Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Abby Bajuniemi, PhD Image: Chalkboard with hierarchy diagram. Source: Pixabay

IA is a natural fit for linguists, and here’s why!

I’m a linguist by training, and one of the things that drew me to User Experience (UX) and Information Architecture (IA) is the overlap between what linguists do on a day-to-day basis and what UX/IA professionals do.

However, this has been hard to explain to hiring managers for many reasons. Well, mostly because most people don’t even know what linguistics is, much less how it applies to an industry field like UX/IA.

What do linguists do, anyway?

Well, we do a lot of things, but one of the things we do is figure out the hierarchy of elements in a phrase/utterance/sentence* and how that relates to the meaning being conveyed.

*I’m going to continue with the word “sentence,” which often refers only to written samples of language. We don’t speak in sentences, and it’s definitely possible to write in things that aren’t sentences. I’m choosing this word for simplicity’s sake.

Before I give you some examples of this, let me explain the different elements that can appear in a sentence.

Types of phrases

Basically, you can have a phrase for most parts of speech: noun phrase, verb phrase, adjectival phrases, adverbial phrases, and prepositional phrases. Articles, possessives, quantifiers, etc., are determinants.

The nucleus of a phrase is the thing that carries the most information in a phrase and what determines what kind of phrase it is. For example, in the phrase “an apple,” “apple” is the nucleus of a noun phrase, and “an” is its determinant. We know “an” goes with “apple” because it tells you something about “apple” and precedes it in the phrase.

We use these phrases to divvy up a sentence and demonstrate its hierarchy. In linguistics, you can do this in two ways: a tree diagram or a diagram with brackets. I learned the bracket method, so that’s what I’ll use as an example.

Example

My elderly neighbor prepared a dish with a lot of oil.

Here is the bracket version.

Image: a diagram of the sentence, “My elderly neighbor prepared a dish with a lot of oil.”

You can see there are two options here, because there are two ways of interpreting this sentence.

Option 1 has “with a lot of oil” modifying “a dish.” Meaning, this dish is greasy/oily, or has a lot of oil in the ingredients list.

Option 2, on the other hand, is the reading in which the preparation of the dish included a lot of oil. That is, maybe it was a deep-fried dish or something that required a large amount of oil to cook it.

How do you know which one it is? If you’re reading the example sentence in isolation, you don’t. You have to look at the preceding and following text to determine context. But how many of you reading right now would have looked at it, read it, and only thought of one interpretation?

Linguists look at information with an eye for deconstructing the subtle differences to be able to create a hierarchy of information that makes sense.

We are also pretty good at categorization

Another thing linguists do is create categories out of groups of words. We are big, big nerds about discussing the nuances of meaning to determine where things belong. For example, I was in a semantics class, and to introduce the concept of “prototypes” in semantic categories, my professor asked us to think of the word “bird.” We were then told to list out all the characteristics a bird has that make it a bird. We said things like +wings, -fur, + feathers, + can fly, -live births, etc. (the “+” means “it has” and the “-” means “it doesn’t have.”) But then he asked us, “What about penguins? Are they birds?”

We proceeded to have an hour-long discussion about what allows a concept to fall into a category and what are the minimum characteristics it needs to belong. Sound familiar, IA people?

In our applied research on semantic categories, we often use card sorts to determine how people categorize concepts. This kind of test tells us what kind of mental representation (mental model) people hold about the different concepts we express with language.

You’re a nerd.

I know. I enjoy it. 🙂

I hope this helped clarify the overlap between linguistics and UX/IA! Would love to be nerdy about linguistics and/or UX with you!

P.S. Please forgive any omissions in my diagrams above! It’s been a while, and I was in a rush.:)

Linguists are Information Architects! was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Linguists are Information Architects!

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