Abstraction in Linguistics
Abstraction is frequently applied in linguistics so as to allow phenomena of language to be analyzed at the desired level of detail. A commonly considered abstraction is the phoneme, which abstracts speech sounds in such a way as to neglect details that cannot serve to differentiate meaning. Other analogous kinds of abstractions (sometimes called "emic units") considered by linguists include morphemes, graphemes and lexemes.
Abstraction also arises in the relation between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Pragmatics involves considerations that make reference to the user of the language; semantics considers expressions and what they denote (the designata) abstracted from the language user; and syntax considers only the expressions themselves, abstracted from the designata.
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Famous quotes containing the word abstraction:
“New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)