Transparency (linguistic)

Linguistic transparency is a phrase which is used in multiple, overlapping subjects in the fields of linguistics and the philosophy of language. It has both normative and descriptive senses.

Normative

Normatively, the phrase may describe the effort to suit one's rhetoric to the widest possible audience, without losing relevant information in the process.

Advocates of normative linguistic transparency often argue that linguistic opacity is dangerous to a democracy. These critics point out that jargon is deliberately employed in government and business. It encrypts morally suspect information in order to dull reaction to it: for example, the phrase "collateral damage" to refer to the manslaughter of innocents.

One play upon this view was by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, who in the Elements of Style ruled that the writer ought to "eschew obfuscation".

The Plain Language Movement is an example of people who advocate using clearer, common language within the wider academic community.

Professor at New York University Alan Sokal, perpetrator of the Sokal hoax, is another noteworthy example of an advocate of linguistic transparency.

Writer and political philosopher George Orwell was a proponent of this view, which he captured in the landmark essay, "Politics and the English Language." Orwell wrote a novel, 1984, about a dystopian future controlled through a politically crafted language called "Newspeak." Newspeak is a language that is linguistically transparent in the descriptive sense, but not in the normative one.

Comedian George Carlin has famously parodied the phenomenon in his stand-up comedy.

The approach may sound like common sense, but it faces the difficulty of figuring out how to communicate complex and uncommon ideas in a popular way.

Descriptive

Definition

In the field of lexical semantics, semantic transparency (in adjective form: semantically transparent) is a measure of the degree to which the meaning of a multimorphemic combination can be synchronically related to the meaning of its constituents. Semantic transparency is a scalar notion. At the top end of the scale are combinations whose meaning is fully transparent; at the bottom end are said to be semantically opaque (in noun form: semantic opacity).[1]: p. 1

Subtypes

Libben proposed a four-degree analysis of bimorphemic compounds:[2]

  1. TT (transparency-transparency): bedroom
  2. OT (opacity-transparency): strawberry
  3. TO (transparency-opacity): jailbird
  4. OO (opacity-opacity): hogwash

Notes

  1. Schäfer, Martin. (2018). The semantic transparency of English compound nouns. Berlin, Germany: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.1134595
  2. Libben, G., Gibson, M., Yoon, Y. B., & Sandra, D. (2003). Compound fracture: The role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness. Brain and language, 84(1), 50-64. doi:10.1016/S0093-934X(02)00520-5
gollark: That is not what I'm talking about and I'm not aware of that happening.
gollark: That's currently all I have to say about Android opensourceness. I might come up with more later.
gollark: Banking apps use this for """security""", mostly, as well as a bunch of other ones because they can.
gollark: Google has a thing called "SafetyNet" which allows apps to refuse to run on unlocked devices. You might think "well, surely you could just patch apps to not check, or make a fake SafetyNet always say yes". And this does work in some cases, but SafetyNet also uploads lots of data about your device to Google servers and has *them* run some proprietary ineffable checks on it and give a cryptographically signed attestation saying "yes, this is an Approved™ device" or "no, it is not", which the app's backend can check regardless of what your device does.
gollark: The situation is also slightly worse than *that*. Now, there is an open source Play Services reimplementation called microG. You can install this if you're running a custom system image, and it pretends to be (via signature spoofing, a feature which the LineageOS team refuse to add because of entirely false "security" concerns, but which is widely available in some custom ROMs anyway) Google Play Services. Cool and good™, yes? But no, not really. Because if your bootloader is unlocked, a bunch of apps won't work for *other* stupid reasons!

References

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