Meaning (linguistics) in the context of "Nonsense syllable"

Poetry (from the Greek word poiesis, "making") is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, literal or surface-level meanings. Any particular instance of poetry is called a poem and is written by a poet. Poets use a variety of techniques called poetic devices, such as assonance, alliteration, consonance, euphony and cacophony, onomatopoeia, rhythm (via metre), rhyme schemes (patterns in the type and placement of a phoneme group) and sound symbolism, to produce musical or other artistic effects. They also frequently organize these devices into poetic structures, which may be strict or loose, conventional or invented by the poet. Poetic structures vary dramatically by language and cultural convention, but they often rely on rhythmic metre: patterns of syllable stress or syllable (or mora) weight. They may also use repeating patterns of phonemes, phoneme groups, tones, words, or entire phrases. Poetic structures may even be semantic (e.g. the volta required in a Petrachan sonnet).

Most written poems are formatted in verse: a series or stack of lines on a page, which follow the poetic structure. For this reason, verse has also become a synonym (a metonym) for poetry. Some poetry types are unique to particular cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz, or Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter. There are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry and alliterative verse, that use other means to create rhythm and euphony. Other traditions, such as Somali poetry, rely on complex systems of alliteration and metre independent of writing and have been described as structurally comparable to ancient Greek and medieval European oral verse. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, testing the principle of euphony itself or altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm. In first-person poems, the lyrics are spoken by an "I", a character who may be termed the speaker, distinct from the poet (the author). Thus if, for example, a poem asserts, "I killed my enemy in Reno", it is the speaker, not the poet, who is the killer (unless this "confession" is a form of metaphor which needs to be considered in closer context – via close reading).

Information is an abstract concept that refers to something which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the interpretation (perhaps formally) of that which may be sensed, or their abstractions. Any natural process that is not completely random and any observable pattern in any medium can be said to convey some amount of information. Whereas digital signals and other data use discrete signs to convey information, other phenomena and artifacts such as analogue signals, poems, pictures, music or other sounds, and currents convey information in a more continuous form. Information is not knowledge itself, but the meaning that may be derived from a representation through interpretation.

The concept of information is relevant or connected to various concepts, including constraint, communication, control, data, form, education, knowledge, meaning, understanding, mental stimuli, pattern, perception, proposition, representation, and entropy.

The distinction between literal and figurative language exists in all natural languages; the phenomenon is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics.

• Literal language is the usage of words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings: their denotation.
• Figurative (or non-literal) language is the usage of words in addition to, or deviating beyond, their conventionally accepted definitions in order to convey a more complex meaning or achieve a heightened effect. This is done by language-users presenting words in such a way that their audience equates, compares, or associates the words with normally unrelated meanings. A common intended effect of figurative language is to elicit audience responses that are especially emotional (like excitement, shock, laughter, etc.), aesthetic, or intellectual.

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, and later the Roman rhetorician Quintilian, were among the early documented language analysts who expounded on the differences between literal and figurative language. A comprehensive scholarly examination of metaphor in antiquity, and the way its use was fostered by Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, is provided by William Bedell Stanford.

In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, including the principles by which they are formed, and how they relate to one another within a language. Most approaches to morphology investigate the structure of words in terms of morphemes, which are the smallest units in a language with some independent meaning. Morphemes include roots that can exist as words by themselves, but also categories such as affixes that can only appear as part of a larger word. For example, in English the root catch and the suffix -ing are both morphemes; catch may appear as its own word, or it may be combined with -ing to form the new word catching. Morphology also analyzes how words behave as parts of speech, and how they may be inflected to express grammatical categories including number, tense, and aspect. Concepts such as productivity are concerned with how speakers create words in specific contexts, which evolves over the history of a language.

The basic fields of linguistics broadly focus on language structure at different "scales". Morphology is considered to operate at a scale larger than phonology, which investigates the categories of speech sounds that are distinguished within a spoken language, and thus may constitute the difference between a morpheme and another. Conversely, syntax is concerned with the next-largest scale, and studies how words in turn form phrases and sentences. Morphological typology is a distinct field that categorises languages based on the morphological features they exhibit.

A sign is an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else. A natural sign bears a causal relation to its object—for instance, thunder is a sign of storm, or medical symptoms a sign of disease. A conventional sign signifies by agreement, as a full stop signifies the end of a sentence; similarly the words and expressions of a language, as well as bodily gestures, can be regarded as signs, expressing particular meanings. The physical objects most commonly referred to as signs (notices, road signs, etc., collectively known as signage) generally inform or instruct using written text, symbols, pictures or a combination of these.

The philosophical study of signs and symbols is called semiotics; this includes the study of semiosis, which is the way in which signs (in the semiotic sense) operate.

In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example, a dictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word "play", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as follows:

In each sentence different collocates of "play" signal its different meanings.

A phonestheme (/foʊˈnɛsθiːm/ foh-NESS-theem; phonaestheme in British English) is a pattern of sounds systematically paired with a certain meaning in a language. The concept was proposed in 1930 by British linguist J. R. Firth, who coined the term from the Greek φωνή phone, "sound", and αἴσθημα aisthema, "perception" (from αίσθάνομαι aisthanomai, "I perceive"). For example, sequence "sl-" appears in English words denoting low-friction motion, like "slide", "slick" and "sled".

A phonestheme is different from a phoneme (a basic unit of word-differentiating sound) or a morpheme (a basic unit of meaning) because it does not meet the normal criterion of compositionality.