Orthogonal

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

The general concept of orthogonality describes independence.

In math, it is often used in geometric spaces, where it basically means 'is it perpendicular', related to use as a basis.

In linguistics, it is often meant to describe how different categorizations are or are not exclusive descriptions. For example, there is overlap between certain types of nouns and verbs in their properties and use (and this argues against lexical category being used as a hard categorization)