OLAC Linguistic Subject Vocabulary

This document specifies the codes, or suggested vocabulary, for the 'linguistic' value of the xsi:type attribute of the OLAC Subject element. These codes describe the content of a resource as about a particular subfield of linguistic science, or about the level of linguistic structure which is the primary concern of a given subfield.

Title changed from 'Linguistic Field' to 'Linguistic Subject'; Added terms Forensic Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Mathematical Linguistics; 'Language Description' renamed to 'Language Documentation'; 'Translation' renamed to 'Translation and Interpreting'; Many terms redefined, with new examples.

Anthropological linguistics often concerns less well-documented languages. The definition includes 'ethnolinguistics.'

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

The SIL Ethnologue, which collects data on the number on speakers of a language and the geographical region in which it is spoken.

The definition includes TESOL, ESL, Second Language Teaching, Second Language Learning and Contrastive Linguistics.

This category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading 'Language and Education,' not the LCSH category 'Applied Linguistics,' which includes computer applications of linguistics. In the 'OLAC-Linguistic' extension of the DCMI Subject element, computer applications should be classified as Computational Linguistics.

Teaching materials, guides for language teachers, and studies of adult language learning.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

An experiment on language and vision or a book on the study of mind.

The definition includes Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, but not Mathematical Linguistics.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

Books and papers dealing with Machine Translation, Text to Speech software, and algorithms to parse sentences.

The definition includes Humor Studies, Conversation Analysis, Interactional Sociolinguistics, and studies of language use in special circumstances, e.g. Courtroom Language.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

Transcripts of discourse, perhaps with turn taking and speaker overlap highlighted; papers on Discourse Representation Theory or on different talk types such as doctor/patient interaction; and audio and video tapes of interactive discourse which might serve as an object of study.

Forensic linguistics refers to the use of linguistic methodology to make legal determinations. Analyses of courtroom language are best classified as Discourse Analysis.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

Papers on issues in dispute in court cases, e.g., authorship identification, assessment of ambiguity in texts, voice attribution.

Resources that cover many subfields in depth, perhaps a dissertation on an endangered language with a detailed syntactic and phonological analysis, should be classified under all the relevant subfields instead of 'General Linguistics'.

Broad, often introductory textbooks such as The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language (Crystal, 1987), and glossaries of linguistic terminology.

The definition includes Comparative Historical Linguistics, Genetic Classification, and philological and etymological study. The last may also be classified as Lexicography.

The category Historical Linguistics is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A study of the diachronic development of vowels in Romance.

A biography of Ferdinand de Saussure, or an analysis of Plato's discussions on language.

Language Acquisition may be used to describe materials relating to either adult or child language acquisition, and to either first or later language acquisition. However, if the materials deal specifically with language teaching, or with the process of language learning from a pedagogical point of view, they may be best classified as Applied Linguistics.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

Studies of first language acquisition, audio or video tapes of language acquisition experiments, and guides to experimental techniques in eliciting acquisition data.

A manual on fieldwork techniques.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

Books and papers about creating dictionaries. Swadesh word lists, a bilingual Avestan-Engliah dictionary, and a collection of legal terms in a particular language.

The definition includes Stylistics and Poetics. Resources classified under this category would also be classified under the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name; however, the LCSH does not include Poetics and Stylistics, which are separate LCSH fields.

An analysis of lexical patterns characteristic of a particular author or syntactic constructions used to create specific literary effects.

Papers arguing for or against Universal Grammar, Transformational Grammar, or Montague Grammar.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A linguistic paper about the formal properties of grammars.

A resource consisting primarily of data from a morphologically complex language should be classifed as 'Language Description' if the primary purpose is to describe the structure of the language in question.

Use of the Library of Congress Subject Heading "Morphophonemics" is deprecated.

A paper on morphological theory, Word Grammar (Hudson).

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A study of brain damage with respect to language impairment, a study of the neurological development of the brain during first language acquisition. The latter should also be classified as Language Acquisition.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A paper on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a comparative study of verbal and non-verbal thought.

The definition includes both articulatory phonetics and acoustic phonetics. Datasets, lexicons, and graphic representations of experimental results should be classified under Phonetics if they have particular relevance to the sounds of the language.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A sound inventory of a language, a study of the variation of articulation of a particular sound.

The classification is not limited to phonological analyses. Datasets, lexicons, and graphic representations of experimental results should be classified under Phonology if they have particular relevance to the sound system of the language.

Use of the Library of Congress subject heading "Morphophonemics" is deprecated.

Phonological theories applied to a particular language; that is, a study of the syllable structure of a language, or the rules behind sound alternations. Also to be included under 'Phonology' are phoneme datasets, field notes on the phonology of a language, and papers on phonological theories themselves, such as a critique of Optimality Theory.

The definition includes Non-verbal Communication.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A study of politeness phenomena, honorifics, deixis or speech acts.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A cross-linguistic study of acquisition of a particular syntactic constraint, a study of aphasic children's language development.

The study of meaning in conversation should be classified as Discourse Analysis and not Semantics. The Linguistic Field of Semantics includes meaning at the word level ('lexical semantics').

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A paper on a semantic theory, such as Truth Conditional Semantics. A paper on color lexemes in a particular language.

Multilingualism, Folklore, Pidgins and Creoles, Dialectology, Language Planning, and Gender Studies should all be classified under 'Sociolinguistics'.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A study of language variation according to such factors as the speakers' gender, age, and/or social class.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A syntactic description of a language, using a particular syntactic theory. A paper using language data to criticize a syntactic theory.

The definition includes Semiotics and Genre Analysis, as well as the computational analysis of text corpora.

A statistical analysis of the British National Corpus, on the use of modal verbs in spoken and written English.

The definition includes theoretical discussions of the best translation and interpreting methods, and practical aids to interpreting languages. The translated text itself may be better classified under 'Language Description' if the purpose of the translation is to exemplify the structure of a language.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A study of the relative merits of different levels of translation (that is, literal translation, word-for-word translation and so on).

The definition includes the descriptive and comparative study of Universals.

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A paper using data from multiple languages as an argument for or against Universal Grammar. An analysis of a poorly documented language in terms of Greenberg's Universals.

Resources dealing with literacy may be classified as Writing Systems or Applied Linguistics or both, depending on whether the resource has substantial pedagogic content (Applied Linguistics) or includes an analysis of the graphemic system per se (Writing Systems).

The category is equivalent to the Library of Congress subject heading of the same name.

A paper examining issues in a linguist's development of a writing system for a previously unwritten language. An examination of pictographic writing systems. A book on the decipherment of Linear B.