In Linguistics
Single quotation marks are used in linguistics to mark a gloss as separate from either the metalanguage, which is used in the descriptive or theoretical prose, or the object language, which is rendered in italics. The following sentence illustrates this:
- The Latin word homo means 'man'.
This sentence is about a word in the object language Latin, which appears in italics, and about its counterpart in the gloss language English, enclosed in single quotation marks. The metalanguage, also English, is unaltered.
Read more about this topic: Scare Quotes