Gibberish, also called jibber-jabber or gobbledygook, is speech that is nonsense: ranging across speech sounds that are not actual words, pseudowords, language games and specialized jargon that seems nonsensical to outsiders.
Clanging is a symptom of mental disorders, primarily found in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. This symptom is also referred to as association chaining, and sometimes, glossomania.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the Description of Language". There is no obvious understandable meaning that can be derived from it, which demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics, and the idea that a syntactically well-formed sentence is not guaranteed to be semantically well-formed as well. As an example of a category mistake, it was intended to show the inadequacy of certain probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.
Nonsense verse is a form of nonsense literature usually employing strong prosodic elements like rhythm and rhyme. It is often whimsical and humorous in tone and employs some of the techniques of nonsense literature.
Pleonasm is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as "black darkness," "burning fire," "the man he said," or "vibrating with motion." It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria and might be considered a fault of style. Pleonasm may also be used for emphasis, or because the phrase has become established in a certain form. Tautology and pleonasm are not consistently differentiated in literature.
A thought disorder (TD) is a disturbance in cognition which affects language, thought and communication. Psychiatric and psychological glossaries in 2015 and 2017 identified thought disorders as encompassing poverty of ideas, neologisms, paralogia, word salad, and delusions—all disturbances of thought content and form. Two specific terms have been suggested—content thought disorder (CTD) and formal thought disorder (FTD). CTD has been defined as a thought disturbance characterized by multiple fragmented delusions, and the term thought disorder is often used to refer to an FTD: a disruption of the form of thought. Also known as disorganized thinking, FTD results in disorganized speech and is recognized as a major feature of schizophrenia and other psychoses. Disorganized speech leads to an inference of disorganized thought. Thought disorders include derailment, pressured speech, poverty of speech, tangentiality, verbigeration, and thought blocking. One of the first known cases of thought disorders, or specifically OCD as it is known today, was in 1691. John Moore, who was a bishop, had a speech in front of Queen Mary II, about "religious melancholy."
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part.
Nonsense is a communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system, that lacks any coherent meaning. In ordinary usage, nonsense is sometimes synonymous with absurdity or the ridiculous. Many poets, novelists and songwriters have used nonsense in their works, often creating entire works using it for reasons ranging from pure comic amusement or satire, to illustrating a point about language or reasoning. In the philosophy of language and philosophy of science, nonsense is distinguished from sense or meaningfulness, and attempts have been made to come up with a coherent and consistent method of distinguishing sense from nonsense. It is also an important field of study in cryptography regarding separating a signal from noise.
Disorganized schizophrenia, or hebephrenia, was a subtype of schizophrenia prior to 2013. Subtypes of schizophrenia were no longer recognized as separate conditions in the DSM 5, published in 2013. The disorder is no longer listed in the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).
A wordfilter is a script typically used on Internet forums or chat rooms that automatically scans users' posts or comments as they are submitted and automatically changes or censors particular words or phrases.
Dissociated press is a parody generator. The generated text is based on another text using the Markov chain technique. The name is a play on "Associated Press" and the psychological term dissociation.
This glossary covers terms found in the psychiatric literature; the word origins are primarily Greek, but there are also Latin, French, German, and English terms. Many of these terms refer to expressions dating from the early days of psychiatry in Europe.
Within the probability theory Markov model, Markovian discrimination in spam filtering is a method used in CRM114 and other spam filters to model the statistical behaviors of spam and nonspam more accurately than in simple Bayesian methods. A simple Bayesian model of written text contains only the dictionary of legal words and their relative probabilities. A Markovian model adds the relative transition probabilities that given one word, predict what the next word will be. It is based on the theory of Markov chains by Andrey Markov, hence the name. In essence, a Bayesian filter works on single words alone, while a Markovian filter works on phrases or entire sentences.
Paraphasia is a type of language output error commonly associated with aphasia, and characterized by the production of unintended syllables, words, or phrases during the effort to speak. Paraphasic errors are most common in patients with fluent forms of aphasia, and come in three forms: phonemic or literal, neologistic, and verbal. Paraphasias can affect metrical information, segmental information, number of syllables, or both. Some paraphasias preserve the meter without segmentation, and some do the opposite. However, most paraphasias affect both partially.
In psychiatry, derailment categorises any speech that sequences of unrelated or barely related ideas compose; the topic often changes from one sentence to another.
In psychology, logorrhea or logorrhoea is a communication disorder that causes excessive wordiness and repetitiveness, which can cause incoherency. Logorrhea is sometimes classified as a mental illness, though it is more commonly classified as a symptom of mental illness or brain injury. This ailment is often reported as a symptom of Wernicke's aphasia, where damage to the language processing center of the brain creates difficulty in self-centered speech.
Jargon aphasia is a type of fluent aphasia in which an individual's speech is incomprehensible, but appears to make sense to the individual. Persons experiencing this condition will either replace a desired word with another that sounds or looks like the original one, or has some other connection to it, or they will replace it with random sounds. Accordingly, persons with jargon aphasia often use neologisms, and may perseverate if they try to replace the words they can not find with sounds.
Verbosity, or verboseness, is speech or writing that uses more words than necessary. The opposite of verbosity is succinctness.
A Jabberwocky sentence is a type of sentence of interest in neurolinguistics. Jabberwocky sentences take their name from the language of Lewis Carroll's well-known poem "Jabberwocky". In the poem, Carroll uses correct English grammar and syntax, but many of the words are made up and merely suggest meaning. A Jabberwocky sentence is therefore a sentence which uses correct grammar and syntax but contains nonsense words, rendering it semantically meaningless.
In psychology, graphorrhea, or graphorrhoea, is a communication disorder expressed by excessive wordiness with minor or sometimes incoherent rambling, specifically in written work. Graphorrhea is most commonly associated with schizophrenia but can also result from several psychiatric and neurological disorders such as aphasia, thalamic lesions, temporal lobe epilepsy and mania. Some ramblings may follow some or all grammatical rules but still leave the reader confused and unsure about what the piece is about.
