A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics
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/ n. A notational device, conventionally an asterisk, used in the notation A* (a regular expression) to indicate a string of any number of items all belonging to the category A. The notation is borrowed from the mathematics of formal systems, in which it normally means a string of zero or more such categories, but many linguists use the notation to express a string of one or more such categories, which in mathematics would be expressed as A+, since the notion ‘zero or more’ is only occasionally of linguistic use.
Linguists with a mathematical or computational orientation usually stick to the established mathematical conventions; when encountering this device in linguistic works, you should check to see which way it is being used. Kleene (1956).
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