Words and meanings

Language units large and small Marked forms of words - Inflection, Derivation, Declension, Conjugation · Diminutive, Augmentative Groups and categories and properties of words - Syntactic and lexical categories · Grammatical cases · Correlatives · Expletives · Adjuncts Words and meaning - Morphology · Lexicology · Semiotics · Onomasiology · Figures of speech, expressions, phraseology, etc. · Word similarity · Ambiguity · Modality · Segment function, interaction, reference - Clitics · Apposition· Parataxis, Hypotaxis· Attributive· Binding · Coordinations · Word and concept reference Sentence structure and style - Agreement · Ellipsis· Hedging Phonology - Articulation · Formants· Prosody · Sound change · Intonation, stress, focus · Diphones · Intervocalic · Glottal stop · Vowel_diagrams · Elision · Ablaut_and_umlaut · Phonics Speech processing · Praat notes · Praat plugins and toolkit notes · Praat scripting notes Analyses, models, software - Minimal pairs · Concordances · Linguistics software · Some_relatively_basic_text_processing · Word embeddings · Semantic similarity Unsorted - Contextualism · · Text summarization · Accent, Dialect, Language · Pidgin, Creole · Natural language typology · Writing_systems · Typography, orthography · Digraphs, ligatures, dipthongs · More linguistic terms and descriptions · Phonetic scripts

Semiotics

Semiotics can be taken as the study of signs and how we relate them to meaning - any communication and any part of it.

Signs in this context are are anything that can be interpreted to have a meaning, including but not limited to sounds, motions, gesture, images.

(Meaningful things aren't even limited to things done intentionally. Signs that are present but not made intentionally are e.f. those used in medical diagnosis, as a symptom can be a a sign of a medical condition.)

In a practical sense we often still focus on words, yet the term is used in part to remind you these are far from the only meaning-carriers, even in diagolgue you consider to be word-based first.

Sign process is sometimes synonym for semiotics, arguably a more self-explanatory name to those not already deep in the theory.

Sign process is also sometimes a little more specifically meant as a "any process/activity that involves signs, and probably meaning".

You can argue that linguistics is mostly about intentional meaning, in a sense we try to keep compact and practical and structural, and semiology is a wider, more anthropological thing about any signs and symbols anyone may have used along the way.

As such, linguistics courses may skim over semiology, or use the term only for some of the more symbolic inbetweens we meet - analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism, and also conduct, behaviour, and a lot of other sociology.

It also overlaps with philosophy, relating to structuralism, and more. (see e.g. Saussure)

See also:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiosis

Philology, Etymology

✎ 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.

Etymology is the study of the history of words and phrases, primarily reporting use, change, transfer between languages and such, often comprising of finding and proving (or disproving) these genetic-like relations.

While it is focused a little less on meaning, it often ends up mentioning things in terms of morphology simply because a lot of carried meaning comes from morphemes.

The term is related to philology, which refers to the extensive study of historical linguistics, which may easily include many aspects of a language at a time - grammar, culture, relevant politics, and more.

Lexicology

✎ 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.

Lexicology is the general and objective study of words and their meanings.

In some ways, it is the lexical part of philology.

In other ways it is closely related to etymology, phraseology, and semantics.

Lexicography can be said to be the applied part of lexicology, as it studies the use of words.

'Lexicography' is also and is often used to refer to the compilation of a lexicon. Note that lexicographer is a comparatively specific word, referring to someone who writes dictionaries.

See also

Etymological websites:

• http://www.etymonline.com/
• http://www.wordorigins.org/
• http://www.takeourword.com/
• http://wordwizard.com/

Names:

• http://www.behindthename.com/