[Corpora-List] What are the terms used for sentence-, paragraph- and text-level analysis?

[Alon Lischinsky]

On 2013/2/20 Matías Guzmán <mortem.dei at gmail.com> wrote:

>>The question remains why do we need "fancy" expressions at all?
>
> Because linguistics can't possibly afford to have a clear and unified
> terminology

Whatever the value of that argument in general, it's certainly not
applicable to this case: as far as I know, ‘lemma’ is the
universally-used term for canonical (in lexicography), uninflected
forms (in morphology and computational linguistics). You don't get
much more unified than that.

As for clarity, I've never seen what's wrong with having a term of art
for a concept that doesn't have an unambiguous correlate in everyday
usage. ‘Word’ wouldn't work in this case, since the point of ‘lemma’
is grouping various inflected word-forms under a common heading. In
fact, employing the everyday term can be a source of considerable
confusion between the lay and the specialised meaning (as Arnold
Zwicky has pointed out regarding ‘grammar’
[http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/its-all-grammar/] and
Geoffrey Pullum regarding ‘passive’
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922]).

A.

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