Daphrase

Daphrase is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to refer to a short phrase that functions as a pragmatic or semantic marker within a sentence. In practice, a daphrase is tagged in corpora to signal non-literal meanings, discourse function, or stance, such as hedging, emphasis, politeness, or attitude. The term is not universally standardized and appears in several annotation schemes as a descriptive label rather than a fixed grammatical category. Daphrase units are typically contiguous strings of words that researchers consider to influence interpretation beyond their dictionary meanings. They may appear as parenthetical insertions, modifiers, or adjuncts that modify the speaker’s stance, such as adverbs like frank, clearly, or phrases like as you know, to be honest, or if you ask me.

In annotation practice, daphrases help natural language processing systems learn to weigh pragmatic cues when extracting meaning, resolving coreference, or predicting sentiment. They are often treated as separate features rather than integrated into the core syntactic structure, though the exact treatment depends on the annotation scheme. Criticisms include inconsistent definitions, subjective judgments in marking, and potential over-segmentation of text. Daphrase is related to concepts such as discourse markers, hedges, stance adverbs, and metatextuality.

See also: discourse marker, hedging, stance, annotation scheme.