Emphasismarking

Emphasismarking is a practice of explicitly marking emphasis within written text or transcription to signal focus, contrast, or intensity in spoken discourse. It spans marker schemes used in linguistics, transcription, subtitling, and online communication. Unlike typographic emphasis such as italics or bold, emphasismarking relies on explicit markers that can be parsed by humans and machines. Common conventions include bracketed tags such as [em]word[/em], or plain tokens like [emphasis]word[/emphasis], around the target word. Example: I did not say you [em]stole[/em] the money.

Origin and usage: The term is not widely standardized and is most often found in discourse analysis, transcription guidelines, and some digital communication practices. It serves to preserve information about prosody and emphasis that plain punctuation may not convey. In subtitling and captioning, emphasis markers can help viewers understand intended focus when visual cues and audio cues are limited.

Applications: In research, emphasismarking supports analysis of focus, contrast, and information structure. In language learning, it can annotate emphasis patterns for learners. In natural language processing and human–computer interaction, it can supply signals to sentiment- and emphasis-aware models. Tools and platforms vary in support, with some automatically rendering emphasis markers, others ignoring them or converting them to styling.

Limitations: The lack of standardization can cause interoperability issues; accessibility concerns arise if markers are not described to screen readers; readers may misinterpret markers if the context is unclear. See also: emphasis, focus marking, prosodic transcription.