Glossary
- Additive connective:
connective indicating a discourse relation of addition, in which two segments are linked by a logical conjunction without a relation of implication between them.
- Alternative signal:
linguistic indication of a discourse relation other than a connective, such as a verbal tense, a semantic relation between lexical items or a punctuation mark.
- Ambiguous connective:
connective that can be used to convey different discourse relations depending on context.
- Asyndetic relation:
discourse relation that is not marked by an explicit linguistic marker.
- Bottom-up approach:
methodological approach, mainly in corpus linguistics, that starts from the observation of the linguistic data to construct or confirm a theoretical model.
- Causal connective:
connective used to indicate a discourse relation of causality, that is a relation involving a logical implication between the two related segments.
- Clause-combining:
different ways in which simple clauses may be combined syntactically to form complex clauses, such as coordination and subordination.
- Cognitive impairment:
difficulties affecting the ability to think, learn and remember information, typically impacting memory, language and judgement.
- Cognitive primitive:
used in the CCR framework to designate the meaning components of discourse relations, including basic operation, order of the segments, source of coherence and polarity.
- Coherence:
cognitive notion designating the meaning conveyed by a discourse, both at a local level by adequately connected sentences and at a global level.
- Cohesion:
linguistic notion designating the linguistic features used to link sentences together within a discourse such as anaphora, verbal tenses and discourse connectives.
- Computational linguistics:
linguistic approach applying computer science to the analysis of written and spoken language.
- Conceptual meaning:
in lexical semantics, conceptual meaning refers to the literal encoded meaning of a word.
- Concessive connective:
connective used to indicate a discourse relation of concession, that is a counterfactual relation, indicating that the situation expressed in the main clause is contrary to expectation.
- Connective (discourse connective):
explicit linguistic marker of a discourse relation between two discourse segments.
- Connectivity:
property of linguistic markers to express discourse relations.
- Contrastive connective:
connective used to indicate a discourse relation of contrast, that is a relation involving a semantic opposition between the two related segments.
- Contrastive linguistics:
field of linguistics dedicated to fine-grained synchronic comparisons between specific aspects of a limited number of languages.
- Cooptation:
operation whereby a linguistic expression at the sentence level is deployed for use at the discourse level.
- Coordination:
type of clause combining, whereby the two related segments are functionally and syntactically independent from one another.
- Core meaning:
the basic and most important meaning of a lexical item, of use mainly in the monosemic approach (see Monosemy).
- Corpus linguistics:
methodology involving the empirical analysis of a large quantity of naturally occurring digitalized data from written or spoken sources.
- Corpus-based analysis:
quantitative or qualitative empirical analysis of a linguistic feature based on corpus data.
- Dependency relation:
syntactic, semantic or functional relation between a head and its dependencies.
- Diachronic linguistics:
linguistic approach aiming to describe linguistic change over time.
- Discourse annotation:
manual or semi-automatized annotation of discourse features such as discourse relations or connectives in corpus data.
- Discourse comprehension:
understanding of the meaning of a spoken or written discourse, encompassing the linguistic decoding of its linguistic content and the derivation of inferences based on world knowledge.
- Discourse marker:
text structuring device linking the host utterance to the broader context, making explicit speaker’s attitudes and speaker-hearer management strategies. Connectives are a subclass of discourse markers.
- Discourse relation:
nature of the logical link uniting discourse segments, such as causality, addition, consequence and concession.
- Experimental pragmatics:
use of experiments applied to pragmatic phenomena such as implicatures and speech acts, in order to study language processing and comprehension.
- Explicit relation:
discourse relation conveyed by the use of a connective.
- Eye-tracking:
method used to infer the position and movements of the eyes to study the cognitive processes at play during spoken language comprehension and online reading.
- First language acquisition:
developing ability to understand and use the language or languages that children are exposed to during their first years of life.
- Genre:
a conventional way to use language in a certain domain such as newspaper articles, literary novels, online chats, etc.
- Grammatical category:
class of linguistic units (like nouns or verbs) or features (like number or case) that share a set of common properties regarding their use in the grammar of a language, also known as part-of-speech (POS).
- Grammaticalization:
diachronic process whereby lexical items become grammatical items.
- Implicit relation:
discourse relation not conveyed by a connective.
- Individual differences:
the different levels of cognitive or linguistic competence between several persons when they perform the same task.
- Mode (spoken -, written -):
the spoken mode refers to language use in spoken form, the written mode refers to language use in its written form.
- Monosemy:
methodological approach in lexical semantics according to which (most) lexical items have a single encoded core meaning.
- Natural language processing (NLP):
computational approach aiming at using computer science techniques to understand how language works.
- Non-truth-conditionality:
meaning of a linguistic expression that cannot be described in terms of truth or falsity.
- Onomasiological approach:
linguistic method aiming at describing meaning differences for broader categories, for example the differences and similarities between causal connectives and contrastive connectives (in contrast with semasiology).
- Periphery (left and right):
position at the beginning or at the end of a linguistic segment.
- Polyfunctionality:
refers to the fact that some connectives can be used to convey several different discourse relations depending on context.
- Polysemy:
methodological approach in lexical semantics according to which lexical items may encode more than on core meaning (contrasts with monosemy).
- POS-tagging:
(automatically) adding a grammatical category label to all tokens in a corpus.
- Pragmaticalization:
diachronic process whereby a lexical or grammatical item becomes a discourse item.
- Procedural meaning:
in lexical semantics, procedural meaning refers to non-conceptual meaning, in other words meaning that does refer to instructions on how to manipulate concepts rather than to (referential) concepts themselves.
- Processing (of discourse):
the mental operations enabling the decoding and understanding of language as it unfolds.
- Psycholinguistics:
a field combining linguistics and psychology to study the processing, representation and acquisition of language in the brain.
- Recall:
the amount of information remembered from a text after reading it.
- Register:
the degree of formality of the language used in a given genre.
- Second language learning:
a field of linguistics studying the acquisition of additional languages acquired after the period of first language acquisition.
- Self-paced reading:
a method used to assess online reading by splitting sentences into segments and measuring the time needed to read them across experimental conditions.
- Semantic path:
description of the way semantic (relational) meanings (typically) evolve over time, for example temporal > causal.
- Semasiological approach:
methodological approach in lexical semantics aiming at describing semantic differences and similarities from specific linguistic items.
- Sociolinguistics:
a field of linguistics analysing the relations between language and society, such as regional, class- and gender-related differences in language use.
- Subordination:
syntactic dependency relation between a main clause and a subordinated clause.
- Syndetic relation:
relation that is expressed by a linguistic marker.
- Taxonomy:
hierarchical classification of concepts, such as discourse relations.
- Temporal connective:
connective that signals a temporal relation, either synchronous (different moments following in time) or asynchronous (at a particular time).
- Top-down approach:
methodological approach whereby the empirical analysis follows a preconceived theoretical model.
- Usage-based linguistics:
linguistic approach that considers authentic language use as it is observed in natural contexts as its object of study.
- Weak-clause association:
property of a linguistic element to be syntactically independent from its host clause or in a loose syntactic dependency relation.
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