension (folklore)" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostension_(folklore)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:35.052893+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +In study of folklore and urban legends, ostension is the process of acting out a folk narrative, i.e., real-life happenings that parallel the events told in pre-existing and well-established legends and lore. +Ostension has become an important concept for folklorists studying the ways in which folklore affects everyday people's real lives, ranging from supernatural rituals such as legend tripping to the complex ways in which awareness of AIDS has affected people's sexual habits. Folklorist John McDowell explored the relationship between iconicity—representation—and ostension—presentation—in mythic narrative, finding in episodes of ostention a virtual encounter with the experiential substrate, an experience that he termed "narrative epiphany". + + +== Theory == +Semiotician Umberto Eco was the first to use the term "ostension" to describe the way in which people communicate messages through miming actions, as by holding up a pack of cigarettes to say, "Would you like one?" The concept was applied to semiotic analysis of contemporary legends by John Holmes McDowell (1982) and by folklorists Linda Dégh and Andrew Vázsonyi (1983). In their article, "Does the Word ‘Dog’ Bite?", seminal for the concept in folkloristics, Dégh and Vázsonyi argued that the most direct form of ostension involved committing an actual crime mentioned in a well-known urban legend, such as microwaving someone's pet animal or placing poison in a child's Halloween candy. While such events are rare, the authors stressed that folklorists must recognize "that fact can become narrative and narrative can become fact." +Dégh and Vázsonyi, followed by other analysts, argued that there were two other forms of ostension that did not necessarily involve literal acting out of legends. +Quasi-ostension involves interpretation of ambiguous events in terms of a legend, as when a murder is first believed to have been a "cult" sacrifice or "gang" murder when in fact the perpetrator had other motives. Many local media panics are based in this form of ostension. +Pseudo-ostension involves legend-like events intentionally acted out by persons aware of the original narrative. For example, in 1991, Ebony published a letter written by "C.J." a Dallas-area woman who said she was HIV-positive, but intentionally having sex with as many men as possible. Soon after, a local radio talk-show broadcast a phone call from a woman who said she was the real "C.J." "I blame it on men, period," she said to the talk-show host. "I'm doing it to all the men because it was a man that gave it to me." After a huge spike in males seeking HIV screening in the Dallas-Fort-Worth area, both the author of the letter and the talk-show caller were identified as hoaxers intending to raise consciousness of the disease. +Folklorist Jeffrey Tolbert argues that the "Slender Man" phenomenon represents a process he calls reverse ostension. According to Tolbert, the Slender Man does the opposite to ostension by creating a set of folklore-like narratives where none existed before. According to Tolbert, this represents two processes in one: it involves the creation of new objects and new disconnected examples of experience, and it involves the combination of these elements into a body of "traditional" narratives, modeled on existing folklore. + + +== See also == + +Archetype +Exemplification +Legend tripping + + +== Notes == + + +== References == +Dégh, Linda; Andrew Vázsonyi (1983). "Does the Word 'Dog' Bite? Ostensive Action: A Means of Legend Telling". Journal of Folklore Research. 20: 5–34. +Eco, Umberto (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-20217-5. +Goldstein, Diane E (2004). Once upon a Virus: Aids Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception. Logan, UT: Utah State University Press. ISBN 0-87421-587-0. +Richardson, James T.; Best, Joel; Bromley, David (1991). The Satanism Scare. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. ISBN 0-202-30379-9. +Sperber, Dan; Wilson, Deirdre (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631198789. +Jaegwon, Kim; et al. (2012). Metaphysics: An anthology. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4443-3102-8. +Ellis, Bill (July 1989). "Death by Folklore: Ostension, Contemporary Legend, and Murder". Western Folklore. 48 (3): 201–220. doi:10.2307/1499739. JSTOR 1499739. + + +== Further reading == +Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science-0.md index 96ed11643..4be7b4534 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:15:28.575686+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:23.803800+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science-1.md index 379cc9527..f4f4e1a00 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/2 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_library_and_information_science" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T06:15:28.575686+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:23.803800+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-0.md index 699f2dfdf..5a2994456 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T08:11:15.750363+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:29.189685+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-1.md index d9b119fe3..c851f97e0 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-1.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-1.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 2/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T08:11:15.750363+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:29.189685+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-2.md index 5481a438d..ab6ad7403 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-2.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics-2.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 3/3 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T08:11:15.750363+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:29.189685+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlocutionary_act-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlocutionary_act-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..364d2e5fd --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlocutionary_act-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,15 @@ +--- +title: "Perlocutionary act" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlocutionary_act" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:36.223948+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A perlocutionary act (or perlocutionary effect) is the effect of an utterance on an interlocutor (listener). Examples of perlocutionary acts include persuading, convincing, scaring, enlightening, inspiring, or otherwise affecting the interlocutor. Words can insinuate an action or an emotion in the listener, whether or not it was the speaker's intention. The perlocutionary effect of an utterance is contrasted with the locutionary act, which is the act of producing the utterance (articulating/speaking), and with the illocutionary force, which does not depend on the utterance's effect on the interlocutor. +As an example, consider the following utterance: "By the way, I have a CD of Debussy; would you like to borrow it?" Its illocutionary function is an offer, while its intended perlocutionary effect might be to impress the interlocutor, or to show a friendly attitude, or to encourage an interest in a particular type of music. The actual perlocutionary effect can be different from the intended perlocutionary effect. The speaker of such a sentence may intend to exhibit a friendly attitude, but a listener might become irritated if they suppose the speaker's intention is snobbishly to impress them. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_linguistics-0.md index 05a995e39..1e2a15d11 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_linguistics-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_linguistics-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_linguistics" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T12:09:43.903507+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:37.500319+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..cb4f5842c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,60 @@ +--- +title: "Phonaesthetics" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:38.814833+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Phonaesthetics (also spelled phonesthetics in North America) is the study of the beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by J. R. R. Tolkien, during the mid-20th century and derives from Ancient Greek φωνή (phōnḗ) 'voice, sound' and αἰσθητική (aisthētikḗ) 'aesthetics'. Speech sounds have many aesthetic qualities, some of which are subjectively regarded as euphonious (pleasing) or cacophonous (displeasing). Phonaesthetics remains a budding and often subjective field of study, with no scientifically or otherwise formally established definition; today, it mostly exists as a marginal branch of psychology, phonetics, or poetics. +British linguist David Crystal has regarded phonaesthetics as the study of "phonaesthesia" (i.e., sound symbolism and phonesthemes): that not just words but even certain sound combinations within a particular language carry meaning. For example, he shows that English speakers tend to associate unpleasantness with the sound sl- in such words as sleazy, slime, slug, and slush, or they associate repetition lacking any particular shape with -tter in such words as chatter, glitter, flutter, and shatter. + + +== Euphony and cacophony == + +Euphony is the effect of sounds being perceived as pleasant, rhythmical, lyrical, or harmonious. Cacophony is the effect of sounds being perceived as harsh, unpleasant, chaotic, and often discordant; these sounds are perhaps meaningless and jumbled together. This is similar to consonance and dissonance in music, which are pleasant and unpleasant sounds respectively. In poetry, for example, euphony may be used deliberately to convey comfort, peace, or serenity, while cacophony may be used to convey discomfort, pain, or disorder. This is often furthered by the combined effect of the meaning beyond just the sounds themselves. +The California Federation of Chaparral Poets uses Emily Dickinson's "A Bird came down the Walk" as an example of euphonious poetry, one passage being "...Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam" and John Updike's "Player Piano" as an example of cacophonous poetry, one passage being "My stick fingers click with a snicker / And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys". + + +== Research == +David Crystal's 1995 paper "Phonaesthetically Speaking" explores lists, created by reader polls and individual writers, of English words that are commonly regarded as sounding beautiful, to search for any patterns within the words' phonetics. Frequently recurring example words in these lists include gossamer, melody, and tranquil. Crystal's finding, assuming a British Received Pronunciation accent, is that words perceived as pretty tend to have a majority of a wide array of criteria; here are some major ones: + +Three or more syllables (e.g., goss·a·mer and mel·o·dy) +Stress on the first syllable (e.g., góssamer and mélody) + is the most common consonant phoneme, followed by , then a huge drop-off before other consonants (e.g., luminous contains the first four) +Short vowels (e.g., the schwa, followed in order by the vowels in lid, led, and lad) are favored over long vowels and diphthongs (e.g., as in lied, load, loud) +Three or more manners of articulation (with approximant consonants the most common, followed by stop consonants, and so on) +A perfect example word, according to these findings, is tremulous. Crystal also suggests the invented words ramelon and drematol , which he notes are similar to the types of names often employed in the marketing of pharmaceutical drugs. + + +== Cellar door == + +The English compound noun cellar door has been widely cited as an example of a word or phrase that is beautiful purely in terms of its sound (i.e., euphony) without inherent regard for its meaning. The phenomenon of cellar door being regarded as euphonious appears to have begun in the very early twentieth century, first attested in the 1903 novel Gee-Boy by the Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper. It has been promoted as beautiful-sounding by various writers; linguist Geoffrey Nunberg specifically names the writers H. L. Mencken in 1920; David Allan Robertson in 1921; Dorothy Parker, Hendrik Willem van Loon, and Albert Payson Terhune in the 1930s; George Jean Nathan in 1935; J. R. R. Tolkien in a lecture, "English and Welsh", delivered in 1955 (in which he described his reverence for the Welsh language and about which he said "cellar doors [i.e. beautiful words] are extraordinarily frequent"; see also Sound and language in Middle-earth); and C. S. Lewis in 1963. Furthermore, the phenomenon itself is touched upon in many sources and media, including an anonymous short piece in the September 1905 issue of Harper's Magazine, the 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam? by Norman Mailer, the 1967 play It's Called the Sugar Plum by Israel Horovitz, a 1991 essay by Jacques Barzun, the 2001 psychological drama film Donnie Darko, and a scene in the 2019 movie Tolkien. +The origin of cellar door being considered as an inherently beautiful or musical phrase is mysterious. However, in 2014, Nunberg speculated that the phenomenon might have arisen from Philip Wingate and Henry W. Petrie's 1894 hit song "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard", which contains the lyric "You'll be sorry when you see me sliding down our cellar door." Following the song's success, "slide down my cellar door" became a popular catchphrase up until the 1930s or 1940s to mean engaging in a type of friendship or camaraderie reminiscent of childhood innocence. A 1914 essay about Edgar Allan Poe's choice of the word "Nevermore" in his 1845 poem "The Raven" as being based on euphony may have spawned an unverified legend, propagated by syndicated columnists like Frank Colby in 1949 and L. M. Boyd in 1979, that cellar door was Poe's favorite phrase. +Tolkien, Lewis, and others have suggested that cellar door's auditory beauty becomes more apparent the more the word is dissociated from its literal meaning, for example, by using alternative spellings such as Selador, Selladore, Celador, Selidor (an island name in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series), or Salidar (Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series), which take on the quality of an enchanting name (and some of which suggest a specifically standard British pronunciation of the word: ), which is homophonous with "sell a daw." + + +== See also == + +Affection (linguistics) – Vowel sound change in Celtic languages +Assimilation (linguistics) – Phenomenon in linguisticsPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets +Cacofonix +Dissimilation +Epenthesis – Phonological process involving the addition of one or more sounds to a word +Inherently funny word – Words which have been described as inherently funny +Japanese sound symbolism – Large amount of sound-symbolic words in Japanese +Onomatopoeia – Words that imitate the sound they describe +Phonestheme – Concept in linguistics +Phono-semantic matching – Type of multi-source neologism +Phonosemantics – Study in linguisticsPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets +Sandhi – Type of sound change at morpheme or syllable boundaries ("euphonic" rules in Sanskrit grammar) +Vogon poetry – Fictional alien race in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets +Vowel harmony – Sound change in vowels + + +== Notes == + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a097d3799 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +title: "Pleonasm" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:40.072968+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Pleonasm (; from Ancient Greek πλεονασμός pleonasmós, from πλέον pléon 'to be in excess') is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as "black darkness", "burning fire", or "the man he said". It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria. Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature. + +== Usage == +Most often, pleonasm is understood to mean a word or phrase which is useless, clichéd, or repetitive, but a pleonasm can also be simply an unremarkable use of idiom. It can aid in achieving a specific linguistic effect, be it social, poetic or literary. Pleonasm sometimes serves the same function as rhetorical repetition—it can be used to reinforce an idea, contention or question, rendering writing clearer and easier to understand. Pleonasm can serve as a redundancy check; if a word is unknown, misunderstood, misheard, or if the medium of communication is poor—a static-filled radio transmission or sloppy handwriting—pleonastic phrases can help ensure that the meaning is communicated even if some of the words are lost. + +=== Idiomatic expressions === +Some pleonastic phrases are part of a language's idiom, such as tuna fish, chain mail and safe haven in American English. They are so common that their use is unremarkable for native speakers, although in many cases the redundancy can be dropped with no loss of meaning. +When expressing possibility, English speakers often use potentially pleonastic expressions such as It might be possible or perhaps it's possible, where both terms (verb might or adverb perhaps along with the adjective possible) have the same meaning under certain constructions. Many speakers of English use such expressions for possibility in general, such that most instances of such expressions by those speakers are in fact pleonastic. Others, however, use this expression only to indicate a distinction between ontological possibility and epistemic possibility, as in "Both the ontological possibility of X under current conditions and the ontological impossibility of X under current conditions are epistemically possible" (in logical terms, "I am not aware of any facts inconsistent with the truth of proposition X, but I am likewise not aware of any facts inconsistent with the truth of the negation of X"). The habitual use of the double construction to indicate possibility per se is far less widespread among speakers of most other languages (except in Spanish; see examples); rather, almost all speakers of those languages use one term in a single expression: + +French: Il est possible or il peut arriver. +Portuguese: O que é que, lit. "What is it that", a more emphatic way of saying "what is"; O que usually suffices. +Romanian: Este posibil or se poate întâmpla. +Typical Spanish pleonasms +Voy a subir arriba – I am going to go up upstairs, "arriba" not being necessary. +Entra adentro – enter inside, "adentro" not being necessary. +Turkish has many pleonastic constructs because certain verbs necessitate objects: +yemek yemek – to eat food. +yazı yazmak – to write writing. +dışarı çıkmak – to exit outside. +içeri girmek – to enter inside. +oyun oynamak – to play a game. +In a satellite-framed language such as English, verb phrases containing particles that denote direction of motion are so frequent that even when such a particle is pleonastic, it seems natural to include it (e.g. "enter into"). + +=== Professional and scholarly use === +Some pleonastic phrases, when used in professional or scholarly writing, may reflect a standardized usage that has evolved or a meaning familiar to specialists but not necessarily to those outside that discipline. Such examples as "null and void", "each and every", "cease and desist" are legal doublets that are part of legally operative language that is often drafted into legal documents. A classic example of such usage was that by the Lord Chancellor at the time (1864), Lord Westbury, in the English case of ex parte Gorely, when he described a phrase in an Act as "redundant and pleonastic". This type of usage may be favored in certain contexts. However, it may also be disfavored when used gratuitously to portray false erudition, obfuscate, or otherwise introduce verbiage, especially in disciplines where imprecision may introduce ambiguities (such as the natural sciences). + +=== Literary uses === +Examples from Baroque, Mannerist, and Victorian provide a counterpoint to Strunk's advocacy of concise writing: + +"This was the most unkindest cut of all." — William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Act 3, Scene 2, 183) +"I will be brief: your noble son is mad:/Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,/What is't but to be nothing else but mad?" — Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2) +"Let me tell you this, when social workers offer you, free, gratis and for nothing, something to hinder you from swooning, which with them is an obsession, it is useless to recoil ..." — Samuel Beckett, Molloy + +== Types == + +There are various kinds of pleonasm, including bilingual tautological expressions, syntactic pleonasm, semantic pleonasm and morphological pleonasm: + +=== Bilingual tautological expressions === +A bilingual tautological expression is a phrase that combines words that mean the same thing in two different languages. An example of a bilingual tautological expression is the Yiddish expression מים אחרונים וואַסער mayim akhroynem vaser. It literally means 'water last water' and refers to 'water for washing the hands after meal, grace water'. Its first element, mayim, derives from the Hebrew מים [majim] 'water'. Its second element, vaser, derives from the Middle High German word vaser 'water'. +According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Yiddish abounds with both bilingual tautological compounds and bilingual tautological first names. +The following are examples of bilingual tautological compounds in Yiddish: + +פֿינצטער חושך fíntster khóyshekh 'very dark', literally 'dark darkness', traceable back to the Middle High German word vinster 'dark' and the Hebrew word חושך ħōshekh 'darkness'. +חמור־אייזל khamer-éyzļ 'womanizer', literally 'donkey-donkey', traceable back to the Hebrew word חמור [ħă'mōr] 'donkey' and the Middle High German word esel 'donkey'. +The following are examples of bilingual tautological first names in Yiddish: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8b837e39d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +--- +title: "Pleonasm" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:40.072968+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +דוב־בער‎ Dov-Ber, literally 'bear-bear', traceable back to the Hebrew word דב dov 'bear' and the Middle High German word bër 'bear'. +צבי־הירש‎ Tsvi-Hirsh, literally 'deer-deer', traceable back to the Hebrew word צבי tsvi 'deer' and the Middle High German word hirz 'deer'. +זאב־וואָלף‎ Ze'ev-Volf, literally 'wolf-wolf', traceable back to the Hebrew word זאב ze'ev 'wolf' and the Middle High German word volf 'wolf'. +אריה־לייב‎ Aryeh-Leib, literally 'lion-lion', traceable back to the Hebrew word אריה arye 'lion' and the Middle High German word lewe 'lion'. + +=== Syntactic pleonasm === +Syntactic pleonasm occurs when the grammar of a language makes certain function words optional. For example, consider the following English sentences: + +"I know you're coming." +"I know that you're coming." +In this construction, the conjunction that is optional when joining a sentence to a verb phrase with know. Both sentences are grammatically correct, but the word that is pleonastic in this case. By contrast, when a sentence is in spoken form and the verb involved is one of assertion, the use of that makes clear that the present speaker is making an indirect rather than a direct quotation, such that he is not imputing particular words to the person he describes as having made an assertion; the demonstrative adjective that also does not fit such an example. Also, some writers may use "that" for technical clarity reasons. In some languages, such as French, the word is not optional and should therefore not be considered pleonastic. +The same phenomenon occurs in Spanish with subject pronouns. Since Spanish is a null-subject language, which allows subject pronouns to be deleted when understood, the following sentences mean the same: + +"Yo te amo." +"Te amo." +In this case, the pronoun yo ('I') is grammatically optional; both sentences mean "I love you" (however, they may not have the same tone or intention—this depends on pragmatics rather than grammar). Such differing but syntactically equivalent constructions, in many languages, may also indicate a difference in register. +The process of deleting pronouns is called pro-dropping, and it also happens in many other languages, such as Korean, Japanese, Hungarian, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Swahili, Slavic languages, and the Lao language. +In contrast, formal English requires an overt subject in each clause. A sentence may not need a subject to have valid meaning, but to satisfy the syntactic requirement for an explicit subject a pleonastic (or dummy pronoun) is used; only the first sentence in the following pair is acceptable English: + +"It's raining." +"Is raining." +In this example the pleonastic "it" fills the subject function, but it contributes no meaning to the sentence. The second sentence, which omits the pleonastic it is marked as ungrammatical although no meaning is lost by the omission. Elements such as "it" or "there", serving as empty subject markers, are also called (syntactic) expletives, or dummy pronouns. Compare: + +"There is rain." +"Today is rain." +The pleonastic ne (ne pléonastique), expressing uncertainty in formal French, works as follows: + +"Je crains qu'il ne pleuve."('I fear it may rain.') +"Ces idées sont plus difficiles à comprendre que je ne pensais."('These ideas are harder to understand than I thought.') +Two more striking examples of French pleonastic construction are aujourd'hui and Qu'est-ce que c'est?. +The word aujourd'hui/au jour d'hui is translated as 'today', but originally means "on the day of today" since the now obsolete hui means "today". The expression au jour d'aujourd'hui (translated as "on the day of today") is common in spoken language and demonstrates that the original construction of aujourd'hui is lost. It is considered a pleonasm. +The phrase Qu'est-ce que c'est? meaning 'What's that?' or 'What is it?', while literally, it means "What is it that it is?". +There are examples of the pleonastic, or dummy, negative in English, such as the construction, heard in the New England region of the United States, in which the phrase "So don't I" is intended to have the same positive meaning as "So do I." +When Robert South said, "It is a pleonasm, a figure usual in Scripture, by a multiplicity of expressions to signify one notable thing", he was observing the Biblical Hebrew poetic propensity to repeat thoughts in different words, since written Biblical Hebrew was a comparatively early form of written language and was written using oral patterning, which has many pleonasms. In particular, very many verses of the Psalms are split into two halves, each of which says much the same thing in different words. The complex rules and forms of written language as distinct from spoken language were not as well-developed as they are today when the books making up the Old Testament were written. See also parallelism (rhetoric). + +=== Semantic pleonasm === +Semantic pleonasm is a question more of style and usage than of grammar. Linguists usually call this redundancy to avoid confusion with syntactic pleonasm, a more important phenomenon for theoretical linguistics. It usually takes one of two forms: Overlap or prolixity. +Overlap: One word's semantic component is subsumed by the other: + +"Receive a free gift with every purchase."; a gift is usually already free. +"A tuna fish sandwich." +"The plumber fixed our hot water heater." (This pleonasm was famously attacked by American comedian George Carlin, but is not truly redundant; a device that increases the temperature of cold water to room temperature would also be a water heater.) +The Big Friendly Giant (title of a children's book by Roald Dahl); giants are inherently already "big". +Prolixity: A phrase may have words which add nothing, or nothing logical or relevant, to the meaning. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ae5bffc78 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +title: "Pleonasm" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:40.072968+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +"I'm going down south."(South is not really "down", it is just drawn that way on maps by convention.) +"You can't seem to face up to the facts." +"He entered into the room." +"Every mother's child" (as in The Christmas Song by Nat King Cole', also known as Chestnuts roasting...). (Being a child, or a human at all, generally implies being the child of/to a mother. So the redundancy here is used to broaden the context of the child's curiosity regarding the sleigh of Santa Claus, including the concept of maternity. The full line goes: "And every mother's child is gonna spy, to see if reindeer really know how to fly". One can furthermore argue that the word "mother" is included for the purpose of lyrical flow, adding two syllables, which make the line sound complete, as "every child" would be too short to fit the lyrical/rhyme scheme.) +"Ilk man and mother's son take heed" from Tam o' Shanter written by Robert Burns in 1790 (Ilk is a now-archaic Scots determiner meaning each or every, so this adds a second pleonasm to the mother's child example above, double-emphasising that he means absolutely every man, as well as fitting the metre of that verse) +"What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder." +"He raised up his hands in a gesture of surrender." +"Where are you at?" +"Located" or similar before a preposition: "the store is located on Main St." The preposition contains the idea of locatedness and does not need a servant. +"The house itself" for "the house", and similar: unnecessary re-specifiers. +"Actual fact": fact. +"On a daily basis": daily. +"This particular item": this item. +"Different" or "separate" after numbers: for example: +"Four different species" are merely "four species", as two non-different species are together one same species. (However, in "a discount if you buy ten different items", "different" has meaning, because if the ten items include two packets of frozen peas of the same weight and brand, those ten items are not all different.) +"Nine separate cars": cars are always separate. +"Despite the fact that": although. +An expression such as "tuna fish", however, might elicit one of many possible responses, such as: + +It will simply be accepted as synonymous with "tuna". +It will be perceived as redundant (and thus perhaps silly, illogical, ignorant, inefficient, dialectal, odd, and/or intentionally humorous). +It will imply a distinction. A reader of "tuna fish" could properly wonder: "Is there a kind of tuna which is not a fish? There is, after all, a dolphin mammal and a dolphin fish." This assumption turns out to be correct, as a "tuna" can also mean a prickly pear. Further, "tuna fish" is sometimes used to refer to the flesh of the animal as opposed to the animal itself (similar to the distinction between beef and cattle). Similarly, while all sound-making horns use air, an "air horn" has a special meaning: one that uses compressed air specifically; while most clocks tell time, a "time clock" specifically means one that keeps track of workers' presence at the workplace. +It will be perceived as a verbal clarification, since the word "tuna" is quite short, and may, for example, be misheard as "tune" followed by an aspiration, or (in dialects that drop the final -r sound) as "tuner". + +== See also == + +== References == + +=== Citations === + +=== Bibliography === +Smyth, Herbert Weir (1984) [1920]. "§3042". Greek Grammar (PDF). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 681–682. ISBN 0-674-36250-0. + +== External links == + The dictionary definition of pleonasm at Wiktionary \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e73be8e31 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,24 @@ +--- +title: "Political linguistics" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:41.271967+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Political linguistics is the study of the relations between language and politics. It argues that language gives origin to the state. The reason is that when humans perform linguistic communication, they use media. Media extend the distance of linguistic communication. Humans interact with one another on a large scale. They form a large community. This leads to the dissolution of the tribes and the formation of the state. Language plays a role in the growth of the state in every aspect. Language plays a role in the formation of the state, in the governance of the state and in the building of the spirit of the state. That is, language is used as a means to form a state and is enacted in various ways that help achieve political objectives. Language allows for people in a very large number to communicate with each other on a large scale to the effect that a state is formed. As language forms the basis of communication, politics is thus affected by language. +Political linguistics is a performance. In order for the public to have positive sentiments towards a party, a politician will carefully craft their manifesto in order to convince the reader of their credibility. These political parties will then be part of a system of communication between the state and the governed, which helps them influence opinions and also their power. Hence, political linguistics is a tool of persuasion in politics, especially in speeches and campaigns. When studying political linguistics, one can pay attention to the effects of slogans, mass media, debates and propaganda to persuade the values and identities of individuals. +There are strong relationships between political linguistics, social linguistics, and media linguistics. +Political linguistics is distinct from linguistic politics or language politics, which refer to the politics of language itself. Language is attached to national, cultural and ethnic identity, hence, the way language is used and disseminated is political and can be used for political gain. + +== Strategies within Political Discourse == + +Language is inseparable from the political domain. It can be used in strategies to influence public thought. +Political discourse is about "the text and talk of professional politicians or political institutions, such as presidents and prime ministers and other members of government, parliament or political parties, both at the local, national and international levels". +When referring to propaganda, Hitler stated that all propaganda needed to be popular, but its intellectual content must be kept to a minimum. Instead, it should appeal to their emotions, with its effectiveness being based on the extent to which the masses’ emotions are exploited. +In this manner, according to Social Identity Theory, language can be used to divide a community by creating an in-group and an out-group. Additionally, it can be used to exaggerate the seriousness of a situation or ostracise a certain demographic . + +=== Politics embedded in language === +Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey. Hence, people will strategically produce utterances in ways they expect their audience to interpret the meaning they are trying to convey. When using language, even if in a thought, any individual will seek an audience and response from them is expected. Erving Goffman believes when "a person volunteers a statement or message, however trivial or common-place, he commits himself and those he addresses, and in a sense places everyone present in jeopardy. By saying something, the speaker opens himself up to the possibility that the intended recipients will affront him by not listening or will think him forward, foolish, or offensive in what he has said." When an utterance is made or a statement is written, a response is solicited from the audience (whether intended or not), hence, according to Goffman's Face Theory, the speaker will choose his words wisely to gain the most favourable response. "One can see the deferential use of the plural as both a negative and a positive face strategy. Addressing someone as, in effect, ‘you and yours', deflects the force of the speech act from the individual spoken to, making it less direct and less threatening. At the same time, it increases the ‘size’ of the addressee, as it were, implying that this person matters too much to be treated as a mere singular." \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..de130f6c4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Political linguistics" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:41.271967+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Strategies in communication === +Face saving can appear in language choice as well. We can observe how the politics of interpersonal relationships are embedded in linguistic sign. Since different languages have different lexicons and syntax, various meanings emerge when people try to say the same things at the same time. +For example, "interpersonal relations are not performed linguistically in the same way in English as in all those other European languages that have a polite form." In French, this relationship is performed between the speaker and their interlocutor(s) by the word choice of tu or vous to show intimacy or distantness. In English, this relationship can be performed by calling the interlocutors by their first name or by their title and surname, but can generally be avoided if they speakers choose to do so. +The study of political linguistics is particularly useful when analyzing international negotiations. International negotiations are complex events with many factors where language and culture barriers often occur. Translators run into difficulties ensuring that nuances and details are not lost in the translation process. In March 2021, Chinese interpreter Zhang Jing gained fame after she was able to translate speeches which were at least 10 minutes long in a smooth and accurate manner. Her capability has prompted many netizens to sing praises of China, saying that she was "calm and collected, could translate and convey the message accurately, fully displaying the country’s diplomatic team’s elegance". In a sense, Zhang’s capabilities have not just revealed the quality of China’s diplomatic team, but improved the public’s perception of the government as well. This shows how important it is to have a good grasp of political linguistics. +Question framing is the forming of questions to elicit certain responses. This is particularly useful in negotiation as it can lead opponents to answer questions in specific ways. As an example, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan investigated question framing in racial attitudes. The various scientists working on the project found that the wording of questions had great bearing on whether respondents attributed characteristics to an individual or to their racial group. Race has always been a factor of politics and the use of political linguistics to downplay racial tensions may be used by political parties. They could use questions framed to emphasize individual achievement rather than the overarching problems. + +== Common manifestations of Political Linguistics == + +=== Propaganda === + +Prominent examples of political manipulation in the form of propaganda can be seen in many countries. These can be found in political elections, media, debates and propaganda posters. +The terms of propaganda are designed consciously, in order to hinder thought and understanding. For example, in the 1940s there was a decision made in public relation circles to introduce terms like "free enterprise" and "free world" instead of the conventional descriptive terms like "capitalism". Part of the reason could be to insinuate somehow that the systems of control and domination and aggression to which those with power were committed were in fact a kind of freedom. Hitler had stated that all propaganda needed to be popular, but its intellectual content must be kept to a minimum. Instead, it should appeal to their emotions, with its effectiveness being based on the extent to which the masses’ emotions are exploited. +During World War II, in Germany, the Nazis heavily used posters to spread propaganda. These posters usually had short captions blaming the Jews for the problems the Germans were facing, but provided no logical explanation for the statements. This exploits the negative emotions the Germans have towards their economic situation, and pushes the blame to the Jews. + +=== Examples of political strategies === + +==== In Singapore ==== + +In 2020, Singapore had its general elections. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong from the ruling party People’s Action Party (PAP) warned Singaporeans against voting for opposition parties. His explanation was that frequent changes of governments do not lead to the societal changes people vote for, implying that voting for opposition might lead to such occurrences in Singapore too. Instead, it could lead to more instability. To emphasise his point, he mentioned that voters should pay attention to other countries whose political consensus fell after frequent handovers of power. He also mentioned how the PAP had served the people well, and will continue to do so. The balance of an example of political instability in other countries together with the contributions of PAP are invoked to convince voters that voting for PAP is the most sound choice since if what they "really want is a PAP MP to look after your constituency and town council, and a PAP government to look after Singapore." + +==== In Taiwan ==== +In Taiwan, the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) who moved to Taiwan after losing the Chinese Civil War to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s changed slogans that were previously used in mainland China with one such example, a slogan used to promote anti-communism and to fight against Russian idealism - "反共抗俄救同胞" (fǎngòng kàng'é jiùtóngbāo, Resist communism and fight Russia, rescue our compatriots) - to "反攻復國救同胞" (fǎngōng fùguó jiùtóngbāo, Counter-attack, recover the nation, rescue our compatriots) to construct the idea of Chinese communists as Russian allies and traitors to the Han Chinese. This change required little effort, replacing "fǎngòng, resist communism" to "fǎngōng, counter-attack" and "kàng'é, fight Russia" to "fùguó, recover the nation" while still retaining the original seven characters in the slogan. + +==== In the United States ==== \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..139b06224 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,34 @@ +--- +title: "Political linguistics" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:41.271967+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Joe Biden’s campaign message in his political battle with Donald Trump is an example of appealing to the attitudes of the masses. A lawsuit was filed against Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential campaign stating "During his 2016 campaign, and throughout his presidency, Trump had threatened violence towards his opponents, encouraged his followers to commit acts of violence, and condoned acts of violence by his followers, including white supremacists and far rightwing hate groups." The campaign used Biden’s basic decency to contrast with Trump. Urging American citizens to "join in the battle for the soul of the nation" on his side, Biden persuaded the masses to make the ‘right’ choice against Trump, stating that if given "eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation." + +=== Social movements === + +Social movements are also places where political linguistics manifest, especially when protestors are pushing for political change. Similarly, some movements aim to have a concise catchphrase to promote their movement. + +==== The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong ==== +In 2014, the name of the social movement, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, makes use of wordplay between the Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese languages, who both have distinct pronunciation and vocabulary rules. When a Mandarin-Chinese reader looks at the Cantonese words for "Umbrella Movement," it will not make much sense to them. In contrast, when a Cantonese-reader looks at the same words, it means both "Chater Road Movement" and, literally, "Umbrella Fight Movement." The significance of the wordplay in the title highlights not only the defence of Hongkongers' distinct language which crucially resides in their cultural identity, as well as the history of the autonomy of Hongkongers. + +==== Nationalism Movement protests in Thailand ==== + +In early 2020, student-led protests begun against the military dominated government, in which the Thai monarchy, after King Vajiralongkorn assumed the throne following the after the death of his father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, began publicly intervening in political affairs. These student-led protests featured adapted use of popular culture such as the three-fingered salute from +Hunger Games, a modified version of the theme song of popular Japanese cartoon Hamtaro, and references to Harry Potter’s "He Who Shall Not Be Named". These uses of popular culture reflects the youths of Thailand, theirs' and their nation's future, making use of things that represents a part of the culture of their generation. + +== Politics, language and society == +Various theorists, including structural and post structural theorists have discussed the link between language and knowledge and its influence in politics. +William Conolly summarizes political linguistics in two ways. First, from the Foucauldian perspective, power is not a possession of agents who exercise it to define the options of others, but a set of pressure lodged in institutional mechanisms which produce and maintain such privileged norms as the subject or the primacy of epistemology. While from the Anglo-American point of view, the self is an agent, capable of forming the intention of deliberately shaping conduct to rules. +Post-structural theorists Derrida and Foucault see authorship as a function rather than an initiating activity. Intentions behind the performance of political linguistics is never from a single source, but also from sources that precede this source which can come in the form of a heritage of speech and discursive practices. +There is a tendency for humans to relate things of the past to the present. Semantics of World War I were applied in preparation for World War II. We seem to have been preparing for World War III, despite desperately not wanting it, by applying the semantics of World War II.Give concrete examples of this Meanings are assigned by association with other words put together by other people (usually in the mass media) rather than from direct experience with things and events. +In support, C. Wright Mills locates the meaning of utterances in the social functions they perform. He suggests that a scrutiny on motives not to find out the reasons a given person is engaged in a particular act but about the kinds of justifications for action that are legitimized in a society at a given time. J. G. A. Pocock speaks similarly to Mills, stating "language is a repository of sedimented power and that to understand the language-power relationship, attention should be focused not on the intention of the individual user but rather on the inheritance of practices and conceptions that precede what comes out of the speaker’s mouth." He added further that resistance to language means "reshaping language in order to reshape how we can define ourselves and thus how we can act." +All linguistic accounts have perspectives to promote or a task to accomplish. Neutral accounts of activities carry with them, by virtue of their grammatical and rhetorical structures, implicit political arguments and legitimations for entrenched authority which seek to disestablish existing structures of power and domination. +Words are distinctive representations of the things referred to, and these representations can be manipulated symbolically. The meaning of a word can be understood as a simultaneous bundle of distinctive semantic features. These features solicit different reactions to things and events which have been found to make a difference in changes to the physical and social environments. +At times, it is only through breaking language rules that we can force our language into a more accurate portrayal of things as they are. For example, when a young boy was accused of a felony, exclaims, ‘Ah ain’t nevah done nothin’ to nobody nohow!’, he is guilty of a quintuple negative at the very least – but his claim to honorable character is being vividly made. +Effective metaphors also break semantic rules optimally. The link language to reality in ways existing lexicons cannot. Winston Churchill’s coinage of the phrase Iron Curtain broke pragmatic, if not semantic, rules of English, but it certainly provided an apt characterization of the Cold War situation at the time. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1e017c1b5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +title: "Political linguistics" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_linguistics" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:41.271967+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Symmetry with social realities === +Political linguistics is highly convincing because of the symmetry with the social realities of the masses. It is a strategic use of language that appeals to and empowers people. +Murray Edelman believes "language used by a particular class of persons both constitutes a kind of political reality that enables or empowers the helping professional and disenables their clientele." It is difficult to oppose their power or authority because the language used is well within the people’s linguistic universe. In Kenneth Burke’s review of Mein Kampf, he focuses on rhetorical structures rather than individual terms. He demonstrates that an appeal to mass attitudes is effective by connecting itself to rhetorical structures which are already a part of general discursive practices and thus generalised understandings. He references Mein Kampf’s strategy is "the appropriation of ‘church thought’ with its already established script for relating economic ills to problems of personality. It therefore sets the stage for both scape-goating the Jews and for exalting the dignity of the Aryan, and, ultimately, for legitimizing violence in order to effect the desired movement in status." +Friedrich Nietzsche believes the inquiry into what people say is to learn how they construct their worlds. "The language of people’s transaction is, both grammatically and rhetorically, a set of contrivances which locks people into identities and gives them objects and kinds of action with predetermined value." + +== See also == + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density-0.md index 115047620..b1ca91f52 100644 --- a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density-0.md +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density-0.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ chunk: 1/1 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density" category: "reference" tags: "science, encyclopedia" -date_saved: "2026-05-05T07:21:14.289017+00:00" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:49.174833+00:00" instance: "kb-cron" --- diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..8ab9362f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +title: "Possible world" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:42.464458+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional and modal logic. Their metaphysical status has been a subject of controversy in philosophy, with modal realists such as David Lewis arguing that there are literally existing alternate realities, and others such as Robert Stalnaker arguing that alternate realities do not exist. + +== Logic == + +Possible worlds are one of the foundational concepts in modal and intensional logics. Formulas in these logics are used to represent statements about what might be true, what should be true, what one believes to be true and so forth. To give these statements a formal interpretation, logicians use structures containing possible worlds. For instance, in the relational semantics for classical propositional modal logic, the formula + + + + ◊ + P + + + {\displaystyle \Diamond P} + + (read as "possibly P") is actually true if and only if + + + + P + + + {\displaystyle P} + + is true in some world which is accessible from the actual world. +Possible worlds play a central role in the work of both linguists and/or philosophers working in formal semantics. Contemporary formal semantics is couched in formal systems rooted in Montague grammar, which is itself built on Richard Montague's intensional logic. Contemporary research in semantics typically uses possible worlds as formal tools without committing to a particular theory of their metaphysical status. The term possible world is retained even by those who attach no metaphysical significance to them. +In the field of database theory, possible worlds are also a notion used in the setting of uncertain databases and probabilistic databases, which serve as a succinct representation of a large number of possible worlds. + +== Argument from ways == +Possible worlds are often regarded with suspicion, which is why their proponents have struggled to find arguments in their favor. An often-cited argument is called the argument from ways. It defines possible worlds as "ways things could have been" and relies for its premises and inferences on assumptions from natural language, for example: + +The Black Death could have killed 99% of the European population, rather than the estimated 25 to 60%. +So there are other ways things could have been. +Possible worlds are ways things could have been. +So there are other possible worlds. +The central step of this argument happens at (2) where the plausible (1) is interpreted in a way that involves quantification over "ways". Many philosophers, following Willard Van Orman Quine, hold that quantification entails ontological commitments, in this case, a commitment to the existence of possible worlds. Quine himself restricted his method to scientific theories, but others have applied it also to natural language, for example, Amie L. Thomasson in her paper entitled Ontology Made Easy. The strength of the argument from ways depends on these assumptions and may be challenged by casting doubt on the quantifier-method of ontology or on the reliability of natural language as a guide to ontology. + +== Philosophical issues and applications == + +=== Metaphysics === + +The ontological status of possible worlds has provoked intense debate. David Lewis famously advocated for a position known as modal realism, which holds that possible worlds are real, concrete places which exist in the exact same sense that the actual world exists. On Lewis's account, the actual world is special only in that we live there. This doctrine is called the indexicality of actuality since it can be understood as claiming that the term "actual" is an indexical, like "now" and "here". Lewis gave a variety of arguments for this position. He argued that just as the reality of atoms is demonstrated by their explanatory power in physics, so too are possible worlds justified by their explanatory power in philosophy. He also argued that possible worlds must be real because they are simply "ways things could have been" and nobody doubts that such things exist. Finally, he argued that they could not be reduced to more "ontologically respectable" entities such as maximally consistent sets of propositions without rendering theories of modality circular. (He referred to these theories as "ersatz modal realism" which try to get the benefits of possible worlds semantics "on the cheap"). +Modal realism is controversial. W.V. Quine rejected it as "metaphysically extravagant". Stalnaker responded to Lewis's arguments by pointing out that a way things could have been is not itself a world, but rather a property that such a world can have. Since properties can exist without them applying to any existing objects, there's no reason to conclude that other worlds like ours exist. Another of Stalnaker's arguments attacks Lewis's indexicality theory of actuality. Stalnaker argues that even if the English word "actual" is an indexical, that doesn't mean that other worlds exist. For comparison, one can use the indexical "I" without believing that other people actually exist. Some philosophers instead endorse the view of possible worlds as maximally consistent sets of propositions or descriptions, while others such as Saul Kripke treat them as purely formal (i.e. mathematical) devices. + +=== Explicating necessity and possibility === +At least since Aristotle, philosophers have been greatly concerned with the logical statuses of propositions, e.g. necessity, contingency, and impossibility. In the twentieth century, possible worlds have been used to explicate these notions. In modal logic, a proposition is understood in terms of the worlds in which it is true and worlds in which it is false. Thus, equivalences like the following have been proposed: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..cba586a25 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +--- +title: "Possible world" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:42.464458+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +True propositions are those that are true in the actual world (for example: "Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914"). +False propositions are those that are false in the actual world (for example: "Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 2014"). +Possible propositions are those that are true in at least one possible world (for example: "Archduke Franz Ferdinand survived the assassination attempt against him in 1914"). This includes propositions which are necessarily true, in the sense below. +Impossible propositions (or necessarily false propositions) are those that are true in no possible world (for example: "Melissa and Toby are taller than each other at the same time"). +Necessarily true propositions (often simply called necessary propositions) are those that are true in all possible worlds (for example: "2 + 2 = 4"; "all bachelors are unmarried"). +Contingent propositions are those that are true in some possible worlds and false in others (for example: "Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914" is contingently true and "Archduke Franz Ferdinand survived the assassination attempt against him in 1914" is contingently false). + +=== Other uses === +Possible worlds play a central role in many other debates in philosophy. These include debates about the Zombie Argument,physicalism, and supervenience in the philosophy of mind. Many debates in the philosophy of religion have been impacted by the use of possible worlds, such as debates about the ontological argument, the problem of evil, and God's foreknowledge. + +== History of the concept == +The idea of possible worlds is most commonly attributed to Gottfried Leibniz, who spoke of possible worlds as ideas in the mind of God and used the notion to argue that our actually created world must be "the best of all possible worlds". Arthur Schopenhauer argued that on the contrary our world must be the worst of all possible worlds, because if it were only a little worse it could not continue to exist. Scholars have found implicit earlier traces of the idea of possible worlds in the works of René Descartes, a major influence on Leibniz, Al-Ghazali (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), Averroes (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (Matalib al-'Aliya), John Duns Scotus and Antonio Rubio (Commentarii in libros Aristotelis Stagiritae de Coelo). +The modern philosophical use of the notion was pioneered by David Lewis and Saul Kripke. + +== See also == +Alternate history – Fictional genre where historical events occur differently +Extended modal realism – Version of modal realism +Fictionalism – Pretending to treat something as literally true (a "useful fiction") +Impossible world – Term used to model separate circumstances that cannot exist together +Modal fictionalism – Philosophical concept +N-universes – Simplified philosophical models of universes +Modal realism – Philosophical concept +Molinism – Theological position on God's knowledge +Multiverse – Hypothetical group of multiple universes +Other worlds strategy – Philosophical treatment of oxymoronsPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets +Standard translation, an embedding of modal logics into first-order logic which captures their possible world semantics + +== References == + +== Further reading == +D.M. Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs (1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ISBN 0-521-58948-7 +John Divers, Possible Worlds (2002. London: Routledge) ISBN 0-415-15556-8 +Paul Herrick, The Many Worlds of Logic (1999. Oxford: Oxford University Press) Chapters 23 and 24. ISBN 978-0-19-515503-7 +David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (1986. Oxford & New York: Basil Blackwell) ISBN 0-631-13994-X +Michael J. Loux [ed.] The Possible and the Actual (1979. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press) ISBN 0-8014-9178-9 +G.W. Leibniz, Theodicy (2001. Wipf & Stock Publishers) ISBN 978-0-87548-437-2 +Brian Skyrms, "Possible Worlds, Physics and Metaphysics" (1976. Philosophical Studies 30) + +== External links == + +"Possible Worlds" entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy +"Possible worlds: what they are good for and what they are" — Alexander Pruss. +"Possible Objects" entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy +"Impossible Worlds" entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy +Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). "Impossible-Worlds". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..53d990d27 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +title: "Predicate (grammar)" +chunk: 1/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:43.742110+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The term predicate is used in two ways in linguistics and its subfields. The first defines a predicate as everything in a standard declarative sentence except the subject, and the other defines it as only the main content verb or associated predicative expression of a clause. Thus, by the first definition, the predicate of the sentence Frank likes cake is likes cake, while by the second definition, it is only the content verb likes, and Frank and cake are the arguments of this predicate. The conflict between these two definitions can lead to confusion. + +== Syntax == + +=== Traditional grammar === +The notion of a predicate in traditional grammar traces back to Aristotelian logic. A predicate is seen as a property that a subject has or is characterized by. A predicate is therefore an expression that can be true of something. Thus, the expression "is moving" is true of anything that is moving. This classical understanding of predicates was adopted more or less directly into Latin and Greek grammars; from there, it made its way into English grammars, where it is applied directly to the analysis of sentence structure. It is also the understanding of predicates as defined in English-language dictionaries. The predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence (the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies). The predicate must contain a verb, and the verb requires or permits other elements to complete the predicate, or else precludes them from doing so. These elements are objects (direct, indirect, prepositional), predicatives, and adjuncts: + +She dances. — Verb-only predicate. +Ben reads the book. — Verb-plus-direct-object predicate. +Ben's mother, Felicity, gave me a present. — Verb-plus-indirect-object-plus-direct-object predicate. +She listened to the radio. — Verb-plus-prepositional-object predicate. +She is in the park. — Verb-plus-predicative-prepositional-phrase predicate. +She met him in the park. — Verb-plus-direct-object-plus-adjunct predicate. +The predicate provides information about the subject, such as what the subject is, what the subject is doing, or what the subject is like. The relation between a subject and its predicate is sometimes called a nexus. A predicative nominal is a noun phrase: in the sentence George III is the king of England, the phrase the king of England is the predicative nominal. In English, the subject and predicative nominal must be connected by a linking verb, also called a copula. A predicative adjective is an adjective, such as in Ivano is attractive, attractive being the predicative adjective. The subject and predicative adjective must also be connected by a copula. + +=== Modern theories of syntax === +Some theories of syntax adopt a subject-predicate distinction. For instance, a textbook phrase structure grammar typically divides an English declarative sentence (S) into a noun phrase (NP) and verb phrase (VP). The subject NP is shown in green, and the predicate VP in blue. Languages with more flexible word order (often called nonconfigurational languages) are often also treated differently in phrase structure approaches. + +On the other hand, dependency grammar rejects the binary subject-predicate division and places the finite verb as the root of the sentence. The matrix predicate is marked in blue, and its two arguments are in green. While the predicate cannot be construed as a constituent in the formal sense, it is a catena. Barring a discontinuity, predicates and their arguments are always catenae in dependency structures. + +Some theories of grammar accept both a binary division of sentences into subject and predicate while also giving the head of the predicate a special status. In such contexts, the term predicator is used to refer to that head. + +=== Non-subject predicands === +There are cases in which the semantic predicand has a syntactic function other than subject. This happens in raising constructions, such as the following: + +Here, you is the object of the make verb phrase, the head of the main clause, but it is also the predicand of the subordinate think clause, which has no subject. + +== Semantic predication == +The term predicate is also used to refer to properties and to words or phrases which denote them. This usage of the term comes from the concept of a predicate in logic. In logic, predicates are symbols which are interpreted as relations or functions over arguments. In semantics, the denotations of some linguistic expressions are analyzed along similar lines. Expressions which denote predicates in the semantic sense are sometimes themselves referred to as "predication". + +=== Carlson classes === +The seminal work of Greg Carlson distinguishes between types of predicates. Based on Carlson's work, predicates have been divided into the following subclasses, which roughly pertain to how a predicate relates to its subject. + +==== Stage-level predicates ==== +A stage-level predicate is true of a temporal stage of its subject. For example, if John is "hungry", then he typically will eat some food. His state of being hungry therefore lasts a certain amount of time, and not his entire lifespan. Stage-level predicates can occur in a wide range of grammatical constructions and are probably the most versatile kind of predicate. + +==== Individual-level predicates ==== +An individual-level predicate is true throughout the existence of an individual. For example, if John is "smart", this is a property that he has, regardless of which particular point in time we consider. Individual-level predicates are more restricted than stage-level ones. Individual-level predicates cannot occur in presentational "there" sentences (a star in front of a sentence indicates that it is odd or ill-formed): + +There are police available. — available is stage-level predicate. +*There are firemen altruistic. — altruistic is an individual-level predicate. +Stage-level predicates allow modification by manner adverbs and other adverbial modifiers. Individual-level predicates do not, e.g. + +Tyrone spoke French loudly in the corridor. — speak French can be interpreted as a stage-level predicate. +*Tyrone knew French silently in the corridor. — know French cannot be interpreted as a stage-level predicate. +When an individual-level predicate occurs in past tense, it gives rise to what is called a lifetime effect: The subject must be assumed to be dead or otherwise out of existence. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5b8ab63b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +--- +title: "Predicate (grammar)" +chunk: 2/2 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicate_(grammar)" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:43.742110+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +John was available. — Stage-level predicate does NOT evoke the lifetime effect. +John was altruistic. — Individual-level predicate does evoke the lifetime effect. + +==== Kind-level predicates ==== +A kind-level predicate is true of a kind of a thing, but cannot be applied to individual members of the kind. An example of this is the predicate are widespread. One cannot meaningfully say of a particular individual John that he is widespread; one may only say this of kinds, as in + +Cats are widespread. +Certain types of noun phrases cannot be the subject of a kind-level predicate. We have just seen that a proper name cannot be. Singular indefinite noun phrases are also banned from this environment: + +*A cat is widespread. — Compare: Nightmares are widespread. + +==== Collective vs. distributive predicates ==== +Predicates may also be collective or distributive. Collective predicates require their subjects to be somehow plural, while distributive ones do not. An example of a collective predicate is "formed a line". This predicate can only stand in a nexus with a plural subject: + +The students formed a line. — Collective predicate appears with plural subject. +*The student formed a line. — Collective predicate cannot appear with singular subject. +Other examples of collective predicates include meet in the woods, surround the house, gather in the hallway and carry the piano together. Note that the last one (carry the piano together) can be made non-collective by removing the word together. Quantifiers differ with respect to whether or not they can be the subject of a collective predicate. For example, quantifiers formed with all the can, while ones formed with every or each cannot. + +All the students formed a line. — Collective predicate possible with all the. +All the students gathered in the hallway. — Collective predicate possible with all the. +All the students carried a piano together. — Collective predicate possible with all the. +*Every student formed a line. — Collective predicate impossible with every. +*Each student gathered in the hallway. — Collective predicate impossible with each. + +== See also == + +== Notes == + +== References == + +== Literature == + +== External links == + The dictionary definition of predicate (grammar) at Wiktionary \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..fc97d7edc --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +--- +title: "Prompt engineering" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:44.973796+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Prompt engineering is the process of structuring natural language inputs (known as prompts) to produce specified outputs from a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) model. Context engineering is the related area of software engineering that focuses on the management of non-prompt contexts supplied to the GenAI model, such as metadata, API tools, and tokens. +It can also be defined as the practice of designing and refining input instructions given to a generative AI model to produce more accurate, relevant, or useful outputs. Effective prompt engineering involves understanding how a model interprets language, and may include techniques such as few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought prompting, and role assignment. It is increasingly considered a skill for working with large language models (LLMs) in both research and professional contexts. +During the 2020s AI boom, prompt engineering became regarded as a business capability across corporations and industries. Employees with the title prompt engineer were hired to create prompts that would increase productivity and efficacy, although the individual title has since lost traction amid AI models that produce better prompts than humans and corporate training in prompting for general employees. +Common prompting techniques include multi-shot, chain-of-thought, and tree-of-thought prompting, as well as the use of assigning roles to the model. Automated prompt generation methods, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), provide for greater accuracy and a wider scope of functions for prompt engineers. Prompt injection is a type of cybersecurity attack that targets machine learning models through malicious prompts. + +== Terminology == +The Oxford English Dictionary defines prompt engineering as "The action or process of formulating and refining prompts for an artificial intelligence program, algorithm, etc., in order to optimize its output or to achieve a desired outcome; the discipline or profession concerned with this." In 2023, prompt ("an instruction given to an artificial intelligence program, algorithm, etc., which determines or influences the content it generates") was the runner-up to Oxford's word of the year. + +=== Prompt === +A prompt is some natural language text that describes and prescribes the task that an artificial intelligence (AI) should perform. A prompt for a text-to-text language model can be a query, a command, or a longer statement referencing context, instructions, and conversation history. The process of prompt engineering may involve designing clear queries, refining wording, providing relevant context, specifying the style of output, and assigning a character for the AI to mimic in order to guide the model toward more accurate, useful, and consistent responses. +When communicating with a text-to-image or a text-to-audio model, a typical prompt contains a description of a desired output such as "a high-quality photo of an astronaut riding a horse" or "Lo-fi slow BPM electro chill with organic samples". Prompt engineering may be applied to text-to-image models to achieve a desired subject, style, layout, lighting, and aesthetic. + +=== Techniques === +Common terms used to describe various specific prompt engineering techniques include chain-of-thought, tree-of-thought, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). A 2024 survey of the field identified over 50 distinct text-based prompting techniques, 40 multimodal variants, and a vocabulary of 33 terms used across prompting research, highlighting a present lack of standardised terminology for prompt engineering. +Vibe coding is an AI-assisted software development method where a user prompts an LLM with a description of what they want and lets it generate or edit the code. In 2025, "vibe coding" was the Collins Dictionary word of the year. + +=== Context engineering === +Context engineering is a related process that focuses on the context elements that accompany user prompts, which include system instructions, retrieved knowledge, tool definitions, conversation summaries, and task metadata. Context engineering is performed to improve reliability, provenance and token efficiency in production LLM systems. The concept emphasises operational practices such as token budgeting, provenance tags, versioning of context artifacts, observability (logging which context was supplied), and context regression tests to ensure that changes to supplied context do not silently alter system behaviour. + +== Rationale == +Research has found that the performance of large language models (LLMs) is highly sensitive to choices such as the ordering of examples, the quality of demonstration labels, and even small variations in phrasing. In some cases, reordering examples in a prompt produced accuracy shifts of more than 40 percent. + +=== In-context learning === +A model's ability to temporarily learn from prompts is known as in-context learning. In-context learning is an emergent ability of large language models. It is an emergent property of model scale, meaning that breaks in scaling laws occur, leading to its efficacy increasing at a different rate in larger models than in smaller models. Unlike training and fine-tuning, which produce lasting changes, in-context learning is temporary. Training models to perform in-context learning can be viewed as a form of meta-learning, or "learning to learn". + +=== Prompting to estimate model sensitivity === +Research consistently demonstrates that LLMs are highly sensitive to subtle variations in prompt formatting, structure, and linguistic properties. Some studies have shown up to 76 accuracy points across formatting changes in few-shot settings. Linguistic features significantly influence prompt effectiveness—such as morphology, syntax, and lexico-semantic changes—which meaningfully enhance task performance across a variety of tasks. Clausal syntax, for example, improves consistency and reduces uncertainty in knowledge retrieval. This sensitivity persists even with larger model sizes, additional few-shot examples, or instruction tuning. +To address sensitivity of models and make them more robust, several evaluative methods have been proposed. FormatSpread facilitates systematic analysis by evaluating a range of plausible prompt formats, offering a more comprehensive performance interval. Similarly, PromptEval estimates performance distributions across diverse prompts, enabling robust metrics such as performance quantiles and accurate evaluations under constrained budgets. + +== Prompting techniques == + +=== Multi-shot === +A prompt may include a few examples for a model to learn from in context, an approach called few-shot learning. For example, the prompt may ask the model to complete "maison → house, chat → cat, chien →", with the expected response being dog. + +=== Chain-of-thought === \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e2b03e1da --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ +--- +title: "Prompt engineering" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:44.973796+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique that allows large language models (LLMs) to solve a problem as a series of intermediate steps before giving a final answer. In 2022, Google Brain reported that chain-of-thought prompting improves reasoning ability by inducing the model to answer a multi-step problem with steps of reasoning that mimic a train of thought. Chain-of-thought techniques were developed to help LLMs handle multi-step reasoning tasks, such as arithmetic or commonsense reasoning questions. +When applied to PaLM, a 540 billion parameter language model, according to Google, CoT prompting significantly aided the model, allowing it to perform comparably with task-specific fine-tuned models on several tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results at the time on the GSM8K mathematical reasoning benchmark. It is possible to fine-tune models on CoT reasoning datasets to enhance this capability further and stimulate better interpretability. +As originally proposed by Google, each CoT prompt is accompanied by a set of input/output examples—called exemplars—to demonstrate the desired model output, making it a few-shot prompting technique. However, according to a later paper from researchers at Google and the University of Tokyo, simply appending the words "Let's think step-by-step" was also effective, which allowed for CoT to be employed as a zero-shot technique. + +==== Self-consistency ==== +Self-consistency performs several chain-of-thought rollouts, then selects the most commonly reached conclusion out of all the rollouts. + +=== Tree-of-thought === +Tree-of-thought prompting generalizes chain-of-thought by generating multiple lines of reasoning in parallel, with the ability to backtrack or explore other paths. It can use tree search algorithms like breadth-first, depth-first, or beam. + +=== Text-to-image prompting === + +In 2022, text-to-image models like DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney were released to the public. These models take text prompts as input and use them to generate images. Early text-to-image models typically do not understand negation, grammar and sentence structure in the same way as large language models, and may thus require a different set of prompting techniques. The prompt "a party with no cake" may produce an image including a cake. + +A text-to-image prompt commonly includes a description of the subject of the art, the desired medium (such as digital painting or photography), style (such as hyperrealistic or pop-art), lighting (such as rim lighting or crepuscular rays), color, and texture. Word order also affects the output of a text-to-image prompt. Words closer to the start of a prompt may be emphasized more heavily. + +==== Artist styles ==== +Some text-to-image models are capable of imitating the style of particular artists by name. For example, the phrase in the style of Greg Rutkowski has been used in Stable Diffusion and Midjourney prompts to generate images in the distinctive style of Polish digital artist Greg Rutkowski. Famous artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Salvador Dalí have also been used for styling and testing. + +==== Textual inversion and embeddings ==== +For text-to-image models, textual inversion performs an optimization process to create a new word embedding based on a set of example images. This embedding vector acts as a "pseudo-word" which can be included in a prompt to express the content or style of the examples. + +=== Image prompting === +In 2023, Meta's AI research released Segment Anything, a computer vision model that can perform image segmentation by prompting. As an alternative to text prompts, Segment Anything can accept bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and foreground/background points. + +=== Limitations === +The process of writing and refining a prompt for an LLM or generative AI shares some parallels with an iterative engineering design process, such as by discovering reusable best practices through reproducible experimentation. But the techniques that improve performance depend heavily on the specific model being used. Such patterns are also volatile and exhibit significantly different results from seemingly insignificant prompt changes. + +== Automated prompt generation == +Recent research has explored automated prompt engineering, using optimization algorithms to generate or refine prompts without human intervention. These automated approaches aim to identify effective prompt patterns by analyzing model gradients, reinforcement feedback, or evolutionary processes, reducing the need for manual experimentation. + +=== Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) === +Retrieval-augmented generation is a technique that enables GenAI models to retrieve and incorporate new information. It modifies interactions with an LLM so that the model responds to user queries with reference to a specified set of documents, using this information to supplement information from its pre-existing training data. This allows LLMs to use domain-specific and/or updated information. +RAG improves large language models by incorporating information retrieval before generating responses. Unlike traditional LLMs that rely on static training data, RAG pulls relevant text from databases, uploaded documents, or web sources. By dynamically retrieving information, RAG enables AI to generate more accurate responses and fewer AI hallucinations without frequent retraining. + +=== Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) === + +GraphRAG (coined by Microsoft Research) is a technique that extends RAG with the use of a knowledge graph to allow the model to connect disparate pieces of information, synthesize insights, and understand summarized semantic concepts over large data collections. It was shown to be effective on datasets like the Violent Incident Information from News Articles. + +=== Using language models to generate prompts === +LLMs themselves can be used to compose prompts for LLMs. The automatic prompt engineer algorithm uses one LLM to beam search over prompts for another LLM: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e905ee3a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,110 @@ +--- +title: "Prompt engineering" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_engineering" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:42:44.973796+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +There are two LLMs. One is the target LLM, and another is the prompting LLM. +Prompting LLM is presented with example input-output pairs, and asked to generate instructions that could have caused a model following the instructions to generate the outputs, given the inputs. +Each of the generated instructions is used to prompt the target LLM, followed by each of the inputs. The log-probabilities of the outputs are computed and added. This is the score of the instruction. +The highest-scored instructions are given to the prompting LLM for further variations. +Repeat until some stopping criteria is reached, then output the highest-scored instructions. +CoT examples can be generated by LLM themselves. In "auto-CoT", a library of questions are converted to vectors by a model such as BERT. The question vectors are clustered. Questions close to the centroid of each cluster are selected, in order to have a subset of diverse questions. An LLM does zero-shot CoT on each selected question. The question and the corresponding CoT answer are added to a dataset of demonstrations. These diverse demonstrations can then added to prompts for few-shot learning. + +=== Automatic prompt optimization === +Automatic prompt optimization techniques refine prompts for large language models by automatically searching over alternative prompt strings using evaluation datasets and task-specific metrics: + +MIPRO (Multi-prompt Instruction Proposal Optimizer) optimizes the instructions and few-shot demonstrations of multi-stage language model programs, proposing small changes to module prompts and retaining those that improve a downstream performance metric without access to module-level labels or gradients. +GEPA (Genetic-Pareto) is a reflective prompt optimizer for compound AI systems that combines language-model-based analysis of execution traces and textual feedback with a Pareto-based evolutionary search over a population of candidate systems; across four tasks, GEPA reports average gains of about 10% over reinforcement-learning-based Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and over 10% over the MIPROv2 prompt optimizer, while using up to 35 times fewer rollouts than GRPO. +Open-source frameworks such as DSPy and Opik expose these and related optimizers, allowing prompt search to be expressed as part of a programmatic pipeline rather than through manual trial and error. + +=== Using gradient descent to search for prompts === +In "prefix-tuning", "prompt tuning", or "soft prompting", floating-point vectors are searched directly by gradient descent to maximize the log-likelihood on outputs. An earlier result uses the same idea of gradient descent search, but is designed for masked language models like BERT, and searches only over token sequences, rather than numerical vectors. Formally, it searches for + + + + arg + ⁡ + + max + + + + X + ~ + + + + + + ∑ + + i + + + log + ⁡ + P + r + [ + + Y + + i + + + + | + + + + + X + ~ + + + + ∗ + + X + + i + + + ] + + + {\displaystyle \arg \max _{\tilde {X}}\sum _{i}\log Pr[Y^{i}|{\tilde {X}}\ast X^{i}]} + + where + + + + + + + X + ~ + + + + + + {\displaystyle {\tilde {X}}} + + ranges over token sequences of a specified length. + +== History == +Early precedents of structured user interaction with ruled-based AI systems can be found in enterprise automation software from 1990s. For example, The Intelligent Filling Manager (1999), developed by Krishna C. Mukherjee, used a dynamic Q&A interface driven by rule-based expert system to collect user inputs for generating regulatory filings automatically across jurisdictions. While not involving neural networks, such systems featured prompt-like workflows that influenced later human-in-the-loop AI designs. In 2018, researchers first proposed that all previously separate tasks in natural language processing (NLP) could be cast as question-answer problems over a context. In addition, they trained a first single, joint, multi-task model that would answer any task-related question like "What is the sentiment" or "Translate this sentence to German" or "Who is the president?" +The AI boom saw an increased focus within academic literature and professional practice on applying prompting techniques to get the model to output the desired outcome and avoid nonsensical output, a process characterized by trial-and-error. After the release of ChatGPT in 2022, prompt engineering was soon seen as an important business skill; companies began hiring dedicated prompt engineers, although, given advances in AI's ability to generate prompts better than humans, the employment market for prompt engineers has faced uncertainty. According to The Wall Street Journal in 2025, the job of prompt engineer was one of the hottest in 2023, but has become obsolete due to models that better intuit user intent and to company trainings. +A repository for prompts reported that over 2,000 public prompts for around 170 datasets were available in February 2022. In 2022, the chain-of-thought prompting technique was proposed by Google researchers. In 2023, several text-to-text and text-to-image prompt databases were made publicly available. The Personalized Image-Prompt (PIP) dataset, a generated image-text dataset that has been categorized by 3,115 users, has also been made available publicly in 2024. + +== Prompt injection == + +Prompt injection is a cybersecurity exploit in which adversaries craft inputs that appear legitimate but are designed to cause unintended behavior in machine learning models, particularly large language models. This attack takes advantage of the model's inability to distinguish between developer-defined prompts and user inputs, allowing adversaries to bypass safeguards and influence model behaviour. While LLMs are designed to follow trusted instructions, they can be manipulated into carrying out unintended responses through carefully crafted inputs. + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..f8634ecfb --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +--- +title: "Rice index" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:50.386474+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Rice index is a number between 0 and 1, which indicates the degree of agreement, within a voting body. + + +== History == +It is named for Stuart A. Rice (1889-1969), Chairman of the United States Central Statistical Board, president of the American Statistical Association in 1933 and Assistant Director of the Office of Statistical Standards in the Bureau of the Budget from 1940 to 1955. + + +== Usage == +A result of 0 indicates a stalemate, while a 1 indicates a perfect consensus. The formula is often used in the social sciences, and is the ratio of the difference between majority and minority to the sum of majority and minority. + + + + + R + I + = + + + + + | + + + yes + + − + + no + + + | + + + + + yes + + + + + no + + + + + + + {\displaystyle RI={\frac {|{\text{yes}}-{\text{no}}|}{{\text{yes}}+{\text{no}}}}} + + +Yes = Number of yes votes, No = Number of votes against. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_rest_and_leisure-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_rest_and_leisure-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ad0eb19d5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_rest_and_leisure-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,56 @@ +--- +title: "Right to rest and leisure" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_rest_and_leisure" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:14.617163+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The right to rest and leisure is the economic, social and cultural right to adequate time away from work and other societal responsibilities. It is linked to the right to work and historical movements for legal limitations on working hours. Today, the right to leisure and rest, including sleep and breaks, is recognised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and in many regional texts such as the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. + + +== History == +The movement for a recognised right to rest, play and have leisure time. can be traced back to the 19th century and the eight-hour day movement. As early as 1856, stonemasons working at the University of Melbourne in Australia put down their tools until demands for reduced working hours were accepted. The ensuing guarantee of a maximum eight-hour workday is one of the earliest examples of legal protection against too much work, which today we recognise as the right to rest and leisure. The motto of the Australian Stonemasons in 1856 was as follows: + +Eight hours to work, Eight hours to play, Eight hours to sleep, Eight bob a day. A fair day’s work, For a fair day’s pay. +Whilst Australia was one of the earliest countries to enjoy universal working hour limitations (an implied right to leisure), throughout the 20th century many other countries began to pass similar laws limiting the number of hours one can work. + + +== Definition == +The modern notion of a right to rest and leisure is recognised in article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states: + +Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. +The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognises in part III, Article 7: + +Rest, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay, as well as remuneration for public holidays. +The Right to Leisure has also been recognised in article 31 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and article 12 of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, both recognising the: + +Right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts. +The Right to Leisure is considered an economic, social and cultural right, as opposed to a civil and political right. The right to rest and leisure is connected to the right to work, which is provided for by Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and article 6.3 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Where the right to work provides a right to work, the right to rest and leisure protects individuals from too much work. +The Committee on Economic, Cultural, and Social Rights has made no general comment on article 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Therefore, there is no universal agreement on the specific obligations of states in relation to the right to rest and leisure, and "no common conception of these terms that may be formally assumed". Nonetheless, states do still have responsibilities in relation to the right to rest and leisure + + +== State obligations on the right to rest and leisure == +Despite the ambiguous language of article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, States do have obligations and responsibilities in relation to the right to leisure. The body of texts published by the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights has established that in relation to all rights, including the right to rest and leisure, States have an obligation to respect, protect and fulfil. + + +=== Respect, protect and fulfil === +The respect, protect and fulfil principle constitutes the core state obligation in relation to economic, cultural and social rights, including the right to leisure: + +Governments and other duty bearers are under an obligation to respect, protect and fulfil human rights. +Based on the definition of respect, protect and fulfil principle outlined in the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights' general comment No. 14, the obligation to respect requires States to refrain from interfering directly or indirectly with the enjoyment of the right to leisure. The obligation to protect requires States to take measures that prevent third parties from interfering with the right to leisure. Finally, the obligation to fulfil requires States to adopt appropriate legislative, administrative, budgetary, judicial, promotional and other measures towards the realisation and enjoyment of the right to leisure. +Therefore, states must not only respect and protect individuals from too much work, but must also fulfil the right, and ensure that individuals have the capacity to positively enjoy their right to leisure, and not simply be in the absence of too much work. + + +== Criticism == +The right to rest and leisure, like many economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR), has often been considered less important or fundamental than civil and political rights. Critiques of economic, social, and cultural rights such as Maurice Cranston and Aryeh Neier, or William Talbott's Which Rights Should be Universal, often argue that ESCR are unnecessary for human dignity, are less fundamental than civil and political rights, are too expensive and impractical, and that some constituencies of humans are undeserving of ESCR. +However, human rights scholars are increasingly embracing the concept of indivisibility and acknowledging that all human rights are fundamental. Defenders of the right to rest and leisure claim that it is of fundamental importance to well-being once basic security has been assured, and that leisure is "not an idle waste of time or mere absence from work, but, rather, necessary for a life of dignity". +The right to rest and leisure is an emerging human right, and debates around its importance and implementability are likely to be ongoing. + + +== See also == + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SocialRank-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SocialRank-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..16c6a045f --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SocialRank-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,17 @@ +--- +title: "SocialRank" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SocialRank" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:54.036371+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +SocialRank (also called Social PageRank) is an algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each node in a Social networking service, with the purpose of measuring the node's - or the person's - relative importance or influence within the network. +One approach to define a SocialRank is to calculate a superposition of attention that a node directly receives and SocialRank of its neighborhood. This definition partly follows the idea of Google's PageRank and means that the SocialRank of a person depends on autonomous value and on the SocialRank of other people that link to it. +SocialRank is useful for characterizing communication networks such as Email or Instant Messaging, but it is particularly well-suited to describe users of Web 2.0 services such as Contact Management sites. + + +== External links == +Business Intelligence und Web 2.0 - Modellierung von Social Networks \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Institutions_and_Gender_Index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Institutions_and_Gender_Index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..ddc999063 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Institutions_and_Gender_Index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Social Institutions and Gender Index" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Institutions_and_Gender_Index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:51.578975+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) is an index that measures discrimination against women. It solely focuses on social institutions which are formal and informal laws, social norms and customary practices that impact the roles of women. The SIGI is a multifaceted measure that focuses on four dimensions: Discrimination in the family, Restricted physical integrity, Restricted access to productive and financial resources, and Restricted civil liberties. + + +== Construction == +SIGI is based on a selection of indicators from the Gender, Institutions and Development (GID) Database. It specifically draws on the GID's social institutions variables that are grouped into five categories or sub-indices: Family Code, Physical Integrity, Civil Liberties, Son Preference (measured as the incidence of missing women), and Ownership Rights. Family code delineates the social institutions that have an effect on a woman's power to make household decisions regarding their family. Variables of this sub-index include financial inheritance, parental authority and marriage rights. The civil liberties aspect focuses on women's freedom with respects to social participation. Its variables include freedoms such as dress, and ability to move outside of the home for women. Physical integrity includes variables that measure incidence of violence against women. Female genital mutilation, laws banning sexual assault or rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence, and women who are reported missing are all variables included in this measure. Ownership rights focuses on the access women have to property. Whether or not women are allowed to own land and or houses and their access to bank loans and credit are foci under this sub-index. Son preference, also sometimes referred to as missing women, consists of variables looking at gender bias in mortality including human trafficking and missing person reports. The index is an unweighted average of these 5 sub-indices and measures on a scale from 0 to 1 the level of gender inequality in social institutions (higher levels indicate greater inequality). Each term in the SIGI formula is squared to allow for partial comparison. The indicators that compose the SIGI would yield uniformly high or even perfect scores for OECD member countries, given that legal discrimination against women is not present in most of these countries. However, significant gender inequality may nevertheless exist in OECD member countries; therefore, SIGI scores are only calculated for non-OECD countries to avoid misleading comparisons. + + +== Applications == +Econometric analysis using the SIGI have shown the significant impact of social institutions on gender equality outcomes. For example, higher levels of gender inequality in social institutions are strongly correlated to lower participation of women in paid labor. However, higher levels of inequality are not necessarily associated with lower levels of per capita income. Some high-income countries in the Middle East and North Africa region, for example, have high levels of gender inequality. Education, on the other hand, seems to be a strong promoter of women's rights. The higher the percentage of women who can read and write, the lower the discrimination they suffer in social institutions. + + +== See also == +Gender equality +Gender inequality +Gender Parity Index +Gender Empowerment Measure +Gender Gap Index +Gender-related Development Index + + +== References == + + +== Sources == +Boris Branisa, Stephan Klasen, Maria Ziegler, Denis Drechsler, and Johannes Jütting (2013): The institutional basis of gender inequality: the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI). Feminist Economics, Published online: 11 Dec 2013. +Boris Branisa, Stephan Klasen, and Maria Ziegler (2013): Gender Inequality in Social Institutions and Gendered Development Outcomes, World Development, Volume 45, May 2013, Pages 252–268 +Johannes Jütting, Christian Morrisson, Jeff Dayton Johnson, and Denis Drechsler (2008): Measuring Gender (In)Equality: The OECD Gender, Institutions and Development Data Base, Journal of Human Development, Volume 9, Issue 1 March 2008, pages 65 – 86. + + +== External links == +Social Institutions and Gender Index, official website \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..41c07102a --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +--- +title: "Social Progress Index" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Progress_Index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:52.871802+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Social Progress Index, created by The Social Progress Imperative, is a comprehensive data insights tool that measures the real-life outcomes experienced by people across a wide range of social and environmental indicators. The Social Progress Index is distinct from other approaches to Beyond GDP measurement in that it explicitly excludes indicators of economic performance. +The 2025 Global Social Progress Index provides data insights for 170+ countries from 2011 to 2024 and is updated annually. The Social Progress Index methodology is also used at local, subnational, and sector-specific levels. These tailored indices apply the same core framework to assess progress in regions, cities, or even specific issues, offering actionable insights for policymakers, community leaders, and organizations seeking to drive equitable and inclusive development. + + +== History == +The Social Progress Index was created in 2013 by the Skoll Foundation to celebrate its 10th year anniversary. This new index was created because its founders found the Human Development Index and the Happiness Index to be insufficient. Paraguay was the first country to adopt the SPI's framework. + + +== Approach == +The Social Progress Index combines three dimensions: 1. Basic needs; 2. Foundation of Well-being; 3. Opportunity. +Social Progress is defined as a society's capacity to meet basic human needs, create building blocks for citizens to improve their quality of life, and allow individuals to reach their full potential. Each dimension includes four components, which are each composed of specific outcome indicators. +The four key features of the Social Progress Index are: 1. Exclusively social and environmental indicators; 2. Outcomes not inputs; 3. Holistic and relevant to all countries; 4. Actionable. + + +== Findings and datasets == +Insights from the 2025 Global Social Progress Index show that economic performance alone does not determine social outcomes. Countries with similar levels of GDP per capita often show significant differences in social progress. For example, while Denmark and the United States have comparable GDP per capita, Denmark scores 10 points higher in social progress. +Several advanced economies, including Australia, Canada, and the U.S., rank among the least improved since 2011. The US slipped from the 19th position in 2011 to the 28th position in 2020. +Since 2020, global progress has largely stalled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a decline in rights and freedoms. Today, two-thirds of the world’s population lives in countries where social progress has stagnated or declined. +Much of the data is freely available and can be used to support research, inform decision-making, and develop tailored strategies for your work. Premium access offers additional visualizations and data insights, expanded and downloadable datasets, country profiles and information by region. + + +== Examination == +The Global Social Progress Index does not currently include measures of subjective life satisfaction or psychological well-being. This is a design decision in the construction of the index as a measure of social outcomes rather than subjective wellbeing. The inter-relationship between GDP, social progress and life satisfaction is explored further in academic papers. Other critics point out that "there remain certain dimensions that are currently not included in the SPI. These are the concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent of the population, efficiency of the judicial system, and quality of the transportation infrastructure." The exclusion of some of these indicators, such as wealth inequality, reflects the design decision to exclude economic indicators, and others, such as judicial efficiency or mental health, are because of the absence of reliable, comparable data. + + +== See also == +Broad measures of economic progress +ESG +Happiness economics +Postmaterialism +Psychometrics + + +== References and media == +^ "Data - Social Progress Index - Methodology". socialprogress.org/. Social Progress Imperative +^ "Global Index: Results". Social Progress Imperative. +^ Ruggeri, Amanda (January 12, 2018). "How can you measure what makes a country great?". BBC. +“Social Progress Index: States and Districts of India | Social Progress Imperative.” Socialprogress.org, 2023, https://www.socialprogress.org/thematic-webpages/social-progress-index-states-and-districts-of-india. +TED: “How We Can Make the World a Better Place by 2030 | Michael Green +TED: “The Global Goals We’ve Made Progress on -- and the Ones We Haven’t | Michael Green +TED: What the Social Progress Index Can Reveal about Your Country. | Michael Green + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Official website \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..c89852d48 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +title: "Sociology of leisure" +chunk: 1/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:16.996537+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The sociology of leisure or leisure sociology is the study of how humans organize their free time. Leisure includes a broad array of activities, such as sport, tourism, and the playing of games. The sociology of leisure is closely tied to the sociology of work, as each explores a different side of the work-leisure relationship. More recent studies in the field move away from this relationship, however, and focus on the relation between leisure and culture. +Studies of leisure have determined that observable patterns in human leisure behavior cannot be explained solely by socioeconomic variables such as age, income, occupation or education. The type of leisure activity is substantially influenced by the numerous more complex factors, such as presence or lack of family, religious beliefs and general cultural values one adheres to. + +== Definitions and theoretical concerns == +Its definitions are numerous and often mutually contradictory, for example as a discrete portion of one's time or as a quality of experience irrespective of time. Joffre Dumazedier distinguished four distinct definitions of leisure, which begin broadly and gradually narrow in scope: + +Style of behavior that may occur even at work; +Any non-work activity; +Activities excluding family and household obligations; +Activities dedicated to self-fulfillment. +Dumazedier's four definitions are not exhaustive. Incompatible definitions and measures are seen as a major factor accounting for occasionally contradictory research findings. +There are some unresolved questions concerning the definition of work: in particular, whether unpaid endeavors, such as volunteering or studying, are work. Non-work time should not be equated with free time, as it comprises not only free time, dedicated to leisure, but also time dedicated to certain obligatory activities, such as housework. Dividing activities into free and dedicated time is not easy. For example, brushing one's teeth is neither work nor leisure; scholars differ in their classifications of activities such as eating a meal, shopping, repairing a car, attending a religious ceremony, or showering (various individuals may or may not classify such activities as leisure). The relation between work and leisure can also be unclear: research indicates that some individuals find skills that they have acquired at work useful to their hobbies (and vice versa), and some individuals have used leisure activities to advance their work careers. Sociologists also disagree as to whether political or spiritual activities should be included in studies of leisure. Further, among some occupational communities, such as police officers or miners, it is common for colleagues to be off-time friends and to share similar, work-based leisure activities. +Apart from a definition of leisure, there are other questions of theoretical concern to the sociologist of leisure. For example, quantifying the results is difficult, as time-budget studies have noted that a given amount of time (for example, an hour) may have different values, depending on when it occurs—within a day, a week, or a year. Finally, as with many other fields of inquiry in the social sciences, the study of the sociology of leisure is hampered by the lack of reliable data for comparative longitudinal studies, as there was little to no standardized data-gathering on leisure throughout most of human history. The lack of longitudinal studies has been remedied in the last few decades by recurring national surveys such as the General Household Survey in the United Kingdom (ongoing since 1971). In addition to surveys, an increasing number of studies have been focusing on qualitative methods of research (interviews). +Simply having free time cannot be considered leisure, as unemployed people usually have a lot of free time, yet their lack of professional activity may throw them in a state of anomie, ennui. In general, a lot of people spend most of their free time consuming social media content and videos online in an addictive manner, despite the negative repercussions on mental health, indicating that constructive leisure must be learned. + +== History == + +Sociology of leisure is a fairly recent subfield of sociology, compared to more traditional subfields such as sociology of work, sociology of the family, or sociology of education: it saw most of its development in the second half of the 20th century.[a] Until then, leisure had often been seen as a relatively unimportant, minor feature of society. Now, however, it is now recognized as a major social institution, deserving of serious sociological inquiry, particularly in Western societies. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3b764793c --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,23 @@ +--- +title: "Sociology of leisure" +chunk: 2/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:16.996537+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +One of the earliest theories of leisure originates from Karl Marx, whose theory was discussed through a 'realm of freedom'. Karl Marx's criticisms of capitalism, saw the structures of capital as in conflict with people truly reaching leisure. The basis of leisure is rooted in economics and politics, as those are intertwined also. In contrast to a more socialist approach, many would see leisure time as an excuse for unproductivity and as something you don't deserve. Not that it shouldn't be attained but shouldn't get in the way of economics. Therein lies our current structures that Marx's theories have not only remained relevant, but his criticisms of his time can remain true to this day. Marx's criticism of capitalism was rooted in the exploitation of the worker. As a conflict against the worker, class warfare in effect. In the Marx and Engels Reader, an overview of the writings and theories of Marxism, the 'realm of freedom' and 'realm of necessity' were heavily elaborated on as it was a new concept at the time. The realm of freedom is a true definition of leisure as it embraces doing activities out of the want, pleasure to do so. Whereas living to survive and work, eat, sleep would be in the realm of necessity. +Over time, emphasis in studies of leisure has shifted from the work-leisure relation, particularly in well-researched majorities, to study of minorities and the relation between leisure and culture. Marshall Gordon noted that there are two approaches in the study of leisure: formal and historical-theoretical. The formal approach focuses on empirical questions, such as the shifting of leisure patterns over an individual's life cycle, the relation between leisure and work, and specific forms of leisure (such as the sociology of sport). The historical-theoretical approach studies the relation between leisure and social change, often from structural-functionalist and neo-Marxist perspectives. Sheila Scraton provided a different analysis, comparing North American and British studies. The British approaches focus on input from pluralism, critical Marxism, and feminism; the American approaches concentrate on the social-psychological tradition. Rhona and Robert Rapoport studied the worklife balance and inequality in many countries, wrote many books in this area and help influence policy and legislation to change practices. +After World War II, leisure became a more concerning matter as automation began to replace jobs, leaving only leisure to fill the void. The goal was to identify new "productive and self-fulfilling free-time pursuits" to maintain the "feverish pursuit of happiness" of the 20th century. Sociologist Robert A. Stebbins coined the term "serious leisure" where a professional path and meaning is first found by following personal interests and then building a business out of it. The study Leisure in America: A Social Inquiry (Kaplan & Wiley, 1964) explored this post-war "recreation explosion". + +== Findings == +Many sociologists have assumed that a given type of leisure activity is most easily explained by socioeconomic variables such as income, occupation or education. This has yielded fewer results than expected; income is associated with total money spent on such activities, but otherwise only determines what type of activities are affordable. Occupation has a similar effect, because most occupations heavily influence a person's income (for example, membership in a prestigious occupation and "country-club" activities such as golf or sailing are significantly correlated—but so is membership in those occupations and high income, and those activities with high cost). Education is correlated with having a wide range of leisure activities, and with higher dedication to them. As Kelly noted, "Predicting a person's leisure behavior on the basis of his socioeconomic position is all but impossible." +On the other hand, type of leisure activity is substantially influenced by the individual's immediate situation—whether they have a family, whether there are recreational facilities nearby, and age. Early family influences, particularly involving the more social leisure activities, can be profound. The type of leisure activity also depends on the individual's current place in the life cycle. +Within the framework of the family, leisure time has been researched to measure the effect of families during weekend work. What was found was families in which parents had to work on the weekend had a negative effect on the family, more particularly the children. It was written that many of the parents who had to work on the weekend were less educated and had lower income. This could have implications for the family and society. +Specific findings in sociological studies of leisure are illustrated by John Robinson's late-1970s study of American leisure. Robinson found that Americans, on average, have four hours of leisure time each weekday, and more on weekends—six hours on Saturdays, almost eight on Sundays. Amount of leisure time diminishes with age, work, marriage, and children. However, the amount of free time does not significantly depend on an individual's wealth. People desire less free time if they are uncertain of their economic future, or if their job is their central interest. During the second half of the twentieth century, watching television became a major leisure activity, causing a substantial decrease in the time dedicated to other activities; in the early 1970s the average American had 4 hours of leisure per day, and spent 1.5 of them watching television. Shared leisure activities increase marital satisfaction. +There are different forms of leisure time and their benefits are not always clear, but generally, there is consensus that in moderation, they tend to have various positive effects. For example, going to the movies, alone or with friends can improve health and well-being. + +== Pay, work and leisure == +Individuals make trade-offs between pay, work and leisure. However, the timing and scale of those trade-offs varies with the occupations and incomes of individuals. They also vary over time and from society to society. In societies, substantial across the board rises in pay can increase the working hours of male blue-collar workers with young children but reduce those of middle class women with husbands in well-paid full-time jobs. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..74382e8fd --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,54 @@ +--- +title: "Sociology of leisure" +chunk: 3/3 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology_of_leisure" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:16.996537+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== See also == +Sociological investigations of leisure on the Internet +Rhona Rapoport +Ikigai + +== Notes == +a ^ There were few sociological studies of leisure before the second half of the 20th century. One of the earliest and most celebrated was Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Veblen, Thorstein (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. Macmillan. OCLC 17647347. +Abbott, Lewis F. Theories of the Labour Market and Employment: A Review, ISR/Google Books, 2013,2020. Chapter 6, "Educational, Family and Leisure Influences". +Bennet M. Bergero, "The Sociology of Leisure: Some Suggestions," Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, vol. 1, issue 2, May 2008, pp. 31–45. +Tony Blackshaw, Leisure Life: Myth, Masculinity and Modernity, Routledge, 2003, ISBN 0-415-27072-3. +József Böröcz, "Leisure Migration. A Sociological Study on Tourism." Elsevier Science, 1996. 0-080-42560-7 +Neil H. Cheek, Jr., "Toward a Sociology of Not-Work," The Pacific Sociological Review, vol. 14, no. 3, July 1971, pp. 245–258. JSTOR +C. Critcher, Peter Bramham, Alan Tomlinson, Sociology of Leisure: A Reader, Taylor & Francis, 1995, ISBN 0-419-19420-7. +Joffre Dumazedier, Sociology of Leisure, Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, 1974, ISBN 0-444-41226-3. +Joffre Dumazedier, Towards a Sociology of Leisure, Macmillan, 1967. +John R. Kelly, "Counterpoints in the Sociology of Leisure," Leisure Sciences, vol. 14, issue 3, 1992, pp. 247–53. +John Robert Kelly, Geoffrey Godbey, The Sociology of Leisure, Venture Pub., 1992, ISBN 0-910251-56-8. +Review of the above book: Margaret Carlisle Duncan, "The Sociology of Leisure," Journal of Leisure Research, vol. 25, no. 4, Fall 1993. Online +Stanley R. Parker, Leisure and Work, Allen & Unwin, 1985. +Orlov Alexandr S. The Sociology of Recreation, Nauka, Moscow, 1995, ISBN 5-02-013607-7. +Gilles Pronovost, The Sociology of Leisure. Trend Report, Sage Publications, 1998. +Rhona Rapoport and Robert N. Rapoport, "Four Themes in the Sociology of Leisure," The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 25, no. 2, June 1974, pp. 215–29. JSTOR +Kenneth Roberts, Leisure in Contemporary Society, CABI, 2006, ISBN 1-84593-069-X. +Chris Rojek, "Leisure and Tourism," in Craig J. Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan S. Turner, eds., The Sage Handbook of Sociology, SAGE, 2005, ISBN 0-7619-6821-0. +Chris Rojek, Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory, SAGE, 1995, ISBN 0-8039-8813-3. +Snape, R. and Pussard, H. 'Theorisations of Leisure in Interwar Britain' Leisure Studies, 2013, 32 (1) pp. 1–18. +Stebbins, Robert A. "Serious Leisure: A Perspective for Our Time." New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007 (paperback edition with new Preface, 2015). +Stebbins, Robert A. "The Idea of Leisure: First Principles." New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2012. +The Marx-Engels Reader. New York : Norton, 1978. Print. +Craig, L., & Brown, J. E. (2014). Weekend work and leisure time with family and friends: Who misses out? Journal of Marriage and Family, 76(4), 710–727. doi:Weekend Work and Leisure Time With Family and Friends: Who Misses Out? +Corbalán, J, et al. “Health and Cinema. Healthy Leisure Profile.” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 60, 2014, p. S58. + +== External links == +ISA: Research Committee on Sociology of Leisure +International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure +BSA: Leisure & Recreation Study Group +Peer-Reviewed Journals in Recreation & Leisure Studies Archived 5 June 2019 at the Wayback Machine +Journal of Leisure Research +Leisure Studies \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Librarian's_Day-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Librarian's_Day-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..39acf9132 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Librarian's_Day-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +--- +title: "South African Librarian's Day" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_Librarian's_Day" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:26.179241+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +South African Librarians’ Day is an annual observance held on 10 July to mark the founding of the Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA) and to celebrate the vital role that librarians and information professionals play in nation building, literacy and equitable access to information in South Africa. + + +== History == +LIASA was formally launched on 10 July 1997 as the professional body uniting all sectors of the library and information services (LIS) profession in South Africa. In 2014, on its 17th anniversary, LIASA declared 10 July as South African Librarians’ Day (SALD), setting aside that date each year to honour the profession and its contributions. +Following LIASA's accreditation by the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) in February 2015, the inaugural government‑endorsed South African Librarians’ Day was marked on 10 July 2015, with a media advisory emphasising librarians’ commitment to the fundamental right of access to information enshrined in the Constitution. + + +== Purpose and Objectives == +South African Librarians’ Day seeks to: + +Raise public awareness of librarianship as a dynamic profession essential to developing an informed nation through equitable access to information. +Celebrate the value added by librarians as information specialists, knowledge managers, research facilitators and community educators. +Promote libraries as inclusive community spaces that advance literacy, learning and social cohesion. + + +== Observance and Themes == +Each year, LIASA selects a theme that reflects current priorities in the sector. Notable recent themes and commemorations include: + +2022 (25th anniversary): Held on 11 July (10 July fell on a Sunday), the virtual event featured over 220 attendees and presentations on the future of librarianship, including a keynote by Dr Peter Lor outlining LIASA's milestones . +2023: Institutional celebrations across university libraries emphasised staff recognition, with the University of Pretoria serving cupcakes to all library staff and partners to acknowledge their service. +2024 (30 years of democracy in LIS): The National Library of South Africa (NLSA) and LIASA co‑hosted a panel discussion at the NLSA's Pretoria Campus, featuring reflections by Ellen Tise (LIASA's first president) on sector achievements since 1994. + + +== Institutional and Provincial Celebrations == +National Library of South Africa (NLSA): Issues a media advisory each year, inviting stakeholders to events recognising librarians’ contributions to literacy, education and access. +University of Pretoria (UP): The Department of Library Services honours staff annually with muffins (2022), cupcakes (2023) and social‑media features encouraging reflection on “Why did you become a librarian?”. +North‑West University (NWU): The NWU LIS, in collaboration with the LIASA North‑West Branch, hosts seminars (e.g., on AI and the future of librarianship), hybrid workshops and community‑oriented “Sip and Paint” sessions. +Northern Cape branch: Celebrated on 20 July 2022 at the Africana Research Library in Kimberley, with branch officers and interns sharing career motivations and local librarians’ history (e.g., Bertram Dyer as South Africa's first qualified librarian). +City of Cape Town Libraries: Commemorated 10 July 2024 with statistics noting 268 librarians accounting for 3 743 years of collective service, underlining the profession's demographics and community impact capetowngreenmap.co.za. + + +== Government Involvement == +Since 2015, the South African government has recognised SALD as a commemorative event, with media advisories and event listings on gov.za emphasising librarians’ roles in upholding citizens’ constitutional rights and supporting the National Development Plan's Sustainable Development Goals. + + +== Significance == +SALD not only honours individual and institutional achievements but also highlights ongoing challenges in the LIS sector, such as funding constraints, fragmented governance and legislative reform. It calls on all librarians to reflect on their societal impact and advocate for cohesive, well‑resourced library services. + + +== See also == +Library and Information Association of South Africa +South African Library Week +Access to Information Act (South Africa) + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Index_on_Youth_Homelessness-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Index_on_Youth_Homelessness-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..e18cb8632 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Index_on_Youth_Homelessness-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,52 @@ +--- +title: "State Index on Youth Homelessness" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Index_on_Youth_Homelessness" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:55.208148+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The State Index on Youth Homelessness is an evaluative tool created through a partnership between the National Homelessness Law Center and True Colors United. Its primary aim is to assess the efforts of U.S. states in addressing and preventing youth homelessness. The index serves as a comprehensive guide to state policies, systemic barriers, and environmental challenges that affect young people experiencing homelessness, especially those between the ages of 12 and 24. + + +== Background == +Youth homelessness is a significant issue in the United States, with estimates indicating that millions of young individuals face homelessness at some point. In response to this crisis, the National Homelessness Law Center and True Colors United collaborated to create the State Index on Youth Homelessness. The index, first introduced in 2018, provides an annual evaluation of the states' performance in addressing youth homelessness. It highlights key areas of concern and serves as a benchmark for assessing progress and identifying areas needing improvement. + + +== Methodology == +The State Index on Youth Homelessness employs a scoring system out of 100 points, based on a set of comprehensive metrics. These metrics cover various aspects of policy and practice, including: + +Legal protections for homeless youth, such as those related to civil rights and non-discrimination. +The accessibility and effectiveness of services and support systems aimed at homeless youth. +Measures to decriminalize homelessness and prevent punitive actions against homeless youth. +Provisions for unaccompanied homeless youth to seek legal independence and consent. +Specific considerations for the needs of LGBTQ youth and racial minorities, who are disproportionately represented in the homeless youth population. +Each state's performance is evaluated against these metrics, with higher scores indicating a more robust and effective response to youth homelessness. + + +== Findings == +Key findings from the State Index on Youth Homelessness have shed light on the varied landscape of state responses to youth homelessness: + +Many states lack inclusive protections and support systems for LGBTQ youth, contributing to their overrepresentation in the homeless population. +There is often a lack of coordination and consistency in state policies, leading to gaps in legal protection and service provision for homeless youth. +States with higher scores tend to have comprehensive plans to end homelessness, entities dedicated to youth homelessness, and laws that protect the rights and dignity of homeless youth. +The index has noted an improvement in state scores over time, indicating a growing awareness and response to the issue of youth homelessness. + + +== Impact == +Policymakers, advocates, and service providers utilize the index to inform their efforts, advocate for necessary changes, and allocate resources effectively. The index also serves an educational purpose, raising awareness about the challenges faced by homeless youth and the policy measures that can make a difference. + + +== Reception == +The State Index on Youth Homelessness has been widely recognized for its comprehensive approach and its role in highlighting the plight of homeless youth across the United States. It has received acclaim for bringing attention to the issue and for providing clear, actionable recommendations for state governments. However, it has also faced scrutiny and critique, particularly concerning its methodology and the complexities of translating policy scores into practical outcomes for homeless youth. + + +== References == + + +== External links == +Official website of the State Index on Youth Homelessness +Official website of the National Homelessness Law Center +Official website of True Colors United \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_World_Liberty_Index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_World_Liberty_Index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..04f4ec786 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_World_Liberty_Index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,27 @@ +--- +title: "State of World Liberty Index" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_World_Liberty_Index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:56.464185+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The State of World Liberty Index was a ranking of countries according to the degree of economic and personal freedoms that their citizens enjoy. It was a compilation of several similar indices created by other organizations. The index's original author Nick Wilson defined freedom as "the ability for the individual to live their lives as they choose, as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same." +Only one report (the 2006 State of World Liberty Index, released 12 August 2006) was produced by the State of World Liberty Project and the original website is now defunct. However, Patrick Rhamey, professor in the Department of International Studies at the Virginia Military Institute, has updated the rankings through 2025 using the same concept, with some adjustments to the original method. +The index has been cited by human rights organisations, governments, pro-democracy groups, news organisations, and others. + + +== Methodology == +The 2006 State of World Liberty Index was created by combining the rankings of four other indexes of world liberty into one: the "2005 Economic Freedom of the World" Index (Fraser Institute), the "2006 Index of Economic Freedom" (The Heritage Foundation), the "2005 Freedom in the World" index (Freedom House), and the "2005 Press Freedom Index" (Reporters Without Borders). +These reports are used to score countries in three categories: individual freedom, economic freedom, and government size plus taxation. These three scores are then averaged to give a country's overall score. +The 2012–2025 Rankings reproduce the original ranking concept using the same data sources, albeit adjusting the weighting of data to best capture the original intent of measuring "the ability of the individual to live their lives as they choose." Measures are also standardized appropriately given the different scales used across indices and the government burden category was condensed into the broader indicator of economic freedom. +Beginning in 2018, the ranking also includes a measure of how Conservative or Progressive a state is, defined as whether a state regulates either social or economic issues more heavily. + + +== 2025 rankings == +In the 2025 index, Switzerland is ranked most free overall, while North Korea is last. Saudi Arabia is ranked most conservative, while Argentina is ranked most progressive. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_employability-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_employability-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..86d7a10a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_employability-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,18 @@ +--- +title: "Sustainable employability" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_employability" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:08.164543+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Sustainable employability generally refers to employees' capacities to function in work and on the labor market throughout their working lives. The topic emerged in response to population aging and the pressure that puts on retirement systems. This pressure requires the maximization of participation in paid work to be able to maintain valued retirement systems and other societally valued institutions (e.g., high quality healthcare). Consequently, research in this topic area focuses on identifying aspects of an employment situation (i.e., the work, work context, and individuals themselves, that prevent harm to individuals' ability to function at work and on the labor market. The purpose of this research is to ultimately develop interventions, in organizations that enable individuals to work in ways that are beneficial - or at least not harmful - to both themselves and the organizations they may be employed in. Much of the initial research has concentrated on older workers as this specific group was considered to need the most immediate attention. However, later work questions whether age really place such an important role in sustainable employability. +Most definitions of sustainable employability incorporate several domains of functioning at work. As workplace functioning is a multifaceted concept, aspects like employability, work ability, work engagement (sometimes referred to as 'vitality' in the context of sustainable employability) are included. However, several definitions have been forwarded in the scientific literature that differ in nuanced ways and that emphasize different aspects of functioning. Other approaches particularly propose defining sustainable employability as a form of an enduring fit between a person and their work. Such approaches show a strong connection to previous thinking on Person-Job fit and Person-Environment fit, with the extension that such a fit should be good and be sustained over time. +A commonly cited definition of sustainable employability is based on Amartya Sen's concept of capabilities. Within this capability approach to sustainable employability, individuals are considered to be sustainably employable when they have the capabilities to achieve things they value in their work and are enabled by their work to do so. Specifically, within this approach, seven capabilities that people are thought to generally value and hope to achieve via their work are a) using their knowledge and skills; b) developing their knowledge and skills; c) being involved in important decisions regarding their work; d) building meaningful relationships in work; e) setting their own goals in work; f) earning a good income via work; and g) contributing to creating something valuable in work. Importantly, this approach recognizes that work environments are crucial in facilitating people to work. However, the approach has received some criticism, as capabilities constitute both characteristics of individuals and their employment context, which complicates separating cause and effect. +Most recent approaches to sustainable employability integrate the above ideas and resolve their limitations. They do so by recognizing sustainable employability as an integrative concept that consists of several aspects of functioning, emphasizing the long term component of sustainability and the need for longitudinal research, and positioning sustainable employability as an outcome of interacting work, work contextual and individual characteristics. +As the field of sustainable employability research matures, research increasingly considers sustainable employability of specific groups of workers or segments of the labor market. Additionally, this initially Northern European topic is now increasingly studied in other parts of the world and particularly those that face similar labor market or social security systems issues. + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_for_Observing_Play_and_Recreation_in_Communities-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_for_Observing_Play_and_Recreation_in_Communities-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4a84086aa --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_for_Observing_Play_and_Recreation_in_Communities-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_for_Observing_Play_and_Recreation_in_Communities" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:18.269755+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +A System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities (SOPARC) is a reliable and valid observation tool for assessing park and recreation areas, including park users’ physical activity levels, gender, age, and ethnicity groupings. It also collects information on park characteristics including accessibility, usability, supervision, and organization. The use of SOPARC in park monitoring would allow for more consistent and comprehensive monitoring of parks. The summary data (e.g. the number of park users, demographics, frequency by activity types) obtained using SOPARC is easily understood by practitioners, policymakers, and the public. SOPARC has been adapted to numerous studies to understand the role of park conditions on park use, compare park data, and inform park system planning and programming. +Traditionally, the park use patterns have been studied by direct observation - either in person or video recording. Compared to survey or interview of park users, the strength of direct observation is that it allow for the collection of data on large numbers of people in a relatively short period without placing a burden on participants. The observational method entailing the observation and description of subjects' behavior is a systematic investigation in behavioral science. + + +== Background == +Dr. Thomas L. McKenzie, an Emeritus Professor of Exercise and Nutritional Sciences at San Diego State University, and his research team have developed several systematic observation tools for assessing physical activity in various contexts. In chronological order, they are (a) System for Observing Fitness Instruction Time (SOFIT), (b) Behaviors of Eating and Activity for Children's Health: Evaluation System (BEACHES), (c) System for Observing Play and Leisure in Youth (SOPLAY), (d) System for Observing Play and Active Recreation in Communities (SOPARC), (f) System for Observing Children's Activity and Relationships during Play (SOCARP), and (g) System for Observing Physical Activity and Recreation in Natural Areas (SOPARNA). These instruments deal with physical education lessons (SOFIT), homes (BEACHES), schools (SOPLAY), parks (SOPARC), playgrounds (SOCARP), and natural areas (SOPARNA). +The focus of these six systematic observation tools is physical activity. Dr. McKenzie and his team argue the primary advantages of systematic observation over other methods of assessing physical activity (e.g., self-reports, accelerometers, pedometers, heart rate monitoring, doubly labeled water) are that it is a direct method and it allows for the simultaneous generation of information on both the physical environment and social environment. Thus, the systematic observation is especially appealing when a researcher tries to understand the impacts of environmental interventions on physical activity. +The original SOFIT instrument measured five levels of physical activity – lying down, sitting, standing, walking, and very active. Based on subsequent validation work (e.g., Rowe et al., 2004), the first three categories have been merged into a single category (i.e., sedentary) because of their similarity in energy expenditure, and thus, the recent instruments including SOPARC use three categories – sedentary (i.e., lying down, sitting, or standing), moderate (e.g., walking, shifting weight from foot to foot), and vigorous (i.e., intensity greater than a walk). + + +== Methodology == +SOPARC, like the other six tools developed by Dr. McKenzie's team, uses ‘momentary time sampling techniques’ in which systematic and periodic scans of individuals and contextual factors within pre-determined target areas in the context are made. During an area scan (i.e., an observation sweeping from left to right), the activity of the individual is coded as sedentary, moderate, or vigorous. Summary counts describe the number of users by gender, age, and race/ethnicity. The protocol, data coding form, mapping strategies, and other information for conducting SOPARC is available online. A free 27-minute SOPLAY/SOPARC Introduction, Practice, and Assessment Training DVD is available from Active Living Research. The electronic download is available to download as a form of iTunes podcasts. +Observations can be recorded on either paper or electronic software. The digital methods are more recommended as software can be developed that can instantly summarize the data as it is entered. An iPad-only application, iSOPARC, is developed by CIAFEL, a research center at the University of Porto, with the contribution of Dr.McKenzie, the original developer of SOPARC. The iSOPARC is an application that implements the SOPARC protocol to generate park use data from the field and to store, process and export it. Main features of iSOPARC are a digital counter, target area mapping, project-based data management, and data export. The app is free and available from Apple app store. Other than iSOPARC, RAND had provided a free application available online that can be used by observers with an Internet connection but has been discontinued. + + +== Applications == + + +=== Monitoring of park environment and park uses === +Considering its multiple benefits to society and nature, an urban park is a crucial place for promoting physical activity. However, the monitoring of park condition and park uses has not been standardized and popularized, which results in only a few cities monitoring park uses. The use of SOPARC in park monitoring would allow for more consistent and comprehensive monitoring of parks. The summary data (e.g. the number of park users, demographics, frequency by activity types) obtained using SOPARC is easily understood by practitioners, policymakers, and the public. Also, the development of an electronic data collection tool such as iSOPARC now enables researchers to enter, store, and analyze data more easily. +Especially for public health perspective, the SOPARC could measure the level of physical activity occurring in a park, which then could calculate energy expenditure estimates for a park. Existing studies have measured total metabolic equivalents (METs) per park per day using the data generated from the SOPARC observations. One MET-hour is the energy expended at rest for one hour. Based on measures of energy expenditure, sedentary behavior is roughly the equivalent of 1.5 METs, moderate physical activity is 3 METs, and vigorous activity 6 METs. To estimate how much physical activity a park generates, it is possible to aggregate the total METs across park users. Quantifying the total number of park users and MET-hours expended in a park creates a benchmark to assess performance in the future or to compare park services within and across jurisdictions. + + +=== Research on park use or park-based physical activity === +As of September 6, 2016, the author could find 312 articles in Google Scholar using the search term, “System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities.” In a review paper of 34 articles using SOPARC, Evenson et al.(2016) find that "there was a wide range of park users (mean 1.0 to 152.6 people/park/observation period), with typically more males than females visiting parks and older adults less than other age groups." Also, they show that "park user physical activity levels varied greatly across studies, with youths generally more active than adults and younger children more active than adolescents." + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..b5e8c8cf2 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,33 @@ +--- +title: "The Theory of the Leisure Class" +chunk: 1/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:19.529237+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), by Thorstein Veblen, is a treatise of economics and sociology, and a critique of conspicuous consumption as a function of social class and of consumerism, which are social activities derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labor; the social institutions of the feudal period (9th–15th c.) that have continued to the modern era. +Veblen discusses how the pursuit and the possession of wealth affects human behavior, that the contemporary lords of the manor, the businessmen who own the means of production, have employed themselves in the economically unproductive practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, which are useless activities that contribute neither to the economy nor to the material production of the useful goods and services required for the functioning of society. Instead, it is the middle class and working class who are usefully employed in the industrialised, productive occupations that support the whole of society. + +== Background == +The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) was published during the Gilded Age (1870–1900), the time of the robber baron millionaires John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, at the end of the 19th century. Veblen presents the evolutionary development of the social and economic institutions of society, wherein technology and the industrial arts are the creative forces of economic production. In the economics of the production of goods and services, the social function of the economy was to meet the material needs of society and to earn profits for the owners of the means of production. Sociologically, that the industrial production system required the workers (men and women) to be diligent, efficient, and co-operative, whilst the owners of the factories concerned themselves with profits and with public displays of wealth; thus the contemporary socio-economic behaviours of conspicuous consumption and of conspicuous leisure survived from the predatory, barbarian past of the tribal stage of modern society. +The sociology and economics reported in The Theory of the Leisure Class show the influences of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and Herbert Spencer; thereby Veblen's socio-economic theory emphasizes social evolution and development as characteristics of human institutions. In his time, Veblen criticised contemporary (19th-century) economic theories as intellectually static and hedonistic, and that economists should take account of how people actually behave, socially and culturally, rather than rely upon the theoretical deduction meant to explain the economic behaviours of society. As such, Veblen's reports of American political economy contradicted the (supply and demand) neoclassical economics of the 18th century, which define people as rational agents who seek utility and maximal pleasure from their economic activities. In contrast, Veblen's economics defines people as irrational economic agents who disregard personal happiness in the continual pursuit of the social status and the prestige inherent to having a place in society (class and economic stratum). Veblen concluded that conspicuous consumption did not constitute social progress because American economic development was unduly influenced by the static economics of the British aristocracy; therefore, conspicuous consumption was an un-American activity contrary to the country's dynamic culture of individualism. +Originally published as The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, the book arose from three articles that Veblen published in the American Journal of Sociology between 1898 and 1899: (i) "The Beginning of Ownership" (ii) "The Barbarian Status of Women", and (iii) "The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labour". These works presented the major themes of economics and sociology that he later developed in works such as: The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), about how incompatible are the pursuit of profit and the making of useful goods; and The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts (1914), about the fundamental conflict between the human predisposition to useful production and the societal institutions that waste the useful products of human effort. +Moreover, The Theory of the Leisure Class is a socio-economic treatise that resulted from Veblen's observation and perception of the United States as a society of rapidly developing economic and social institutions. Critics of his reportage about the sociology and economics of the consumer society that is the US especially disliked the satiric tone of his literary style, and said that Veblen's cultural perspective had been negatively influenced by his austere boyhood in a Norwegian American community of practical, thrifty, and utilitarian people who endured anti-immigrant prejudices in the course of integration to American society. + +== Thesis == + +=== Concepts === +In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen coined the following sociological terms: + +Leisure class — members of the upper class who are exempt from productive work. +Pecuniary superiority — the leisure class demonstrates their economic superiority by not working. +Pecuniary emulation — the economic effort to exceed someone else's socio-economic status. +Pecuniary struggle — the acquisition and exhibition of wealth to gain social status. +Vicarious leisure — the leisure of wives and servants as evidence of the wealth of the lord of the manor +Estranged leisure — the leisure of servants is realised on behalf of the lord of the manor. + +=== The stratified society === +The Theory of the Leisure Class established that the political economy of a modern society is based upon the social stratification of tribal and feudal societies, rather than upon the merit and social utility and economic utility of individual men and women. Veblen's examples indicate that many economic behaviours of contemporary society derive from corresponding tribal-society behaviours, wherein men and women practiced the division of labor according to their status group; high-status people practiced hunting and warfare, which are economically unproductive occupations, whilst low-status people practiced farming and manufacturing, which are economically productive occupations. In a socially stratified society, the leisure class are members of the upper class who are exempt from productive work. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..732a3db97 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +--- +title: "The Theory of the Leisure Class" +chunk: 2/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:19.529237+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +==== (i) Occupation ==== +The concepts of dignity and self-worth and honour are the bases of the development of social class and distinctions of type among the social classes; thus, by way of social stratification, productive labor came to be seen as disreputable. Therefore, the accumulation of wealth does not confer social status, whereas evidence of wealth, such as leisure, does. In a stratified society, the division of labor inherent to the barbarian culture of conquest, domination, and the exploitation of labour featured labour-intensive occupations for the conquered people, and light-labour occupations for the conquerors, who thus became the leisure class. In that societal context, although low-status, productive occupations (tinker, tailor, chandler) were of greater economic value to society than were high-status, unproductive occupations (the profession of arms, the clergy, banking, etc.), for social cohesion, the leisure class occasionally performed productive work that was more symbolic than practical. +The leisure class engaged in displays of pecuniary superiority by not working and by the: + +Accumulation of property and material possessions +Accumulation of immaterial goods — high-level education, a family crest +Adoption of archaic social skills — manners and etiquette, chivalry and a code of conduct +Employment of servants + +==== (ii) Economic utility ==== +In exercising political control, the leisure class retained its high social status through direct and indirect coercion, by reserving for themselves the profession of arms, and by withholding weapons and military skills from the lower social classes. Such a division of labor (economic utility) rendered the lower classes dependent on the leisure class, which established, justified, and perpetuated the leisure class's role as the defenders of society against natural and supernatural enemies, since the clergy also belonged to the leisure class. +Contemporary society did not psychologically supersede the tribal-stage division of labor, but rather evolved it along lines of social status and stratum. During the Mediæval period (5th–15th c.), only land-owning noblemen had the right to hunt and to bear arms as soldiers; status and income were parallel. Likewise, in contemporary society, skilled laborers of the working class are paid an income in wages, which is inferior to the salary income paid to the educated managers whose economic importance (as engineers, salesmen, personnel clerks, et al.) is indirectly productive; income and status are parallel. + +==== (iii) Pecuniary emulation ==== +The term pecuniary emulation describes a person's economic efforts to surpass a rich person's socio-economic status. Veblen said that the pecuniary struggle to acquire and exhibit wealth, to gain status, is the driving force behind the development of culture and society. To attain, retain, and gain greater social status within their social class, low-status people emulate the high-status members of their socio-economic class, by consuming over-priced brands of goods and services perceived to be of better quality and thus of a higher social class. In striving for greater social status, people buy high-status goods and services they cannot afford, despite the availability of affordable products perceived as lower quality and of lesser social prestige, and thus of a lower social class. In a consumer society, the businessman was the latest member of the leisure class, a barbarian who used his prowess (business acumen) and competitive skills (marketing) to increase profits, by manipulating the supply and the demand among the social classes and their strata, for the same products (goods and services) at different prices. + +=== Contemporary consumerism === +The subjugation of women — Women originally were spoils of war captured by raiding barbarians. In contemporary society, the unemployed housewife is an economic trophy that attests to a man's socio-economic prowess. In having a wife without an independent economic life (a profession, a trade, a job), a man can display her unemployed status as a form of his conspicuous leisure and as an object of his conspicuous consumption. +The popularity of sport — American football is sociologically advantageous to community cohesion; yet, in itself, sport is an economic side-effect of conspicuous leisure that wastes material resources. +Devout observances — Organized religion is a type of conspicuous leisure (wasted time) and of conspicuous consumption (wasted resources); a social activity of no economic consequence, because a church is an unproductive use of land and resources, and clergy (men and women) do unproductive work. +Social formalities — social manners are remnant barbarian behaviours, such as paying respect to one's socially powerful betters. In itself, etiquette has little value (practical or economic), but is of much social value as cultural capital, which identifies, establishes, and enforces distinctions of place (social stratum) within a social class. + +== Overview == + +=== Conspicuous economics === + +With The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899), Veblen introduced, described, and explained the concepts of "conspicuous consumption" and of "conspicuous leisure" to the nascent, academic discipline of sociology. Conspicuous consumption is the use of money and material resources to display a higher social status (e.g., silver flatware, custom-made clothes, an oversized house). Conspicuous leisure is the application of extended time to the pursuit of pleasure (physical and intellectual), such as sport and the fine arts. Therefore, such physical and intellectual pursuits display the freedom of the rich man and woman from having to work in an economically productive occupation. + +=== Theses === +Chapter I: Introductory +The modern industrial society developed from the barbarian tribal society, which featured a leisure class supported by subordinated working classes employed in economically productive occupations. The people of the leisure class were exempt from manual work and economically productive occupations. + +Chapter II: Pecuniary Emulation +The emergence of a leisure class coincides with the beginning of ownership, initially based upon marriage as a form of ownership — of women and their chattel property — as evidence of prowess. As such, the material consumption of the leisure class has little to do with either comfort or subsistence, and much to do with social esteem from the community, and thus with self-respect. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5916bc0e8 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +--- +title: "The Theory of the Leisure Class" +chunk: 3/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:19.529237+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Chapter III: Conspicuous Leisure +Among the lower social classes, a man's reputation as a diligent, efficient, and productive worker is the highest form of pecuniary emulation of the leisure class available to him in society. Yet, among the social strata of the leisure class, manual labor is perceived as a sign of social and economic weakness; thus, the defining social characteristics of the leisure class are the exemption from useful employment and the practice of conspicuous leisure as a non-productive consumption of time. + +Chapter IV: Conspicuous Consumption +Theoretically, the consumption of luxury products (goods and services) is limited to the leisure class, because the working classes have other, more important, things and activities on which to spend their limited income, their wages. Yet, such is not the case, because the lower classes consume expensive alcoholic beverages and narcotic drugs. In doing so, the working classes seek to emulate the standards of life and play of the leisure class, because they are the people at the head of the social structure in terms of reputability. In that emulation of the leisure class, social manners are a result of the non-productive consumption of time by the upper social classes; thus, the social utility of conspicuous consumption and of conspicuous leisure lies in their wastefulness of time and resources. + +Chapter V: The Pecuniary Standard of Living +In a society of industrialised production (of goods and services), the habitual consumption of products establishes a person's standard of living; therefore, it is more difficult to do without products than to continually add them to one's way of life. Moreover, once self-preservation (food and shelter) is achieved, the needs of conspicuous waste drive society's economic and industrial improvements. + +Chapter VI: Pecuniary Canons of Taste +To the leisure class, a material object becomes a product of conspicuous consumption when it is integrated into the canon of honorific waste by being regarded either as beautiful or worthy of possession for itself. Consequently, to the lower classes, possessing such an object becomes an exercise in the pecuniary emulation of the leisure class. Therefore, an objet d'art made of precious metal and gemstones is a more popular possession than is an object of art made of equally beautiful, but less expensive materials, because a high price can masquerade as beauty that appeals to the sense of social prestige of the possessor-consumer. + +Chapter VII: Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture +In a consumer society, the function of clothes is to define the wearer as a man or a woman belonging to a given social class, rather than to protect them from the environment. Clothing also indicates that the wearer's livelihood does not depend upon economically productive labor, such as farming and manufacturing, which activities require protective clothing. Moreover, the symbolic function of clothing indicates that the wearer belongs to the leisure class and can afford to buy new clothes as fashion changes. + +Chapter VIII: Industrial Exemption and Conservatism +A society develops through the establishment of institutions (social, governmental, economic, etc.), modified only in accordance with ideas from the past to maintain societal stability. Politically, the leisure class maintains its societal dominance by retaining outdated aspects of the political economy; thus, its opposition to socio-economic progressivism to the degree that they consider political conservatism, nationalism, and political reaction as honorific features of the leisure class. + +Chapter IX: The Conservation of Archaic Traits +The existence of the leisure class influences the behaviour of individual men and women through social ambition. To rise in society, a person from a lower class emulates the characteristics of the desired upper class; they assume the habits of economic consumption and social attitudes (archaic traits of demeanour in speech, dress, and manners). In pursuit of social advancement and concomitant social prestige, the man and the woman who rid themselves of scruple and honesty will more readily rise into a stratum of the leisure class. + +Chapter X: Modern Survivals of Prowess +As owners of the means of production, the leisure class benefit from, but do not work in, the industrial community, and do not materially contribute to the commonweal (the welfare of the public) but do consume the goods and services produced by the working classes. As such, the individual success (social and economic) of a person derives from their astuteness and ferocity, which are character traits nurtured by the pecuniary culture of the consumer society. + +Chapter XI: The Belief in Luck +The belief in the concept of 'luck' (Fortuna) is one reason why people gamble; likewise, they follow the belief that luck is a part of achieving socio-economic success, rather than the likelier reason of social connections derived from a person's social class and social stratum. Within the social strata of the leisure class, the belief in luck is greater in the matter of sport (wherein physical prowess does matter) because of personal pride and the concomitant social prestige; hence, gambling is a display of conspicuous consumption and of conspicuous leisure. Nonetheless, gambling (the belief in luck) is a social practice common to all social classes. + +Chapter XII: Devout Observances +The existence, function, and practice of religion in a socially stratified society is a form of abstract conspicuous consumption for and among the members of the person's community, of devotion to the value system that justifies the existence of their social class. As such, attending church services, participating in religious rites, and paying tithes are forms of conspicuous leisure. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..35da00469 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,31 @@ +--- +title: "The Theory of the Leisure Class" +chunk: 4/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:19.529237+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +Chapter XIII: Survivals of the Non-invidious Interest +The clergy and the women who are members of the leisure class function as objects of vicarious leisure; thus, it is morally impossible for them to work and productively contribute to society. As such, maintaining a high social class is more important for a woman of the leisure class than it is for a man of the leisure class. Women, therefore, are the greatest indicators of a man's socio-economic standing in his respective community. In a consumer society, how a woman spends her time and the activities she engages in communicate the social standing of her husband, her family, and her social class. + +Chapter XIV: The Higher Learning as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture +Education (academic, technical, religious) is a form of conspicuous leisure because it does not directly contribute to society's economy. Therefore, high-status, ceremonial symbols of book-learning, such as the gown and mortar-board cap of the university graduate educated in abstract subjects (science, mathematics, philosophy, etc.), are greatly respected. In contrast, certificates, low-status, ceremonial symbols of practical schooling (technology, manufacturing, etc.), are not greatly respected to the same degree, because the contemporary university is a leisure-class institution. + +== Criticism and critique == + +=== Literary style === +In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen used idiosyncratic and satirical language to identify, describe, and explain the consumerist mores of American modern society in the 19th century; thus, about the impracticality of etiquette as a form of conspicuous leisure, Veblen said: + +A better illustration [of conspicuous leisure], or at least a more unmistakable one, is afforded by a certain King of France who was said to have lost his life in the observance of good form. In the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his master's seat, the King sat uncomplaining before the fire, and suffered his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery. But, in so doing, he saved his Most Christian Majesty from menial contamination. +In contrast, Veblen used objective language in The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), which analyses the business-cycle behaviours of businessmen. In his introduction to the 1973 edition, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said that The Theory of the Leisure Class is Veblen's intellectual put-down of American society. That Veblen spoke satirically to soften the negative implications of his socio-economic analyses of the U.S. social-class system, facts that are more psychologically threatening to the American ego and the status quo than the negative implications of Karl Marx's analyses. That, unlike Marx, who asserted capitalism as superior to feudalism in providing products (goods and services) for mass consumption, Veblen did not recognise such a distinction. For him, capitalism was one form of economic barbarism, and that goods and services produced for conspicuous consumption are fundamentally worthless. +In the Introduction to the 1967 edition of The Theory of the Leisure Class, economist Robert Lekachman said that Veblen was a misanthrope: + +As a child, Veblen was a notorious tease, and an inveterate inventor of malicious nicknames. As an adult, Veblen developed this aptitude into the abusive category and the cutting analogy. In this volume [The Theory of the Leisure Class] the most striking categories are four in number: [i] Conspicuous Consumption, [ii] Vicarious Consumption, [iii] Conspicuous Leisure, and [iv] Conspicuous Waste. It is amazing what a very large proportion of social activity, higher education, devout observance, and upper-class consumer goods seemed to fit snugly into one, or another, of these classifications. + +=== 19th century === +The success of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) derived from the fidelity, veracity, and accuracy of Veblen's reportage about the socio-economic behaviours of the American system of social classes. Additional to the success (financial, academic, social) accrued to him by the book, a social-scientist colleague told Veblen that the sociology of gross consumerism catalogued in The Theory of the Leisure Class had much "fluttered the dovecotes of the East", especially in the Ivy League academic Establishment. +In the two-part book review "An Opportunity for American Fiction" (April–May 1899), the critic William Dean Howells made Veblen's treatise the handbook of sociology and economics for the American intelligentsia of the early 20th century. Reviewing first the economics and then the social satire in The Theory of the Leisure Class, Howells said that social-class anxiety impels American society to wasteful consumerism, especially the pursuit of social prestige. That despite social classes being alike in most stratified societies, the novelty of the American social-class system was that the leisure class had only recently appeared in U.S. history. +Asking for a novelist to translate into fiction what the social-scientist Veblen had reported, Howells concluded that a novel of manners was an opportunity for American fiction to accessibly communicate the satire in The Theory of the Leisure Class: \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-4.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-4.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..6dbbb24ee --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class-4.md @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ +--- +title: "The Theory of the Leisure Class" +chunk: 5/5 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:19.529237+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + + It would be easy to burlesque [the American leisure class], but to burlesque it would be intolerable, and the witness [Veblen] who did this would be bearing false testimony where the whole truth and nothing but the truth is desirable. A democracy, the proudest, the most sincere, the most ardent that history has ever known, has evolved here a leisure class which has all the distinguishing traits of a patriciate, and which by the chemistry of intermarriage with European aristocracies is rapidly acquiring antiquity. Is not this a phenomenon worthy the highest fiction? Mr. Veblen has brought to its study the methods and habits of scientific inquiry. To translate these into dramatic terms would form the unequalled triumph of the novelist who had the seeing eye and the thinking mind, not to mention the feeling heart. That such a thing has not been done hitherto is all the stranger, because fiction, in other countries, has always employed itself with the leisure class, with the aristocracy; and our own leisure class now offers not only as high an opportunity as any which fiction has elsewhere enjoyed, but by its ultimation in the English leisure class, it invites the American imagination abroad on conditions of unparalleled advantage. +In the Journal of Political Economy (September 1899), the book reviewer John Cummings said: + +As a contribution to the general theory of sociology, Dr. Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class requires no other commendation for its scholarly performance than that which a casual reading of the work readily inspires. Its highly original character makes any abridgement of it exceedingly difficult and inadequate, and such an abridgement cannot be even attempted here ... The following pages, however, are devoted to a discussion of certain points of view in which the author seems, to the writer [Cummings], to have taken an incomplete survey of the facts, or to have allowed his interpretation of facts to be influenced by personal animus. + +=== 20th century === +In the essay "Prof. Veblen" (1919), the intellectual H. L. Mencken addressed the matters of Americans' social psychology reported in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), by asking: + +Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford one—or because I delight in being clean? Do I admire Beethoven's Fifth Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists—or because I genuinely love music? Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver, because plowhands must put up with the liver—or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose? +In the essay "The Dullest Book of The Month: Dr. Thorstein Veblen Gets the Crown of Deadly Nightshade" (1919), after addressing the content of The Theory of the Leisure Class, the book reviewer Robert Benchley addressed the subject of who are readers to whom Veblen speaks, that:the Doctor has made one big mistake, however. He has presupposed, in writing this book, the existence of a [social] class with much more leisure than any class in the world ever possessed—for, has he not counted on a certain number of readers? + +In the introduction to the 1934 edition, the economist Stuart Chase said that the Great Depression (1929–1941) had vindicated Veblen the economist, because The Theory of the Leisure Class had unified "the outstanding economists of the world". In the foreword to the 1953 edition, sociologist C. Wright Mills said that Veblen was "the best critic of America that America has ever produced". In the Introduction to the 1973 edition of the book, economist John Kenneth Galbraith addressed the author as subject, and said that Veblen was a man of his time, and that The Theory of the Leisure Class—published in 1899—reflected Veblen's 19th-century world view. That in his person and personality, the social scientist Veblen was neglectful of his grooming and tended to be disheveled; that he suffered social intolerance for being an intellectual and an agnostic in a society of superstitious and anti-intellectual people, and so tended to curtness with less intelligent folk. +John Dos Passos writes of Veblen in his trilogy novel U.S.A, in the third novel (1933), The Big Money. There, as one of Passos' highly subjective portraits of historical figures throughout the trilogy, Veblen is bio-sketched in THE BITTER DRINK in about 10 pages, referring presumably in that title to the hemlock Socrates was forced to drink for his supposed crimes. The portrait ends with these three final lines: "but his memorial remains/riveted into the language/the sharp clear prism of his mind." + +In The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953), the historian of economics Robert Heilbroner said that Veblen's socio-economic theories applied to the Gilded Age (1870–1900) of gross materialism and political corruption in the U.S. of the 19th century, but are inapplicable in 21st-century economics, because The Theory of the Leisure Class is specific to U.S. society in general, and to the society of Chicago in particular. In that vein, in No Rest for the Wealthy (2009), the journalist Daniel Gross said: + +In the book, Veblen—whom C. Wright Mills called "the best critic of America that America has ever produced"—dissected the habits and mores of a privileged group that was exempt from industrial toil and distinguished by lavish expenditures. His famous phrase conspicuous consumption referred to spending that satisfies no need other than to build prestige, a cultural signifier intended to intimidate and impress. In this age of repossessed yachts, half-finished McMansions and broken-down leveraged buyouts, Veblen proves that a 110-year-old sociological vivisection of the financial overclass can still be au courant. Yet, while Veblen frequently reads as still 100 percent right on the foibles of the rich, when it comes to an actual theory of the contemporary leisure class, he now comes off as about 90 percent wrong. + +== See also == + +== References == +Notes + +Bibliography + +== External links == + +The Theory of the Leisure Class at Standard Ebooks + The Theory of the Leisure Class at Project Gutenberg + The Theory of the Leisure Class public domain audiobook at LibriVox +Reviews of The Theory of the Leisure Class +Selective excerpts +In Our Time. "The Theory of the Leisure Class". BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 13 February 2024. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Dem_Democracy_Indices-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Dem_Democracy_Indices-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..7e0594ad7 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Dem_Democracy_Indices-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,98 @@ +--- +title: "V-Dem Democracy Indices" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Dem_Democracy_Indices" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:57.748883+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Democracy Indices by V-Dem are democracy indices published by the V-Dem Institute that describe qualities of different democracies. It is published annually. It is considered by UNESCO to be the world's most comprehensive democracy ratings. +Datasets analysis 50 indices and consist of over 450 specific indicators, focusing on both qualitative and quantitative measurements of democracy. V-Dem utilizes historical data dating back to the 1800s for some countries, multiple coders for each question, and large measurement models. They use several key principles: electoral, liberal, majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, with variables describing various aspects of government, especially on the quality of democracy, inclusivity, and other economic indicators. In 2020, the V-Dem index had "more than 470 indicators, 82 mid-level indices, and 5 high-level indices covering 202 polities from the period of 1789–2019". + + +== Democracy indices == +As of 2022, the V-Dem Institute published 483 indicators and republishes 59 other indicators. V-Dem publishes five core indices with several other supplementary indices. The core indices are measuring "electoral", "liberal", "participatory", " deliberative" and "egalitarian" "democracies". + + +==== Electoral Democracy Index ==== + +This index measures the principle of electoral or representative democracy, including whether elections were free and fair, as well as the prevalence of a free and independent media. This index is part of all the other indices as a central component of democracy. + + +==== Liberal Democracy Index ==== + +This index incorporates measures of rule of law, checks and balances, and civil liberties along with the concepts measured in the electoral democracy index. + + +==== Participatory Democracy Index ==== + +This index measures the degree to which citizens participate in their own government through local democratic institutions, civil society organizations, direct democracy, and the concepts measured in the electoral democracy. + + +==== Deliberative Democracy Index ==== + +This index measures the degree to which decisions are made in the best interest of the people as opposed to due to coercion or narrow interest groups, in addition to the basic electoral democracy index. + + +==== Egalitarian Democracy Index ==== + +This index measures the level of equal access to resources, power, and freedoms across various groups within a society, in addition to the level of electoral democracy. + + +== By country == +The table below shows 2026 V-Dem Democracy indices describing the year 2025. + + +== Regimes of the World == + +V-Dem maintains the Regimes of the World index, which classifies governments using data from its other indices as either a closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, or liberal democracy. It is heavily inspired by Robert Dahl's theory of polyarchy based on six institutional guarantees: elected officials, free and fair elections, freedom of expression, alternative sources of information, associational autonomy, and inclusive citizenship. + + +=== Autocracies === +Regimes where leaders are not de facto accountable to citizens and may lack multiparty or free and fair elections. Dahl's institutional prerequisites are not fulfilled. + +Closed Autocracy + +Governments which lack multiparty elections for the chief executive or the legislature, or lack any competition such as in one-party states. Legislative institutions are de facto undermined and electoral accountability is evaded. + +Electoral Autocracy + +Governments where the chief executive, legislature, or both are accountable in de jure multiparty elections. They fall short of democratic standards due to irregularities, limitations on party competition, and violations of Dahl's prerequisites. They are closely related to theories of electoral authoritarianism and competitive authoritarianism. + + +=== Democracies === +Regimes with de facto multiparty, free and fair elections. Dahl's institutional prerequisites are at least minimally fulfilled. + +Electoral Democracy +Regimes that possess the bare minimum to be considered a democracy. They are "de-facto accountable to citizens through periodic elections", but are not liberal democracies and lack further entrenched individual and minority rights beyond the electoral sphere. Basic electoral democracies may not possess a fully developed rule of law, legislative and judicial oversight of the executive branch, protections against the "tyranny of the majority", and only minimal fulfillment of Robert Dahl's institutional prerequisites for democracy. +Liberal Democracy + +Regimes that possess the rule of law and satisfy liberal principles. They provide checks and balances between legislative and judicial oversight of the executive branch, limitations on government to prevent the "tyranny of the majority", protect individual liberties, and provide equal access to and protection under the law. A fully developed rule of law is essential for liberal democracies, as it ensures decisions are implemented. It is sometimes referred to as a "Madisonian" democracy. + + +== Digital Society Project == +The Digital Society Project is a subset of indicators on V-Dem's survey that asks questions about social media's political status and the internet. Specifically, the Digital Society Project measures a range of questions related to internet censorship, misinformation online, and internet shutdowns. This annual report includes 35 indicators assessing five areas: disinformation, digital media freedom, state regulation of digital media, the polarization of online media, and online social cleavages. It has been updated each year starting in 2019, with data covering from 2000–2021. Similar to other expert analyses like Freedom House, these data are more prone to false positives when compared with remotely sensed data, such as that from Access Now or the OpenNet Initiative. + + +== Criticisms == + +Political scientist Jonas Wolff criticized V-Dem for gradually abandoning a pluralist conceptualization of democracy. According to him, V-Dem has moved away from its original emphasis on the conceptual varieties of democracy and adopted an uncontested view of democracy as liberal democracy while also ignoring the limitations of liberal democracy. +The V-Dem dataset does not cover some countries, namely: Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Belize, Brunei, Dominica, the Federated States of Micronesia, Grenada, Kiribati, Liechtenstein, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Nauru, Palau, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Tonga, Tuvalu, and the Vatican. + + +== See also == +Academic Freedom Index + + +== References == + + +== Further reading == +Vanessa A. Boese, Markus Eberhardt: "Which Institutions Rule? Unbundling the Democracy-Growth Nexus", V-Dem Institute, Series 2022:131, February 2022. +Max Fisher, November 16, 2021. "U.S. Allies Drive Much of World's Democratic Decline, Data Shows: Washington-aligned countries backslid at nearly double the rate of non-allies, data shows, complicating long-held assumptions about American influence". The New York Times. + + +== External links == +v-dem.net, official website] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..3773586d5 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +--- +title: "Waist–hip ratio" +chunk: 1/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:58.920257+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The waist–hip ratio or waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) is the dimensionless ratio of the circumference of the waist to that of the hips. +This is calculated as waist measurement divided by hip measurement (W⁄H). For example, a person with a 75 cm waist and 95 cm hips (or a 30-inch waist and 38-inch hips) has WHR of about 0.79. +The WHR has been used as an indicator or measure of health, fertility, and the risk of developing serious health conditions. WHR correlates with perceptions of physical attractiveness. + +== Measurement == + +=== WHO protocol === +According to the World Health Organization's data gathering protocol, the waist circumference should be measured at the midpoint between the lower margin of the last palpable ribs and the top of the iliac crest, using a stretch-resistant tape that provides constant 100 g (3.53 oz) tension. Hip circumference should be measured around the widest portion of the buttocks, with the tape parallel to the floor. Other organizations use slightly different standards. The United States National Institutes of Health and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey used results obtained by measuring at the top of the iliac crest. +For both measurements, the individual should stand with feet close together, arms at the side and body weight evenly distributed, and should wear little clothing. The subject should be relaxed, and the measurements should be taken at the end of a normal respiration. Each measurement should be repeated twice; if the measurements are within 1 cm of one another, the average should be calculated. If the difference between the two measurements exceeds 1 cm, the two measurements should be repeated. + +=== Practical measurement === +The layperson's measurement of hip circumference is the same as the WHO protocol: measure at the widest part of the buttocks or hip. +There are several possible alternative definitions of waist circumference with easier-to-locate landmarks: + +Waist measurements are usually obtained by laypersons by measuring around the waist at the navel, but research has shown that these measurements may underestimate the true waist circumference. +In lean people, the waist is commonly measured at the smallest circumference of the natural waist, as indicated in the WHO report. +Where the waist is convex rather than concave, as in pregnancy and obesity, the waist may be measured at a vertical level 1 inch (2.5 cm) above the navel. +The NIH NHANES study measures at the top of the iliac crest, which is low but relatively easy to find. + +== Indicator of health == + +=== Serious health conditions === +The WHR has been used as an indicator or measure of health, and as a risk factor for developing serious health conditions. +WHR is used as a measurement of obesity, which in turn is a possible indicator of other more serious health conditions. The WHO states that abdominal obesity is defined as a waist–hip ratio above 0.90 for males and above 0.85 for females, or a body mass index (BMI) above 30.0. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) states that "total cholesterol levels are usually higher in persons with predominant abdominal obesity, defined as a waist-to-hip circumference ratio of ≥ 0.8 for women and ≥ 1.0 for men. + +WHR has been found to be a more efficient predictor of mortality in older people (>75 years of age) than waist circumference or BMI. If obesity is redefined using WHR instead of BMI, the proportion of people categorized as at risk of heart attack worldwide increases threefold. WHR may be less accurate in individuals with a BMI of 35 or higher, and more complex to interpret since an increased WHR may result from increased abdominal fat or decreased lean muscle mass around the hips. The body fat percentage is considered to be an even more accurate measure of relative weight. Of these three measurements, only the waist–hip ratio takes account of the differences in body structure. Hence, it is possible for two people of the same sex to have different body mass indices but the same waist–hip ratio, or to have the same body mass index but different waist–hip ratios. +WHR has been shown to be a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than simple waist circumference and body-mass index. The study by American Heart Association has shown that measuring waistline and comparing it to hip size might be a better way to predict heart disease risk than a widely used body mass index. However, other studies have found waist circumference (particularly waist-to-height ratio) to be a better indicator of cardiovascular risk factors than the waist–hip ratio, body fat distribution, and hypertension in type 2 diabetes. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-1.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-1.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..83f647b53 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-1.md @@ -0,0 +1,36 @@ +--- +title: "Waist–hip ratio" +chunk: 2/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:58.920257+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +=== Stress === +The stress hormone cortisol is regulated by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and has been associated with higher levels of abdominal fat and therefore a higher WHR. +Abdominal fat is a marker of visceral fat (stored around important internal organs such as the liver, pancreas and intestines) and has greater blood flow and more receptors for cortisol than peripheral fat. The greater the number of cortisol receptors, the more sensitive the visceral fat tissue is to cortisol. This heightened sensitivity to cortisol stimulates fat cells to further increase in size. +Women who have a combination of normal BMI and high WHR experience elevated cortisol reactivity to acute stressors and failure to habituate to repeated stressors, compared to women with normal WHR. This suggests that high WHR might also indicate HPA-axis dysregulation and over-exposure to cortisol. +Evidence for the relationship between cortisol and central fat distribution has primarily been studied in individuals with Cushing's syndrome. +This is characterized by over-exposure to cortisol due to elevated activity of the HPA axis. A primary component of Cushing's syndrome is the accumulation of fat in the abdominal region, and it is hypothesized that elevated cortisol levels contribute to this accumulation. However, this hypothesis remains contested as cortisol levels only modestly explain variation in central fat distribution. It is more likely that a complex set of biological and neuroendocrine pathways related to cortisol secretion contribute to central adiposity, such as leptin, neuropeptide y, corticotropin releasing factor and the sympathetic nervous system. + +=== Growth and development === +In general, adults with growth hormone deficiencies also have increased WHRs. Adults with untreated congenital isolated growth hormone deficiency have increased WHRs, possibly from increased cortisone–cortisol ratios and insulin sensitivities. Since these individuals have increased visceral obesity, it has been suggested that a minimal growth hormone secretion would theoretically increase insulin resistance. However, because of the growth hormone deficiency, this insulin resistance point cannot be reached and these individuals are more sensitive to insulin. Increased adipose deposits are therefore more likely to form in these individuals, causing the high WHR. Growth hormone deficiencies have also been correlated with WHRs in prepubertal children; the specific baseline body statistics, such as WHRs, of pre-pubertal children with growth hormone deficiencies can predict growth response effectiveness to artificial growth hormone therapies, such as rhGH treatments. + +=== Sex characteristics === +Males with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, determined by CYP21A2 mutations, have increased WHRs. + +=== Fertility === +Women with high WHR (0.80 or higher) have significantly lower pregnancy rates than women with lower WHRs (0.70–0.79), independent of their BMIs. Men with WHRs around 0.9, similarly, have been shown to be more healthy and fertile with less prostate cancer and testicular cancer. +One of the factors that affects a woman's waist-hip ratio is her gynoid fat distribution, a store of energy to be expended in the nurturing of offspring, both to provide adequate energy resources during pregnancy and for the infant during the stage in which they are breastfeeding. In an ancestral environment where food was scarce, a female with high levels of gynoid fat would be signalling that she in an optimal state for reproduction and nurturing of offspring. This can be seen in the fact that a female's waist–hip ratio is at its optimal minimum during times of peak fertility—late adolescence and early adulthood, before increasing later in life. +As a female's capacity for reproduction comes to an end, the fat distribution within the female body begins a transition from the gynoid type to more of an android type distribution. This is evidenced by the percentages of android fat being far higher in post-menopausal than pre-menopausal women. +Evidence suggests that WHR is an accurate somatic indicator of reproductive endocrinological status and long-term health risk. Among girls with identical body weights, those with lower WHRs show earlier pubertal endocrine activity, as measured by high levels of lutenizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone, as well as sex steroid (estradiol) activity. A Dutch prospective study on outcome in an artificial insemination program provides evidence for the role of WHR and fecundity. These investigators report that a 0.1 unit increase in WHR decreases the probability of conception per cycle by 30% after adjustment for age, obesity, reasons for artificial insemination, cycle length and regularity, smoking, and parity. +Menopause, the natural or surgical cessation of the menstrual cycle, is due to an overall decrease in ovarian production of the hormones estradiol and progesterone. These hormonal changes are also associated with an increase in WHR independent of increases in body mass. Significantly, studies find that large premenopausal WHRs are associated with lower estradiol levels and variation in age of menopause onset. Circulating estrogen preferentially stores lipid deposits in the gluteofemoral region, including the buttocks and thighs, and evidence suggests that menopause-associated estrogen deficiency results in an accumulation of adipose deposits around the abdomen. These menopause-induced changes in body fat distribution can be counteracted with hormone replacement therapy. In contrast, aging males gradually accumulate abdominal fat, and hence increased WHR, in parallel with declining androgen levels. + +=== Offspring cognitive ability === +Using data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, William Lassek at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara found a child's performance in cognitive tests correlated to their mother's waist–hip ratio, a proxy for how much fat she stores on her hips. +Children whose mothers had wide hips and a low waist–hip ratio scored highest, leading Lassek and Gaulin to suggest that fetuses benefit from hip fat, which contains long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, critical for the development of the fetus's brain. In addition, evidence suggests that children of low-WHR teens were protected from the cognitive deficits often associated with teen birth. + +=== Offspring newborn size === +A higher WHR corresponds to a heavier baby with a longer body and a bigger head at birth. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-2.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-2.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..1834cbb05 --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-2.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: "Waist–hip ratio" +chunk: 3/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:58.920257+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +== Human genetics == +Studies in twins have suggested that between 22% and 61% of variability in waist-to-hip ratio may be accounted for by genetic factors. + +== As an indicator of attractiveness == + +=== Female === +WHR is considered as one of the three determinants of female attractiveness, the other two being body mass index (BMI), and curviness. The concept and significance of WHR as an indicator of attractiveness was first theorized by evolutionary psychologist Devendra Singh at the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. Singh argued that the WHR was a more consistent estrogen marker than the bust–waist ratio (BWR) studied at King's College, London by Glenn Wilson in the 1970s. +Some researchers have found that the waist–hip ratio is a significant measure of female attractiveness. Women with a 0.7 WHR are usually rated as more attractive by men from various cultures. Preferences may vary, according to some studies, ranging from 0.6 in China, South America, and some of Africa to 0.8 in Cameroon and among the Hadza tribe of Tanzania, with divergent preferences according to the ethnicity of the observed being noted. In ancient Greek and Egyptian sculptures, idealized female representations typically displayed ratios of 0.7, while in Indian and African artwork, the WHRs for female statues are even smaller, at 0.6 and 0.5 respectively. +It appears that men in westernized societies are more influenced by female waist size than hip size: "Hip size indicates pelvic size and the amount of additional fat storage that can be used as a source of energy. Waist size conveys information such as current reproductive status or health status ... in westernized societies with no risk of seasonal lack of food, the waist, conveying information about fecundity and health status, will be more important than hip size for assessing a female's attractiveness". +By western standards, women in foraging populations have high numbers of pregnancies, high parasite loads, and high caloric dependence on fibrous foods. These variables change across cultures, suggesting that: + +the normal range of female WHR was often higher than in western cultures, +what constituted locally "WHR" varied, and +average WHR of nubile females and of females of peak fertility varied. +Thus, a WHR that indicates pubertal onset, sex, fertility, hormonal irregularities, and/or differentiates male from female in one population may not do so in another. +In a series of 1993 studies done by Singh, men used WHR and overall body fat to determine a woman's attractiveness. In his first study, men were shown a series of 12 drawings of women with various WHRs and body fat. Drawings with normal weight and a low WHR were associated with the most positive traits (i.e. attractive, sexy, intelligent and healthy). The drawings of thin female figures were not associated with any positive traits except youthfulness. +Through this study, Singh suggests that males and females may have developed innate mechanisms which detect and make use of the WHR to assess how healthy an individual is and (particularly for men), infer possible mate value. Having a healthy mate improves the chances of producing offspring with inherited genetic protection from various diseases and a healthy mate is more likely to be a good parent (Hamilton & Zuk, 1982; Thornhill, 1993). +Other studies discovered WHR as a signal of attractiveness as well, beyond just examining body fat and fertility. Barnaby Dixson, Gina Grimshaw, Wayne Linklater, and Alan Dixson conducted a study using eye-tracking techniques to evaluate men's fixation on digitally altered photographs of the same woman, as well as asking the men to evaluate the images based on attractiveness. What they found was while men fixated on the woman's breasts in each photo, they selected the images where the woman had a 0.7 WHR as most attractive, regardless of breast size. Pazhoohi et al. (2019) using eye tracking confirmed that lower than optimal WHRs when posing in contrapposto, which causes one side of the body to have a lower than optimal view-dependent WHR, are perceived more attractive and are supernormal stimuli. +Furthermore, referencing a 2005 study conducted by Johnson and Tassinary looking at animated human walking stimuli, Farid Pazhoohi and James R. Liddle proposed that men do not solely use WHR to evaluate attractiveness, but also a means of sex-differentiation, with higher WHR perceived as more masculine and lower WHR as an indicator of femininity. Pazhoohi and Liddle used this idea as a possible additional explanation as to why men perceive a lower WHR as more attractive – because it relates to an expression of femininity, as opposed to masculinity and a higher WHR. On this basis, it was shown that men with lower, more feminine, WHRs feel less comfortable and self-report lower body esteem and self-efficacy than men with higher, more masculine, WHRs. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-3.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-3.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..d0fd3124d --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio-3.md @@ -0,0 +1,46 @@ +--- +title: "Waist–hip ratio" +chunk: 4/4 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist–hip_ratio" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:39:58.920257+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +To enhance their perceived attractiveness, some women may artificially alter their apparent WHR. The methods include the use of a corset to reduce the waist size and hip and buttock padding to increase the apparent size of the hips and buttocks. In an earlier attempt to quantify attractiveness, corset and girdle manufacturers of the 20th century used a calculation called hip spring (or hip-spring or hipspring), calculated by subtracting the waist measurement from the hip measurement. However this calculation fell into disuse because it is a poor indicator of attractiveness; for example, a hip spring of 250 mm would likely be considered quite attractive for an average-sized adult woman, but a child or petite woman with the same number would more likely be seen as malnourished. +WHR versus BMI attractiveness is related to fertility, not fat content. A study performed by Holliday used computer generated female body shapes to construct images which covary with real female body mass (indexed with BMI) and not with body shape (indexed with WHR), and vice versa. Twelve observers (6 male and 6 female) rated these images for attractiveness during an fMRI study. The attractiveness ratings were correlated with changes in BMI and not WHR. The results demonstrated that in addition to activation in higher visual areas, changes to BMI had a direct impact on activity within the brain's reward system. This shows that BMI, not WHR, modulates reward mechanisms in the brain and that this may have important implications for judgements of ideal body size in eating-disordered individuals. +Another study, conducted by Adrian Furnham, was used as an extension of Singh and Young's 1995 investigation. A total of 137 participants were in the study. There were 98 female participants. The age range was between 16 and 67. The majority of participants were undergraduates, and 90% were white British, the remainder being Asian (East Indian) and African. Their educational and socio-economic backgrounds (nearly all middle class) were fairly homogenous, and none had previously participated in any studies involving female body shape or attractiveness. It was predicted that the effect of breast size on judgment of attractiveness and age estimation would be dependent on overall body fat and the size of the waist-to-hip ratio. +All the participants were given a booklet with eight pictures in total. Each figure was identified as heavy or slender, feminine WHR or masculine WHR, and large-breasted or small-breasted. The participants rated the figures for four personal attributes (attractiveness, healthiness, femininity, and kindness/understanding). +When ratings of the figures' attractiveness were made, generally it appeared that bust size, WHR, and their weight were all important contributory elements. The female participants rated the figures with a low WHR as more attractive, healthy, feminine-looking, and in the case of the heavy figure, more kind and understanding than did male participants. This is a particularly interesting finding, as most previous studies report that young women idealize female bodies solely on the basis of thinness. As far as the breast sizes of the slender figures is concerned, whether they had large or small breasts did not appear to have any effect on the ratings of attractiveness or kindness or understanding, and having larger breasts only increased the mean ratings of health and femininity very slightly. However, a heavy figure with a high WHR and a large bust was rated as the least attractive and healthy by all participants. +Waist–hip ratio is also a reliable cue to one's sex and it is hypothesised that the "individuals who represent a mismatch based on the cue provided by WHR (e.g., women with high WHR values or men with low WHR values) would likely be viewed as unattractive by the opposite sex." +A 2017 University of Wroclaw study of around one thousand women across different cultures—designed to address the conflicting theories—concluded that an attractive WHR is not a predictor of peak fertility, but actually a predictor of the onset of fertility and therefore a predictor of maximal long term reproductive potential and minimal chance of raising a competing male's children. The study authors concluded "Hence, it can be predicted that the preference for a low WHR results from male preference for women at peak residual reproductive value, just prior to first probably fertile ovulatory cycle (and with no previous children). + +=== Male === +Research has found waist-to-chest ratio to be the largest determinant of male attractiveness, with body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio not as significant. + +== Food == +A number of studies have been carried out with focus on food composition of diets in relation to changes in waist circumference adjusted for body mass index. +Whole-grain, ready-to-eat, oat cereal diets reduce low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and waist circumference in overweight or obese adults more than low-fibre control food diets. Weight loss did not vary between groups. +In an American sample of 459 healthy men and women participating in the ongoing 'Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging', the mean annual increase [with age] in waist circumference was more than 3 times as great for the participants in the white-bread cluster compared with the participants using a diet that is high in fruit, vegetables, reduced-fat dairy and whole grains and is low in red or processed meat, fast food and soft drink. +A 2011 study suggests that a dietary pattern high in fruit and dairy and low in white bread, processed meat, margarine, and soft drinks may help to prevent abdominal fat accumulation. + +== See also == +Body proportions – Proportions of the human body in art +Artistic canons of body proportions – Criteria used in formal figurative art +Digit ratio – Ratio of lengths of fingers +Leg-to-body ratio – Numerical index of body proportion +Physical attractiveness – Aesthetic assessment of physical traits +Sexual attraction – Attraction on the basis of sexual desire +Bust/waist/hip measurements – Measures used for fitting clothing +Wasp waist – Women's fashion silhouette +Waist-to-height ratio – Measure of the distribution of body fat (better indicator of health) + +== References == + +== Further reading == +Karremans JC, Frankenhuis WE, Arons S (2010). "Blind men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio". Evolution and Human Behavior. 31 (3): 182–186. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.10.001. hdl:2066/90029. + +== External links == +"Waist–hip ratio should replace body mass index as indicator of mortality risk in older people" – EurekAlert August 8, 2006 +"Body visualizer". MPI IS Perceiving Systems Department, Max Planck Institute. 2011. Retrieved 23 September 2020. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..5729ebeaa --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +--- +title: "Where-to-be-born Index" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where-to-be-born_Index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:00.151038+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Where-to-be-born Index, formerly known as the Quality-of-life Index (QLI), was last published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in 2013. Its purpose was to assess which country offered the most favorable conditions for a healthy, secure, and prosperous life in the years following its release. +It was based on a method that combines the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys with the objective determinants of quality of life across countries, as well as forecasts for economic growth. + + +== Methodology == +In 2013, an index was created using data from 80 countries and territories. The survey considered ten quality-of-life factors and future GDP per capita forecasts to determine each nation’s score. Switzerland, Australia, and Norway topped the list with scores just above 8. +Back in 2006, life satisfaction scores (rated on a scale of 1 to 10) for 130 countries (from the Gallup Poll) were analyzed through multivariate regression. Researchers identified 11 statistically significant indicators that explained about 85% of the variation in life satisfaction scores across countries. These predicted scores represent a country’s quality of life index, with coefficients automatically weighing the importance of different factors. The estimated equation from 2006 allows for comparisons over time and across nations. +The independent variables in the estimating equation for 2006 include: + +Material well-being as measured by GDP per capita (in USD, at 2006 constant PPPS) +Life expectancy at birth +The quality of family life based primarily on divorce rates +The state of political freedoms +Job security (measured by the unemployment rate) +Climate (measured by two variables: the average deviation of minimum and maximum monthly temperatures from 14 degrees Celsius; and the number of months in the year with less than 30mm rainfall) +Personal physical security ratings (based primarily on recorded homicide rates and ratings for risk from crime and terrorism) +Quality of community life (based on membership in social organizations) +Governance (measured by ratings for corruption) +Gender equality (measured by the share of women holding seats in national Houses of Assembly) + + +== See also == + + +=== Measurement and metrics === + + +=== Indices === + + +== Notes == \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Peace_and_Security_Index-0.md b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Peace_and_Security_Index-0.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..4f81499ed --- /dev/null +++ b/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Peace_and_Security_Index-0.md @@ -0,0 +1,88 @@ +--- +title: "Women, Peace and Security Index" +chunk: 1/1 +source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women,_Peace_and_Security_Index" +category: "reference" +tags: "science, encyclopedia" +date_saved: "2026-05-05T15:40:01.527816+00:00" +instance: "kb-cron" +--- + +The Women, Peace and Security Index (WPS) scores and ranks countries in terms of women's security, justice, and inclusion. The index is widely used to compare countries as well as their development trends over time. + + +== Description == +The index is published by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and the PRIO Centre on Gender, Peace and Security with support from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As of October 2023, four indexes have been released. +The researchers use a total of 13 indicators, spanning from employment and education regulations to perceptions of violence and safety. The index takes into account proximity to armed conflict, financial inclusion, share of parliamentary seats, and other parameters. Information is gathered from various sources such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Gallup World Poll. Scores are on a scale of 0 to 1. +There are major implications of the WPS reports and scores. The WPS is highly correlated with other indexes, most notably the Human Development Index, the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index, and the Fragile States Index. These correlations demonstrate that when women are doing well in a society, it is also more peaceful, democratic, and prosperous. The WPS score is a more consistent predictor of these features than a country's GDP, indicating that women's rights and gender equality are integral to a country's state. The index also gives insight into +specific domains in which every country can improve. + + +== Indicators == +In its initial form, the WPS used 11 indicators across 3 dimensions. In the newest edition from 2023/2024, it used 13 indicators. + + +=== Inclusion === +Inclusion is defined as being economic, social, and political. This dimension contains five indicators. + +Education, measured as the average number of years of education of women 25 years and older. +Financial inclusion, measured as percentage of women with a bank account (individual or joint). +Employment, measured as a percentage of women between ages 25-64 in the formal or informal workplace. +Cellphone use, measured as women above the age of 15 who have a mobile phone that they can use for personal calls. +Parliamentary representation, measured as percentage of seats held by women. + + +=== Justice === +Justice is defined as formal and informal discrimination. This dimension contains four indicators. + +Absence of legal discrimination, scored from 0-100 to reflect how the law protects women's opportunities across 35 life and work aspects. +Access to justice, scored from 0-4 based on the extent to which women are able to exercise justice in court without threat to safety. +Maternal mortality, measured as the number of maternal deaths due to pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births +Son bias, measured as the number of boys born per 100 girls, with a rate of 1.05 being the highest natural demographic. + + +=== Security === +Security is defined as being at the individual, community, and societal levels. This dimension contains four indicators. + +Intimate partner violence, measured as the percentage of women whom have had a partner in their lifetime and have experienced physical or sexual violence by a partner in the past 12 months. +Community safety, defined as the percentage of women and girls older than 15 who were polled by Gallup World Poll and answered that they felt safe walking alone where they live. +Political violence targeting women, measured as the number of political violence events against women per 100,000 women. +Proximity to conflict, measured as percentage of women living within 50 kilometers of an armed conflict. + + +== Past Reports == + + +=== 2017/2018 Report === +The 2017/2018 WPS Report was the inaugural report that debuted the index. It ranked 153 countries, covering more than 98% of the world's population. The top 12 countries all scored at or above 0.845, with top three scorers in order being Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland. The bottom dozen countries scored at or below 0.56. There was a larger disparity here, with the bottom three countries in order being Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen, with Syria and Afghanistan both receiving a score of 0.385. In contrast, Iceland's score was 0.886. + + +=== 2019/2020 Report === +The 2019/2020 WPS Report expanded with additional data to 167 countries. In this report, the top dozen countries all scored above 0.870. The top three in order were Norway, Switzerland, and Finland. The bottom three countries were Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria. The top scorer, Norway, received a score of 0.904, with the bottom scorer, Yemen, receiving a score of 0.351. This edition of the WPS also added subnational reports for three of the most populous countries (China, India, and Nigeria) to reflect diversity within each. +There were several significant findings of this report. Almost every country, excluding Iceland, scored poorly in at least one dimension. General trends across all countries showed that all three dimensions improved from the 2017/2018 report. However, on individual indicators such as parliamentary representation and employment, progress had stalled. + + +=== 2021/2022 Report === +The 2021/2022 WPS Report ranked a total of 170 countries. From the 2017 report to the 2021 report, there was a global average increase of 9 percent in WPS scores. 90 countries had an increase of 5 percent or more. The top dozen countries scored at or above 0.879, with the top three in order being Norway, Finland, and Iceland. The bottom three countries were Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. Syria, the lowest scorer, was given a score of 0.278, compared to the top scorer Norway with 0.922. A notable addition to this report was Palestine, which ranked 160th. The pace of progress slowed dramatically, cut by nearly half compared to the pace from 2017 to 2019, largely attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. + + +=== 2023/2024 Report === +The 2023/2024 WPS Report is the most recent. It scored and ranked 177 countries. Four indicators were changed or new in this report, meaning that directly comparing scores from this year to past reports will not be the most accurate measure. Notably, all of the top dozen scoring countries were above 0.9, compared to only four in 2021. All of the lowest dozen countries were below 0.45, compared to only three being below that threshold in 2021. The top three countries were Denmark, Switzerland, and Sweden, with Denmark receiving a score of 0.932. The lowest three countries were Afghanistan, Yemen, and the Central African Republic, with Afghanistan receiving a score of 0.286. +There was again wide disparities between the scores for the three dimensions within many countries, showing that all countries have room for improvement. Additionally, the report found that 600 million women (15% of the world's women) lived within 50 kilometers of an armed conflict in 2022. + + +== Countries == +These are the scores and rankings from the 2023/2024 WPS Report. + + +== See also == + +Gender Development Index +Gender Inequality Index +Gender Parity Index +Global Gender Gap Report +Global Peace Index +Women's Economic Opportunity Index + + +== References == \ No newline at end of file