Scare Quotes - in Linguistics

In Linguistics

Single quotation marks are used in linguistics to mark a gloss as separate from either the metalanguage, which is used in the descriptive or theoretical prose, or the object language, which is rendered in italics. The following sentence illustrates this:

• The Latin word homo means 'man'.

This sentence is about a word in the object language Latin, which appears in italics, and about its counterpart in the gloss language English, enclosed in single quotation marks. The metalanguage, also English, is unaltered.