Grunnotationals

Grunnotationals are a hypothetical family of notational devices used in linguistics and computer science to annotate utterances with extra information about the speaker's stance, evidential status, or epistemic commitment. They function as meta-notations appended to propositions or sentences to encode information beyond content.

Origin and etymology: Coined by linguist Mina Grun and colleagues in a 2016 paper introducing a general framework for annotating discourse with Grunnotationals. The name blends "Grun" from the researcher and "notations" to reflect their role as markers.

Classification and syntax: The standard system identifies several categories, including stance, evidential, and evaluative grunnotationals. They typically appear as bracketed tokens attached to the utterance, e.g., "The policy passed [grun:stance:confident]" or "The report is likely [grun:evidential:reported]." They can be pre- or postposed and are designed to be language-agnostic in theory.

Applications: Used in corpus annotation, discourse parsing, and natural language understanding to improve interpretation of meaning, particularly in multi-agent communication and AI dialogue. Software tools support integration of grunnotationals into annotation schemas and NLP pipelines.

Criticism and status: The approach is still developing; debates focus on standardization, cross-linguistic applicability, and the potential performance cost in parsing. Proponents argue grunnotationals provide clearer modeling of discourse and speaker intention.