OLAC Linguistic Data Type Vocabulary

Phonetic transcription may be narrow or broad, and will typically use the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA] in a standard encoding (e.g. [Unicode-IPA], [SAMPA]). Phonological transcriptions are also classified here.

Phonemic transcription may use the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA] or a practical orthography.

A prosodic transcription is a symbolic record of intonation, stress, tone or other suprasegmental features that is expressed independently of regular phonetic transcription.

Orthographic transcriptions differ from phonemic transcriptions that use a practical orthography in that they include orthographic conventions for punctuation, capitalization, etc.

Kinesic transcriptions represent systematic uses of facial expressions, body language, and eye gaze that are used to communicate meaning.

An example of a phonetic annotation is the TIMIT database, in which each element of phonetic transcription is associated with a range of samples in a digital audio file [TIMIT].

A morphological annotation is a morphological transcription where the component morphemes are aligned with some other linguistic record, such as an orthographic transcription or a speech signal. An example of morphological annotation is interlinear text with aligned morphemic glosses.

A syntactic annotation might include supra-lexical features such as word order or auxiliary phrase constructions. They may thus be aligned with phrases or clauses rather than smaller segments of the annotated record.

Translations may align with different linguistic levels of the resource: morpheme-by-morpheme translation, word-by-word translation, sentence-level free translation, or discourse-level free translation.

A pedagogical description is a style of presentation intended for use in teaching people to use the language.

This includes any resource that lists words or morphemes and defines them. It contrasts with a word list in that the definitions are complex (rather than being one-word equivalents) and the entries may include other information like part of speech, related words, and illustrative sentences.

A word list is a list of reference words in a major language for which the nearest equivalent word in a target language has been elicited (for instance, the Swadesh 100-word list).

Whereas a dictionary documents the meanings of words by means of definitions, a word net documents meanings by building a web of semantic relationships [WordNet].

A thesaurus is a list of words or concepts arranged according to sense.

A terminological lexicon is a glossary of domain-specific terms. Examples are technical terminology, kinship terms, color terms, acronyms, ...

Analytical information includes such things as morphological derivation, grammatically related forms, argument structure, ...

Types of narratives include historical, traditional, and personal narratives, myths, folktales, fables, and humorous stories.

Examples of oratory include sermons, lectures, political speeches, and invocations.

Examples of dialogues include conversations, interviews, correspondence, consultations, greetings and leave-takings.

Examples of singing include chants, songs, and choruses.

Examples of formulaic discourse are prayers, curses, blessings, charms, curing rituals, marriage vows, and oaths.

Examples of procedural discourses include recipes, instructions, and plans.

Examples of reports include news reports, essays, and commentaries.

Examples of ludic discourse are play languages, jokes, secret languages, and speech disguises.

Examples of unintelligible speech include sacred languages, speaking in tongues, and singing syllables (fa-la-la).