Concept
Metalanguage
Overview
In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to describe another language, often called the object language. Expressions in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in the object language by the use of italics, quotation marks, or writing on a separate line. For example, to say that the word "noun" can be used as a noun in a sentence, one could write "noun" is a <noun>.
A metasyntax is the syntax of a metalanguage which defines the formal grammar of a formal language.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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It may be said to be, at once, both what the logicians call, a singular, and what they call, a common term; and to join, in its signification the seemingly opposite qualities of the most precise individuality and the most extensive generalization. This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first formers of language. What are called the…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Metalanguage is.
And, since we are concerned with what is called "thought," we must pay more attention than we otherwise should do to the private as opposed to the social use of language. Language profoundly affects our thoughts, and it is this aspect of language that is of most importance to us in our present inquiry. We are almost more concerned with the internal speech that is never uttered than we are with the things said out…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Metalanguage is.
First of all, languages are by this simplification rendered more prolix, several words having become necessary to express what could have been expressed by a single word before. Thus the words, _Dei_ and, _Deo_, in the Latin, sufficiently show, without any addition, what relation, the object signified is understood to stand in to the objects expressed by the other words in the sentence. But to express the same…
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
States what Metalanguage is.
Philosophers who discussed Metalanguage
Related ideas
- Formal language
- Word
- Formal grammar
- Number theory
- Symbol (formal)
- Rule of inference
- Truth
- Theory
- Theorem
- Formal system
- Well-formed formula
- Gödel, Escher, Bach
- Metatheory
- Oxford University Press
- Penguin Books
- Backus–Naur form
- Cambridge University Press
- Proposition
- Douglas Hofstadter
- Axiom
- Mental world
- The Oxford Companion to Philosophy
- ML (programming language)
- Taxonomy
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.