A posteriori

SECONDARY SOURCE: Literary scholars distinguish between primary sources, secondary sources, and educational resources. Students should also. To understand the difference, click here.

SECONDARY STRESS: A stress less prominent than the primary stress--often indicated by a grave accent mark. See chart of common diacritical markings for more information.

SECOND LANGUAGE: In addition to a first language (i.e., a native language), a second language is any language used frequently for communication, trade, diplomacy, scholarship, or other important purposes.

SECOND-PERSON POINT OF VIEW: See discussion under point of view.

SECOND SOUND SHIFT: Another term for the High German Shift.

SELF-REFLEXIVITY: Writing has self-reflexivity if it somehow refers to itself. (Critics also call this being self-referential.) For instance, the following sentence has self-reflexive traits:

This is not a sentence.

Here, the demonstrative pronoun this refers to the larger sentence that contains it--the sentence's subject-matter is its own structure as a sentence. Postmodern writing has become especially fond of this artistic technique, employing metafiction and metapoetry. Self-reflexivity calls attention to its own artifice, violates verisimilitude, or breaks the boundaries between sign, signifier and signified. See metaliterature.

SEMANTIC BLEACHING: The process by which a word loses all its original meaning--a phenomenon quite common in toponyms and personal names. For instance, few English speakers think of "Red People" when they hear the toponym Oklahoma, even though this is what Oklahoma means in the original Choctaw; the loanword has undergone semantic bleaching.

SEMANTIC CHANGE: A change in what a word or phrase means.

SEMANTIC CONTAMINATION: Change of meaning that occurs when two words sound alike. Because the words are so similar, often the meaning of one becomes attached to the other. This is especially likely with foreign loan words. For example, the Old English word dream originally meant "joy." However, the Scandinavian loan word draumr meant "vision while asleep." Through semantic contamination via the Viking invasions, the English word dream gained its current meaning, as Algeo points out (277).

SEMANTIC MARKING: When the meaning of a word is limited semantically, that word is said to possess a semantic marking. See marked word and unmarked word.

SEMANTICS: The study of actual meaning in languages--especially the meanings of individual words and word combinations in phrases and sentences--as opposed to other linguistic aspects like grammar, morphology, etymology, and syntax.

SEMIOLOGY: Another term for semiotics.

SEMIOTICS: The study of both verbal and nonverbal signs. In Charles Sanders Peirce's thinking, a sign may fall into several possible categories:

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  iconic signs bear some natural resemblance to what they signify. For instance, a map of Tennessee is an iconic representation of a "real world" geography.
  
• 
  indexical signs show some causal connection with what they signify. For instance, a stylized image of smoke as a sign indicating "fire" would be an indexical sign.
  
• 
  symbolic signs have an arbitrary or conventional relationship with what they signify. Note that in linguistics, almost all verbal sounds and written letters fall in the category of symbolic signs. Using the sounds /c/ and /a/ and /t/ to represent a furred quadroped that hunts mice, or the graphemes , , and as a visual representation of those sounds, is purely arbitrary.
  

SEMITIC: A non-Indo-European family of languages including Arabic and Hebrew.

SEMIVOWEL: A sound articulated in the same way as a vowel sound, but which functions like a consonant typically. Examples include [w] and [y]. In some languages such as Welsh, these can function as graphemes for pure vowels.

SENEX AMANS (from Latin "ancient lover"; also spelled senex amanz in Old French): A stock character in medieval fabliaux, courtly romances, and classical comedies, the senex amans is an old, ugly, jealous man who is married to a younger, attractive but unhappy woman. He is often a poor lover (or even impotent) with bad breath, wrinkled skin, and grey hair. He is frequently cuckolded by a younger, handsome, virile man who secretly seduces his wife. We find examples of the senex amans in Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" and "The Merchant's Tale," and in various other fabliaux. Likewise, the motif also appears in the medieval French lais such as Marie de France's "Guigemar" and similar works such as Tristan and Iseult. The motif of the senex amans often becomes useful for fast characterization, since it often can quickly cast a predatory light on an elderly male antagonist. An example of such use would be the old king of Ghana pursuing the young Imoinda in Aphra Behn's Oronooko, or any of the aging aristocrats sadistically pursuing young virtuous peasant girls in gothic novels.

SENRYU: The senryu is a satirical form of the haiku. The form originates in Edo with the poet Karai Senryu (1718-1790). While the haiku attempt to avoid excessive "cleverness," vulgarity, humor, or explicit moralizing on the poet's part, the senryu embraces these elements. The genre allows a greater liberty of diction. Its tone is less lofty than the Zen-like tone found in many haiku, and it often focuses on the distortions and failings of human nature rather than the beauty of nature. Conventional topics include mothers-in-law, shrewish wives, women of disrepute, the antics of bachelors, and misbehavior among the clergy. Here is an example of a senryu:

When she wails
At the top of her voice,
The husband gives in.

As Joan Giroux suggests in The Haiku Form, the humor and implicit lesson in such senryu are very appealing to European and American writers. It is a genre much more accessible to the Western poet, accustomed as we are to logic rather than Zen. She writes:

Would-be writers of English haiku are often dismayed to have their Japanese friends remark, "Your poem is more like senryu. It is too philosophical." It is not surprising, therefore, that senryu appeals strongly to Western readers. The Western tradition of logic rather than intuition makes senryu in some respects easier [for Western poets] to write than haiku. (22-23)

Contrast senryu with haiku. See also kigo, tanka, haikai, and hokku.