The term abstraction has a number of uses in the field of

linguistics Linguistics is the science, scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure ...

. It can denote a process (also called object abstraction) in the development of language, whereby terms become used for concepts further removed from the objects to which they were originally attached. It can also denote a process applied by linguists themselves, whereby phenomena are considered without the details that are not relevant to the desired level of analysis.

Object abstraction

Object abstraction, or simply '' abstraction'', is a concept wherein terms for objects become used for more abstract concepts, which in some languages develop into further abstractions such as verbs and grammatical words ( grammaticalisation). Abstraction is common in human language, though it manifests in different ways for different languages. In language acquisition, children typically learn object words first, and then develop from that vocabulary an understanding of the alternate uses of such words. For example, the word "book" refers objectively to a physical object constructed with bound pages, but in abstraction refers to a particular literary creation —regardless of how many physical copies of the "book" there are, it is one "book." The word "book" then developed more abstract uses, such as in keeping a record (bookkeeping), or to keep a record of betting (booking), or as a verb for entering persons into a record ("to book"). Words may then be further abstracted and even have embedded puns, such as in 'to make history of oneself' ("he booked"). An early example of this kind of study came from

John Horne Tooke John Horne Tooke (25 June 1736 – 18 March 1812), known as John Horne until 1782 when he added the surname of his friend William Tooke to his own, was an English clergyman, politician, and philologist. Associated with radical proponents of parl ...

, who in his conversational '' The Diversions of Purley'' (1786), proposed that the abstract word through came to English through both sound change and

derivation Derivation may refer to: Language * Morphological derivation, a word-formation process * Parse tree or concrete syntax tree, representing a string's syntax in formal grammars Law * Derivative work, in copyright law * Derivation proceeding, a proc ...

from the

Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

: :"For as the French peculiar preposition CHEZ is no other than the Italian substantive CASA or CA, so is the English preposition THOROUGH no other than the Gothic substantive ''dauro'', or the Teutonic substantive ''thuruh'': and like them, means door, gate, passage. I am persuaded that Door and Through have one and the same Gothic origin dauro, mean one and the same thing, and are in fact one and the same word." Tooke was incorrect about "through," but his insights about the way words migrated via geography, language, sound change, and meaning were innovative, and fundamentally correct.

Abstraction used by linguists

Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics

The relation among syntax,

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comp ...

, and

pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the in ...

has also been cashed out in terms of what could be called an "abstraction hierarchy." For instance, Rudolf Carnap in his ''Introduction to Semantics'' (1942, Harvard University Press) writes:

If… explicit reference is made to the speaker, or, to put it in more general terms, to the user of a language, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics. (Whether in this case reference to designata is made or not makes no difference for this classification.) If we abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their designata, we are in the field of semantics. And if, finally, we abstract from the designata also and analyze only the relations between the expressions, we are in (logical) syntax. The whole science of language, consisting of the three parts mentioned, is called semiotic. (p. 9)

A related statement was made a few years earlier by Carnap's fellow American philosopher Charles W. Morris, PhD student of the sociologist and pragmatist philosopher

George Herbert Mead George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded a ...

, and heavily influenced by the pragmatist and founder of (analytical)

semiotics Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something ...

Charles Sanders Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...

"Syntactics, as the study of the syntactical relations of signs to one another in abstraction from the relations of signs to objects .e., semanticsor to interpreters .e., pragmatics is the best developed of all the branches of semiotic." (p. 13)

The relation between abstraction and Morris' influential trichotomy is a matter of ongoing discussion.Korta, K, Perry, J, "Pragmatics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Emic units

A kind of abstraction commonly considered in linguistics is the ''

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

'', which abstracts

speech sound In phonetics and linguistics, a phone is any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words. In contrast, a phoneme is a speech sound in a given language that, if swapped with another ...

s in such a way as to neglect details that cannot serve to differentiate meaning. Other analogous kinds of abstractions (sometimes called "

emic unit In linguistics and related fields, an emic unit is a type of abstract object. cited in Kinds of emic units are generally denoted by terms with the suffix ''-eme'', such as ''phoneme'', ''grapheme'', and ''morpheme''. The term "emic unit" is defin ...

s") include

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone are ...

grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called '' graphemi ...

s and lexemes.

References

{{reflist Linguistics Pragmatics