I had to look up all of these words today in order to be able to explain just one aspect of my research. One of the things that I work on is the topic of sublanguages (explained below). Looking for material on the subject in French, I came across the doctoral dissertation Sur la notion de sous-langage, by Roland Dachelet. Even in the context of discussing my own research, Zipf’s Law strikes.
- le sous-langage: sublanguage.
- le domaine: domain. A sublanguage is a variety of language associated with a specific domain—medicine, biology, weather, sports reporting.
- spécialisé: specialized. Being related to a specific domain, a sublanguage is specialized.
- la contrainte: constraint. Sublanguages are generally associated with constraints—constraints on the kinds of subjects and arguments that a verb in the domain can have, for instance; constraints on syntactic structures; constraints on the set of words.
- le lexique: in this case, the set of words in a text—vocabulary. It has other meanings, too, such as bilingual dictionary. Typically the set of words in a sublanguage is constrained.
- la morphologie: morphology (how words are put together).
- une ambiguïté: ambiguity. The fundamental problem of language processing—if most things in language didn’t have multiple possible interpretations, computers could just look everything up.
- la variabilité: variability. The other major problem of language processing—there are so many ways to express the same thing.
- la caractérisation: characterization. The current challenge in sublanguages is to characterize them automatically—that is, with a computer, as opposed to a human doing it manually.
- la syntaxe: syntax. This is how phrases are structured.
- syntaxique: syntactic.
- une analyse syntaxique: syntactic analysis.
- la structure: structure. Syntax is mostly about structure.
- la sémantique: semantics.
- sous-jacent: below, underlying, implicit (the sense in which I need it). Important aspects of language, such as syntactic structure, are implicit in the sense that they are not visibly indicated in the stream of language.
Zipf's Law 