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In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to make statements about other languages (object languages). Formal syntactic models for the description of grammar, e.g. generative grammar, are a type of metalanguage. More broadly, it can refer to any terminology or language used to discuss language itself - a written grammar, for example, or a discussion about language use. An example would be rendering an utterance in logic e.g. "John smokes" can be written as S(j), where S=smokes and j=john.
Kinds There are a variety of recognized kinds of metalanguages including embedded, ordered, and nested or hierarchical. Embedded metalanguages, as their name suggests, are metalanguages embedded in an object language. They occur both formally and naturally. This idea is found in Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach in his discussion of the relationship between formal languages and number theory: "...it is in the nature of any formalization of number theory that its metalanguage is embedded within it" (pg.270). They occur in informal languages as well, such as in English, where adjectives, adverbs, and possessive pronouns serve as an embedded metalanguage, while nouns, verbs, and in some instances adjectives and adverbs serve as an object language. Thus the term 'red' in the phrase 'red barn' is part of the embedded metalanguage of English and the term 'barn' is part of the object language. A similar example for adverbs is the term 'slowly' in the phrase 'slowly running'. Ordered metalanguages are analogous to ordered logics. An example of an ordered metalanguage would be the construction of one metalanguage to talk about an object language, then creating another metalanguage to talk about the first metalanguage, and so on for as long as is necessary. Nested or hierarchical metalanguages are similar to ordered metalanguages in that each level represents a greater degree of abstraction. However, nested metalanguages differ from ordered ones in that each level includes the one below. The paradigmatic example of a nested metalanguage comes from the Linnean taxonomic system in biology. Each level in the system incorporates the one below it. The language used to talk about genus is also used to talk about species, the language that is used to talk about orders is also used to talk about geni, and so on up to kingdoms. Role in metaphor Michael Reddy (1979) has demonstrated that much of the language we use to talk about language is conceptualized and structured by what he refers to as the conduit metaphor. The conduit metaphor is actually three interconnected metaphors: Reddy estimates that fully 70% of the language we use to talk about the English language is based on this metaphor. While recognizing the prominence of this metaphor, Reddy is deeply troubled by it. He thinks of it as erroneous, misleading, and dehumanizing. Computing Computers are not intelligent like humans and therefore do not get the gist of an idea as a person would. Computers follow programmes which are sets of instructions in a clear and simple language. The development of a programming language involves the use of a metalanguage. Backus–Naur form is one of the earliest metalanguages used in computing and was developed in the 1960s by John Backus and Peter Naur. HTML and XHTML are examples of markup languages that can be used by anyone wishing to present Web pages on the internet with media such as text (formatted or unformatted), graphics, sound and video. Markup languages are different to metalanguages as they only describe how a document should be presented and not the syntax of a computer programming language. XML is the metalanguage used to describe to XHTML just as SGML is used to describe HTML. XHTML is much stricter than HTML, for example XHTML is case sensitive unlike HTML. XML is used to describe other document types such as "OpenDocument Text" which is the native format for the word processor application in OpenOffice.org. Many other metalanguages have been based on the W3C XML 1.0 standard, including: See also | ||||||||
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