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
- related to free indirect speech
- basically, speaking of yourself, but in third person
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.)
15. metathesis
- transposition of sounds