Granularity (linguistics)
The granularity (lat. Granum 'grain') of a linguistic expression provides information about its (semantic) sharpness.
JL Austin introduced the concept of granularity to linguistic pragmatics . The term originally comes from photography and indicates the grain size of an image. A text can therefore be coarse-grained or fine-grained.
The linguistic granularity depends on the respective participants in the communication, their topic and the type of text.
Examples: Two physicists have a conversation about Schrödinger's cat that is more fine-grained than two students. Granular representations will also be different in the doctor-patient conversation in contrast to the discussion between two medical professionals about the same disease. Popular scientific texts are coarser than the scientific equivalents. A wanted text will describe the car with which bank robbers fled in more detail than the press release, which only mentions a getaway vehicle.
The granularity is adjusted using formulas. The coarsening by roughly speaking , by and large , etc. and the refinement by strictly speaking , precisely speaking , etc.
For example, the claim “Rolf is a Swabian” can be both wrong and correct. Roughly speaking, people from Württemberg are equated with Swabians . Strictly speaking, however, Heilbronn residents are not part of the Swabians. Those residents of Bavaria who are based in Neu-Ulm are again considered to be Swabians.
See also: hedge expression , fuzziness (language) , truth and de dicto
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- Smith et al. Bittner: A Unified Theory of Granularity, Vagueness, and Approximation.
- Helmut Glück (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon Language . Metzler, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-476-01519-X .
