Chapter 6 Flashcards
Semantics
a subfield of linguistics that studies linguistic meaning and how expressions convey meanings
Lexical Semantics
deals with the meanings of words and other lexical expressions, including the meaning relationships among them.
Compositional semantics
concerned with phrasal meanings and how phrasal meanings are assembled
referents
the particular entities in the world to which some expressions refers
hyponymy
a word meaning relation
sister terms
when two words in their reference, is intuitively, on the same level in the hierarchy
synonym
two words are synonymous if they have exactly the same reference
antonymy
in order for two words to be antonyms of one another, they must have meanings that are related,yet these meanings must contrast with eachother in some significant way
complementary pairs
two words X and Y are complementary antonyms if there is nothing in the world that is a part of both X’s reference and Y’s reference.
gradable pairs
everything must be one or the other or neither, but not both.
reverses
are pairs of words that suggest some kind of movement, where one word in the pair suggests movement that “undoes” the movement suggested by the other.
converses
with two opposing points of view; for one member of the pair to have reference, the other must as well.
preposition
the claim expressed by a sentence
truth value
the ability of a preposition to be true or false
truth conditions
the conditions that would that would have to hold in the world in order for some preposition to be true
entailment
a relationship between propositions where a proposition p is said to entail another proposition q just in case p is true, q has to be true as well
mutual entailment
the relationship between two propositions where they entail one another
incompatible
this means that it would be impossible for both of them to be true; that is, the truth conditions for one are incompatible with the truth conditions for one another
principle of compositionality
the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of the words it contains, and how these words are syntactically combined.
compositional
principle of compositionality states that meanings of mulit-word expressions are compositional, predictable from the meanings of words and their syntactic combination
idioms
a multi word lexical expressions whose meaning is not compositional
pure intersection
the relationship between the reference of an adjective and a noun it modifies such that each picks out a particular group of things, and the reference of the resulting phrase is all of the things that are in both the reference set of the adjective and the reference set of the noun
intersective adjectives
an adjective whose reference is determined independently from the reference of the noun that it modifies
relative intersection
type of relationship between adjective and noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference
subsective relatives
adjectives whose reference is included in the set of things that the noun they modify refers to
non intersection
an adjective whose reference is a subset of the set that the noun it modifies refers to,but that does not,in and of itself, refer to any particular set of things
anti intersection adjectives
an adjective whose referents are not in the set referred to by the noun that it modifies
sense
a mental representation of an expressions meaning
reference
a component of linguistic meaning that relates the sense of some expression to entities in the outside world. The collection of all the referents of an expression
gradable antonyms
words that are antonyms and denote opposite ends of a scale
