Crossword clues for specificity
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1829, from French spécificité or else a native formation from specific + -ity.
Wiktionary
n. 1 The state of being specific rather than general. 2 (context statistics English) The probability, in a binary test, of a true negative being correctly identified. 3 (context medicine English) The extent to which a particular diagnostic test is specific for a given condition.
WordNet
n. the quality of being specific rather than general; "add a desirable note of specificity to the discussion"; "the specificity of the symptoms of the disease"
the quality of being specific to a particular organism; "host specificity of a parasite"
Wikipedia
Specificity may refer to:
- Being specific (disambiguation)
- Specificity (statistics), the proportion of negatives in a binary classification test which are correctly identified
- Sensitivity and specificity, in relation to medical diagnostics
- Specificity (linguistics), whether a noun phrase has a particular referent as opposed to referring to any member of a class
- Particular, as opposed to abstract, in philosophy
- Asset specificity, the extent that investments supporting a particular transaction have a higher value than if they were redeployed for any other purpose
- Domain specificity, theory that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized learning devices
- Specificity theory, theory that pain is "a specific sensation, with its own sensory apparatus independent of touch and other senses"
- Cascading Style Sheets#Specificity, determines which styles are applied to an html element when more than one rule could apply.
- Chemical specificity, in chemistry and biochemistry, with regard to enzymes or catalysts and their substrates
In linguistics, specificity is a semantic feature of noun phrases, distinguishing between entities/nouns/referents that are unique in a given context and those which are not, even if the unique referent is not identifiable.
This is distinct from the feature of definiteness.
- I'm looking for the manager, Ms Lee. [definite, specific]
- I'm looking for the manager, whoever that may be. [definite, non-specific]
- There's a certain word that I can never remember. [indefinite, specific]
- Think of a word, any word. [indefinite, non-specific]
In English and many other languages, specificity is not typically marked. As a result, sometimes, specificity can be ambiguous. Consider the following example:
- Every woman talked to a student.
This has two interpretations. Under one reading, every woman talked to the same student (the class president, for example), and here the noun phrase a student is specific. Under the second reading, various students were talked to. In this case, a student is non-specific.
"In contrast, in some languages, NPs in certain positions are always unambiguous with respect to specificity. The ambiguity is resolved through case marking: NPs with overt case morphology are specific, NPs without case morphology are nonspecific."
Usage examples of "specificity".
They were neither as specific nor as shattering as the grim clairvoyant images of death that had poured off the elementary-school building, but in spite of their lack of specificity and explosive effect, they had a disturbing power all their own.
Thus although each receptor type responds to glutamate, some will respond to chemically similar molecules as well, others show different forms of specificity.
Specimens taken revealed the specificity of their action, much like that of the viroids already known.
HRT increases breast density, which reduces the sensitivity and specificity of breast screening.
To unravel the dialectic between specificity and plasticity and to understand its mechanisms form some of the major tasks of modern biology.
So it turns out that to understand the mechanisms of memory, of plasticity, it is also necessary to understand the mechanisms of specificity.
Much that was known didn't fit with the werebear tale: the specificity and tidiness of the flesh removal, caching the flesh, stealing film, moving and hiding the body.
Because of the specificity of his fear, he did not sound like a typical aerophobic passenger, and all of the flight attendants were staring at him with, if not respect, at least a wary thoughtfulness.
In their staging and form, both plays broke away from the box sets and specificity of character and historical time and place so typical of the traditional drama.
Chomsky's view is that language and indeed grammar are programmed into the brain's 'deep structure' - that is, they are an aspect of what I would describe as the brain's specificity.
Whereas once biologists used to speak of organisms as the product of the interplay of nature and nurture, or, in modern language, genes and environment, today this dichotomy is recognized as simplistic, for it is an individual's genes, expressed during development, which provide the basis for both specificity and plasticity.
Specificity is the property that confers on brains the ability to make sense of their environment, to recognize invariance and to respond in an orderly way to regularities in the external world.
By contrast the key feature of a fully developed nervous system is its specificity, the precise set of connections by which a signal beginning at a particular sensory cell runs in a defined route, ending in some effector cell, a private line, essentially insulated from the multitude of other neurons within the system.