"Words and phrases" typically refers to the basic building blocks of language. Here’s a breakdown: 1. **Words**: Individual units of meaning that can stand alone. In English, for example, words can be nouns (e.g., "dog"), verbs (e.g., "run"), adjectives (e.g., "happy"), and more. Words are combined to express ideas, feelings, and actions.
In linguistics, abstraction refers to the process of creating general concepts or categories from specific instances. It involves distilling complex ideas or phenomena into more generalized forms, often by removing specific details that are not central to understanding the underlying principles or structures.
"Constructed action" and "constructed dialogue" are terms often used in the study of performance, particularly in theater and the performing arts, as well as in narrative analysis and storytelling. These concepts help to illustrate how performers and storytellers create meaning through their actions and words. ### Constructed Action Constructed action refers to the way performers create specific physical actions or gestures to convey meaning or character intent in a performance.
Rational reconstruction is a method used in philosophy, particularly in the areas of social sciences and epistemology. It involves the process of taking a phenomenon, concept, or historical event and reconstructing it in a way that emphasizes its rationality, coherence, and systematic understanding. The aim is to determine the underlying principles, assumptions, or logical structures that inform a particular theory, practice, or set of beliefs.
The Gradient Salience Model (GSM) is a computational framework used primarily in the context of natural language processing (NLP) to understand and generate attention mechanisms in neural networks, particularly in models dealing with tasks like sentiment analysis, machine translation, and textual entailment. This model emphasizes the importance of the distribution and strength of particular features (e.g., words, phrases) in the input data as they relate to the output predictions made by a neural network.
Historical pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that examines how the use and interpretation of language in context have evolved over time. It focuses on understanding how the meanings and functions of words, sentences, and discourse practices change in different historical periods, taking into account social, cultural, and situational contexts. Key aspects of historical pragmatics include: 1. **Contextual Meaning**: Investigating how the meaning of expressions can shift based on their usage in particular contexts during different historical periods.
Honorifics in linguistics refer to words or expressions that convey respect, politeness, or social status in communication. They can take various forms, including titles, pronouns, verb forms, and other lexical items. Honorifics serve to indicate the relationship between the speaker and the listener, as well as the relative status or social hierarchy between them.
In linguistics, *entailment* refers to a relationship between two statements or propositions where the truth of one statement necessarily implies the truth of another. If statement A entails statement B, then whenever A is true, B must also be true. This relationship is important in semantics, the study of meaning in language, as it helps in understanding how different sentences relate to each other in terms of truth conditions. For example, consider the statements: - A: "All cats are mammals.
Evidentiality is a linguistic feature that indicates the source of information expressed in a statement or claim. It conveys the speaker's assessment of the reliability of the information and how they came to know it. Evidentiality is particularly important in languages that grammatically encode this information, allowing speakers to indicate whether they are speaking from direct experience, hearsay, inference, or other sources.
Experimental pragmatics is a subfield of pragmatics, which itself is the study of how context influences the interpretation of meaning in communication. While traditional pragmatics often involves theoretical exploration and analysis of language use in real-world contexts, experimental pragmatics applies empirical methods and experimental designs to investigate how people understand and produce language in various situations. Key aspects of experimental pragmatics include: 1. **Empirical Methods**: Researchers use controlled experiments, often involving quantitative measures, to test hypotheses related to pragmatic phenomena.
Intercultural pragmatics is a subfield of pragmatics that studies how individuals from different cultural backgrounds communicate and understand each other. It examines the ways in which cultural norms, values, and social contexts influence language use, interpretation of meaning, and communicative intentions in intercultural interactions.
Linguistic empathy refers to the capacity to understand and resonate with the feelings, experiences, and perspectives of others through language. It involves not only the ability to grasp the meaning of what someone is saying but also a deeper, emotional connection that can be communicated through language use, tone, and choice of words.
Prosiopesis, also known as prosopopeia or prosopopoeia, is a rhetorical device in which an abstract idea, an inanimate object, or even an imaginary entity is given human characteristics or the ability to speak. This technique is often used to create vivid imagery and engage the audience's emotions by personifying concepts that are otherwise intangible. For example, in literature, a poet might depict death as a character who speaks to the living.
The "question under discussion" typically refers to the specific topic or issue that is being addressed, debated, or analyzed in a particular context, such as a conversation, academic paper, meeting, or other forms of discourse. It is the focal point of inquiry or the main subject that participants are examining or trying to resolve.
As of my last knowledge update in October 2021, "Compunet" could refer to a few different things, depending on the context. Here are a couple of possibilities: 1. **CompuNet (Networking and IT Service)**: In some cases, "CompuNet" or "CompuNet Services" is a name used by companies that offer IT solutions, networking services, or technology consulting.
Origo in pragmatics refers to the perspective or point of reference in discourse, which encompasses various dimensions like the speaker, the listener, the context, and the time of the utterance. It is a key concept in understanding how meaning is constructed and interpreted in communication.
Performativity is a concept that originates in linguistic and philosophical theories and refers to the capacity of certain utterances or actions to bring about effects in the world simply by being expressed. The term is most famously associated with the work of philosopher J.L. Austin, who distinguished between constative statements (which describe states of affairs) and performative utterances, which do things—such as making promises, issuing orders, or declaring someone married—when they are spoken under the right conditions.
Phatic expressions are conversational phrases used to establish social relationships rather than to convey information or express ideas. They are often characterized by their function of maintaining a social bond, engaging in small talk, or facilitating communication without the need for deep content. Common examples of phatic expressions include greetings like "How are you?" or "Nice weather we're having," as well as polite inquiries or remarks that serve to acknowledge someone's presence.
The squiggle operator (∼) is a symbol used in various fields, and its meaning can vary depending on the context. Here are a few common interpretations: 1. **Mathematics**: In mathematical notation, the squiggle often represents "approximately," which can indicate that two quantities are close in value but not exactly equal. For example, if \( a \sim b \), it suggests that \( a \) is approximately equal to \( b \).
Politeness maxims are principles that guide the way people communicate in a manner that is socially acceptable and respectful. The concept of politeness maxims was notably developed by sociolinguist Geoffrey Leech in his book "Principles of Pragmatics" (1983), where he outlined a set of maxims that individuals generally follow in conversation to maintain politeness.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact