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Linguistic transparency is a phrase which is used in multiple, overlapping subjects in the fields oflinguistics and the philosophy of language. It has bothnormative anddescriptive senses.
Normatively, the phrase may describe the effort to suit one's rhetoric to the widest possible audience, without losing relevant information in the process.
Advocates of normative linguistic transparency often argue that linguistic opacity is dangerous to a democracy. These critics point out that jargon is deliberately employed in government and business. It encrypts morally suspect information in order to dull reaction to it: for example, the phrase "collateral damage" to refer to themanslaughter of innocents.
One play upon this view was byWilliam Strunk, Jr. andE. B. White, who in theElements of Style ruled that the writer ought to "eschew obfuscation".
ThePlain Language Movement is an example of people who advocate using clearer, common language within the wider academic community.
Professor at New York UniversityAlan Sokal, perpetrator of theSokal hoax, is another noteworthy example of an advocate of linguistic transparency.
Writer and political philosopherGeorge Orwell was a proponent of this view, which he captured in the landmark essay, "Politics and the English Language." Orwell wrote a novel,1984, about adystopian future controlled through a politically crafted language called "Newspeak." Newspeak is a language that is linguistically transparent in the descriptive sense, but not in the normative one.
ComedianGeorge Carlin has famously parodied the phenomenon in his stand-up comedy.
The approach may sound like common sense, but it faces the difficulty of figuring out how to communicate complex and uncommon ideas in a popular way.
In the field oflexical semantics,semantic transparency (in adjective form: semantically transparent) is a measure of the degree to which the meaning of amultimorphemic combination can be synchronically related to the meaning of itsconstituents. Semantic transparency is ascalar notion. At the top end of the scale are combinations whose meaning is fully transparent; at the bottom end are said to besemantically opaque (in noun form: semantic opacity).[1]: p. 1
Libben proposed a four-degree analysis of bimorphemic compounds:[2]