Terms
- aramhayr
- Jan 22
- 10 min read
Updated: Jun 23
Actor – in computer science or process description either human or mechanical (software module, hardware unit, application, etc.) role player in requirements specification for a System design
Ambiposition - an adposition that can occur either before or after its complement. Other types are: preposition, circumposition, postposition
Amphiboly - a logical fallacy and grammatical flaw where a sentence is ambiguous due to its faulty syntax or punctuation, allowing for multiple interpretations.
Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) - interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers (Wikipedia)
Acceptance Criteria (AC) – a list of statements that are true, if a feature of the system defined in a US is implemented correctly.
Circumposition - an adposition that surrounds its complement, with one part placed before the element and the other placed after it.
Classifier - a word or morpheme that must accompany certain nouns in specific syntactic environments (typically with numerals or demonstratives) to group the noun into a semantic class such as shape, animacy, or function.Unlike adjectives, classifiers do not freely contribute descriptive content and usually cannot stand alone as predicates; they are syntactically required formatives that mark the noun’s class for counting or reference.
Mandarin Chinese: 三本书 sān běn shū “three CL-volume book(s)” where 本 běn is a classifier for bound/volume-like items; you cannot say 三书 sān shū for “three books” without the classifier.
Japanese: 二匹の犬 ni-hiki no inu “two CL-small-animal dogs,” where 匹 hiki is a counter/classifier for small animals; 二犬 is ungrammatical for “two dogs.”
Korean: 세 마리 개 se mari gae “three CL-animal dogs,” with 마리 mari as the classifier for animals; again the classifier is required with the numeral.
The classifier differs from noun (piece, animal, etc.), because it cannot normally take plural or case like a full noun, and its choice is lexically tied to the counted noun, unlike adjectives whose choice is semantically free.
Clause – a grammatical combination of a finite verb phrase and an optional object phrase.
Clitic (/ˈklɪtɪk/ KLIT-ik, backformed from Greek ἐγκλιτικός enklitikós "leaning" or 'enclitic') is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase. In this sense, it is syntactically independent but phonologically dependent—always attached to a host. A clitic is pronounced like an affix, but plays a syntactic role at the phrase level. In other words, clitics have the form of affixes, but they are distributed like function words.
Coherence – a property of speech (discourse) involving relational, consistent connections between phrases, clauses, and sentences.
Collocation (col- (lat. together) + location) - combination of words that occur with much higher frequency than would be expected by chance.
Combining form - a morpheme that occurs only in compounds or derivatives and can be distinguished descriptively from an affix by its ability to occur as one immediate constituent of a form whose only other immediate constituent is an affix (such as cephal- in cephalic) or by its being derived from an independent word (such as electro- representing electric in electromagnet or para- representing parachute in paratrooper) or can be distinguished historically from an affix by the fact that it is borrowed from another language in which it is descriptively a word or a combining form (such as French mal giving English mal- in malodorous)
Common knowledge – “Two people, 1 and 2, are said to have common knowledge of an event E if both know it, 1 knows that 2 knows it, 2 knows that 1 knows is, 1 knows that 2 knows that 1 knows it, and so on” (Aumann, 1976)[1]. Common knowledge is not only knowledge that both share, but also that each of the two knows that the other knows about it
Content tree (CT) – a tree-like data structure of a sentence that represents dependencies between the units of speech: lexemes, phrases, clauses, based on syntactic (part-of-speech), semantic, and pragmatic tagging.
Communication- the transmission of information.
Complement - A word or group of words that completes a grammatical construction in the predicate and that describes or is identified with the subject or object.
Connective – a lexeme that links lexemes, phrases, and clauses into [coherent] speech. The conjunctions (շաղկապներ) and relational lexemes (relative pronouns, adverbs, and adjectives). Conjunctions specifically facilitate inferential, logical, and causal connections.
Contraction - a single phonological and (often) orthographic word that results from fusing two or more words, typically through vowel deletion, consonant reduction, or cliticization, while preserving much of the original syntactic structure.Contractions differ from simple affixation because they are synchronically analyzable as combinations of independent words (auxiliaries, pronouns, negators) rather than as bound morphemes forming a new lexical item.
English: I am → I’m, do not → don’t, he will → he’ll; these behave syntactically like the full sequences (I’m not ready ≈ I am not ready), unlike an inflected verb such as isn’t which may be lexicalized.
French: je ai → j’ai “I have,” ne est → n’est “is not”; here the vowel deletion and apostrophe mark a contracted clitic, distinct from a single lexical noun or verb.
Thus, whereas nouns or adjectives introduce independent lexical content, contractions package existing function words in a reduced phonological form without adding new lexical meaning.
Counter - a subclass of classifiers that are more numeral like. They separated into separate part-of-spech mostly for pedagogical reasons, since they have no specific grammatical or syntactic properties to distinguish them from classifiers.
Conversation - interactive communication between two or more people.
Data View – data extract from one or more underlying data sources through a predefined query. It allows the users to interact with the extracted data as if it were a separate data repository.
Defeasible reasoning - reasoning when the corresponding argument is rationally compelling but not deductively valid. The truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of conclusion: rough-and-ready inferences, exception-permitting generalizations.
Discourse – a minimal stretch of verbal communication (a message) created as the result of speech production, consisting of units that are tightly connected and whose meaning and intention are impossible or difficult to understand without the other units in the same discourse. Minimality in this context means that removing any unit of speech from the discourse makes it incoherent and hard (or impossible) to understand. Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. It is a "sequence of written or oral utterances, arranged into a coherent whole" (Zufferey & Moeschler 2012: 143).
Grammar - a set of rules to produce, analyze, or describe new codes from existing, that can be assigned a meaning to. There are several types of grammar: 1) Descriptive, 2) Pedagogical, 3) Prescriptive, 4) Reference, 5) Theoretical, 6) Traditional [Cry2010::92]. In this context by grammar we understand Theoretical grammar: a set of rules to produce (and parse) speech units from the already produced. Natural languages typically described by 2 theoretical grammars: 1) morphology, that produces lexemes from morphemes and lexemes, and 2) syntax, that produces phrases, clauses, sentences from lexemes and phrases, and claises.
Holism - a philosophical and practical approach arguing that the whole of a system should be viewed as more than just the sum of its individual parts. It emphasizes that complex systems can only be deeply understood by analyzing the relationships and interactions between their components within the broader context.
Implicature - a meaning that goes beyond the literal sense. In discourse analysis it denotes a locutionary act of meaning one thing by saying something else, and it can also refer to the object of that act
Information - news encoded in a message - verbal or other. It is a relative quantity: it is inversely proportional to the receiver's anticipation (probability) of getting a known (recognizable) code in the particular position in the message. If I tell that «եւ-ը վերջածանց է» to someone, who does not understand Armenian, then the amount of information transmitted by the message will be 0, because no code is known. For a lay person, who knows Armenian, the message has much more information, then for a linguist. Ellipses in the discourse occur when the speaker is sure that the probability of the omitted phrase recovery is 1, hence, carries no information for the listener. More genrally, it is the encoded change of one state of a system into another.
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) - an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation for the sounds of speech (Wikipedia).
Lemma – dictionary form of a lexeme
Lemmatization – extraction or recreation of lemma from the text form
NoSQL database - or "Not Only SQL" database, is a non-relational database designed to handle unstructured or semi-structured data. Other database types are: relational normalized, relational denormalized (warehouse), hierarchical (file system), etc.
Lexeme – the minimal unit of languge that can be assigned ontological meaning to: as a representative of an object, state (noun), attribute (adjective, adverb, verb), etc. or a grammatical role: subject, predicate, object, etc. in a sentence. It is a combination of attached or detached morphemesa combination of morphemes that have [ontological, logical] meaning and can be assigned a syntactic role that is structured according to grammatical rules – morphology. Traditionally – word. The borderline between lexeme and phrase is blurry, for example, in case of conjunctions and numerals.
Meta-grammar - a language for generating (or describing) grammars. Meta-grammar is a system that defines patterns or rules for generating grammars. In the context of natural languages meta-grammar is a grammar for producing natural language grammars. The relation of meta-grammar to natural language grammar is similar to the relation of natural language grammar to speech. Natural language (grammar) produces natural speech, meta-grammar produces natural-language grammar.
Morpheme – a language unit serving a morphological function, such as stem, suffix, or particle.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document (Wikipedia).
Parser – analysis (breakdown) of a message (natural language text, programming language source code) and transformation into a structured format. It involves breaking down the input into its constituent parts according to predefined rules or grammar. We assume that the “language organ” in human brain parses natural speech into tree-like structure before passing it to other layers for storage and analysis. Computer programming language parsers also parse the source code into a tree like structure before passing it to other modules for linearizing it into a sequence of commands
Phrase – a grammatically structured combination of lexemes, one of which is the head of the phrase and the others complement the head; typically a verb, noun, or attributive (adjectival or adverbial) phrase
Portable document format (PDF) - standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems (Wikipedia)
Reductionism - philosophical and scientific approach of breaking complex systems, theories, or phenomena down into their smaller, more fundamental parts. It operates on the premise that a whole is merely the sum of its constituents and can be best understood by analyzing those individual components.
Relational database - a type of database that organizes data into one or more tables (or "relations") with rows and columns, establishing relationships between the data points. Columns represent relation types, while each row contains a set of data points or instances that are related to each other.
Sentence – a structure comprising subject noun phrases and clauses, aligned by person and number; may involve multiple subjects and clauses joined by connectives..
Sequence - a set of things next to each other in a preset order; a series.
Series - a number of things that follow on one after the other or are connected one after the other.
Signature – a contextual specification for a linguistic unit, denoted by the types of units it relates to in deep structure. For example, <P1>C<P2> for a conjunction C joining phrase types P1 and P2; or for verb the signature <nomNP>V<datNP> means that the verb V connects nominative Subject with dative Object (see [Հայ2022::284-288] for verb signatures).
Skin (computer science) - refers to a customizable visual layer applied to software or games to change its appearance without altering its core functions. It is a custom design package or file applied to a program, website, or operating system to changes surface-level looks (like colors, fonts, or icons) and never changes the way the software works.
Speech - a combination of lexemes construted according to syntactic rules (grammar) into phrases, clauses, and sentences.
Speech Act - definition and classification.
Structured Query Language (SQL) - standard language for interacting with relational databases
Subitizing - ability to instantly, accurately, and effortlessly recognize the number of items in a small group without counting them.
System – product, service, organization that is being developed.
Tagger - in corpus linguistics, part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging, PoS tagging, or POST), also called grammatical tagging, is the process of marking up a word in a text (corpus) as corresponding to a particular part of speech, based on both its definition and its context. A simplified form of this is commonly taught to school-age children, in the identification of words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc. (Wikipedia) [Note. This is written from an analytical language grammar perspective. Instead of part-of-speech the paradigmatic form should be used and taught to school-age children.]
Thought – a mental image or representation originally created by perception or imagination
Troponym (greek. τρόπος — manner, way, mode, or style + ὄνομα — name) - a verb whose meaning specifies a particular manner of performing the action denoted by a more general verb. For example, stroll, march, and saunter are troponyms of walk because they describe specific ways of walking.
Verb phrase – a phrase with a head verb, potentially including adverbial or case-marked NP complements.
User Story - standardized narrative format for describing system features from the end-user perspective. It specifies “who wants to achieve what” – User Story phrase, and Acceptance
Use Case - structured description of the System behavior as responses to a sequence of the Actor’s requests for achieving a tangible goal.
Universal grammar - the set of common features of natural language abilities. "Universal" means the set of common parts found in all grammars. It implies a commonality of parts, while meta-grammar implies principles of construction.
Utterance – “any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of the person” [Har1951::14].
Word - a sequence of letters, characters, or sounds, considered as a discrete entity, though it does not necessarily belong to a language or have a meaning.
Sentence – a grammatically aligned combination of subject phrase, clause, and sentence
[1] The concept was first introduced by (Lewis, 1975).

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