Toward Automatic Processing of English Metalanguage

The metalinguistic facilities of natural language are crucial to our ability to communicate, but the patterns behind the appearance of metalanguage—and thus the clues for how we may instruct computers to detect it—have remained relatively unknown. This paper describes the first results on the feasibility of automatically identifying metalanguage in English text. A core metalinguistic vocabulary has been identified, supporting intuitions about the phenomenon and aiding in its detection and delineation. These results open the door to applications that can extract the direct, salient information that metalanguage encodes.