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assorted terms from linguistics

Assorted terms from linguistics and rhetoric.

1 Hapax Legomenon

  • word only attested to once in a work

2 Synedoche

3 Metonymy

4 anaphora

  • refers to something that came before in context, e.g. a pronoun
    • can be broader than that though

5 de dicto vs de re

  • de dicto – "what is said". For example: "Jane wants to marry the richest man in the world" should be read as "The richest man, whoever he may be, is who Jane wants to marry."
  • de re – "the thing" In the above example: the sentence can be read "Jeff Bezos, who happens to be the richest man in the world, is who Jane wants to marry"

6 de se

7 scalar implicature

8 meronym and holonym

  • semantic relationships between words.
  • \(x\) is a meronym of \(y\) if \(x\) can be said to be part of \(y\): a finger is a part of a hand. The converse holds for holonyms

9 hyponym

  • \(x\) is a hyponym of \(y\) if \(x\) can be said to be a type of \(y\): a pine tree is a tree.

10 polysyndeton and asyndeton

  • polysyndeton – using many conjunctions: "I did this and I did that and I went there and I came here…"
  • asyndeton – omitting conjunctions: "I came, I saw, I conquered"

11 case

  • categorization of (usually) nouns and pronouns according to syntactical function

11.1 dative case

  • marks the indirect object: "Mary gave the gift to John"

11.2 accusative case

  • marks the direct object: "I see the car

11.3 nominative case

  • marks the subject

11.4 genitive

  • marks a relationship between the genitive-noun and the main-noun, e.g. pack of (genitive) dogs (main)
  • these relationships can be a lot of things. Including:
    • possession – "Jane's cheese"
    • composition – "wheel of cheese"
    • participation in an action
    • etc.

12 declension

  • changing the form of a word to indicate syntactic information, e.g. marking a noun with case
  • for verbs, this is called conjugation

13 conjugation

  • inflect a verb with information about: person, case, gender, etc.

14 thematic relations

  • TODO expand this into a full note
  • semantic roles that can be assigned to (usually) nouns
  • roles include: agent (does the acting), patient (gets acted on, etc.)

Created: 2021-09-16 Thu 01:23