Brand Naming: Linguistic Analysis Terms Defined

Brand Naming: Linguistic Analysis Terms Defined

T erms Defined

Scriptability

Syllabic Balance

Aural Comp.

Phonetic Viability

Visual Aesthetics

Refers to how the name appears when it is written and any difficulties encountered in the scripting process.

Refers to overall lexical balance, with regard to syllable structure (Perfect balance is CVC-CVC.)

Aural Comprehensibility: Refers to how easy it is to understand the word when you hear it pronounced.

How intuitive is pronunciation based on orthography?

Refers to quality of thematic undertones.

How does the word look? Is it visually appealing? Does it offer potential for interesting logo design?

Evocative Semantics

Ease of Pronunci-

ation

Durability & Longevity

Rating of relative articulatory comfort.

Does the word possess distinctive qualities that will ensure strength in the future?

Phonemic Simplicity

How fluid are the phonemic transitions? (i.e. no adjacent harsh sounds at phonemic. joints)

Gender Properties

This category measures the feminine or masculine qualities of the word, relative to a neutral baseline.

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T erms Defined

Morphological Complexity

A measure of the number of distinct morpheme types in a given word or utterance. Within Linguistics, this is a highly contested measure: How do we process morphologically complex words? Two proposed processes are as follows: » Using parsing routines to identify constituents and calculate meaning. » Using memories for words to access stored records of lexical meaning.

Regarding metrics for measuring the complexity of morphological, numerical, and alphabetical strings: Information theory offers a notion of this complexity in asking the following: Intuitively, which of (1) and (2) is more complex?

(1) 10101010101010101010 (2) 11011111000101011010

In comparing these strings, much can be extrapolated to morphological and linguistic structure as well. For instance, if two words contain the same characters/letters, but in differing orders and at levels of differing morphological complexity, parsing may be constrained, dependent on pattern recognition and other related properties.

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Syntax refers to the structure of a sentence or utterance. It follows that a syntactic construction that has no bound forms among its immediate constituents; any phrase or sentence.

Syntactic Construc-

tion

Inflectional Category

An Inflectional Phrase (IP) is a functional phrase which has inflectional properties (such as tense and agreement). An Inflectional phrase is essentially the same as a sentence, but reflects an analysis whereby a sentence can be treated as having a head, complement and specifier, like other kinds of phrases.

Linguistic Analysis: T erms Defined

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Glossary of Linguistic Nomenclature

Phoneme Morpheme Grapheme

The smallest distinctive unit of sound in the structure of a given lan-

guage.

The smallest grammatical unit (of

meaning) in the structure of a given

language.

The smallest semantically distinguishing unit in a written language, analogous to

the pho- nemes of spoken languages.

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Glossary of Linguistic NomenclatureGlyph

Affix

Ascender

Prefix

Descender

Infix

Ligature

Suffix

A specific shape that represents a grapheme, in a specific typeface.

An additional element placed at the beginning or end of a root, stem, or word, or in the body of a word, to modify its

meaning.

In typography, the up- ward vertical stem on

some lowercase letters, such as h and b, that

extends above the baseline height.

An affix which is placed before the stem of a word (also called a

preformative).

In typography, the por- tion of some lowercase letters, such as g and y, that extends or de-

scends below the baseline.

An affix inserted inside a word stem

(an existing word).

Occurs where two or more graphemes or

letters are joined as a single glyph.

An affix which is placed after the stem of a word (also sometimes called

a postfix).

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Phonology

Dialect

A particular form of a language that is

peculiar to a specific region or social group.

Coda

The consonant(s) occur- ring after the vowel in a

syllable.

The description of the systems and patterns of speech sounds that

occur in a language, and how they govern pro-

nunciation.

Idiolect

A variety of language that is unique to a person, as manifested by the patterns of vocabulary, grammar,

and pronunciation that he/she uses.

Orthography

A standardized system for using a particular

writing system (script) to write a particular lan-

guage.

Consonant Cluster

A group of consonants which have no interven-

ing vowel.

Lexicon

Essentially a catalogue of a given language’s words (its wordstock).

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Alliteration Rhyme Lexical Stress

The repetition of a particular sound in the prominent lifts (or

stressed syllables) of a series of words or phrases (used here to refer to intra-lexical, or within-

word, application).

Element of a word or syllable that has or ends with a sound that corre- sponds to another (used

here to refer to intra-lexical application).

The stress placed on a given syllable in a word

(also known as word stress).

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T ense Number

A category that locates a situation in time, to indicate

when the situation takes place.

Tense is the grammaticalization of time

reference.

Agreement based on grammatical number can occur between verb and subject, as in

the case of grammatical person.

Person

The grammatical distinction between context-dependent references to

participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker,

the addressee, and others.

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Mood Gender

A grammatical (and specifically,

morphological) feature of verbs, used

to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal

inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they

are saying.

In languages in which grammatical gender plays a significant role, there is often

agreement in gender between a noun and its

modifiers.

In languages that have a system of cases, there is often agreement by case between a noun and its

modifiers. Case agreement is not a significant feature of

English? Example languages which employ case agreement widely: German, Greek,

Russian.

Voice Case

In grammar, the voice (also called diathesis) of a verb describes the

relationship between the action (or state) that the verb expresses and the participants identified

by its arguments (subject, object, etc.).

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Phoneme Morpheme Grapheme

The smallest distinctive unit of sound in the structure of a given lan-

guage.

The smallest grammatical unit (of meaning) in the structure of a

given language. (Note: A morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas

a word must.)

The smallest semantically distinguishing unit in a written language, analogous to

the pho- nemes of spoken languages. (Note: A grapheme may or may not carry meaning by

itself, and may or may not correspond to a single phoneme. Graphemes include alphabetic letters,

typo- graphic ligatures, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols of any of the

world’s writing systems.)

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Brand Naming: Linguistic Analysis Terms Defined