In contrast to a wide range of other technical fields, terminology for linguistics and human language engineering, both for written text and for speech, is determined by mainly theoretical research and pre-competitive development considerations. There is currently no effective standardisation of any practical consequence, except in the sub-fields which are related to electrical engineering, signal processing, and acoustics.
It is clearly out of the question to try to harmonise theoretical terminologies; for very good logical reasons theoretical terms cannot be isolated and defined in the absence of their theoretical environment. A practical procedure is to analyse the actual vocabulary used by experts in applications oriented fields. However, experts from many different disciplines are involved: from speech sciences (including clinical phonetics on the one hand, and orthographic transcription and signal labelling on the other) through descriptive linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics), and computational linguistics (linguistic data acquisition, lexicon construction, parsing) to electrical engineering and product evaluation methodology. This heterogeneity forebodes non-consistent terminological models from the different disciplines which cannot be naively tossed together into a single pool without the danger of confusion and contradiction.