Chapter 6 Semantics Flashcards
Semantics
A subfield of linguistics that studies meaning in language.
Lexical Semantics
Deals with the meanings of words and other lexical expressions, including the meaning relationships among them.
Compositional Semantics
A subfield of semantics that studies the meanings of phrasal expression and how those meanings arise given the meanings of the lexical expressions they contain and how they are syntactically combined.
Sense
Having a mental representation of its meaning.
Reference
The collection of all referents of an expression.
Referents
The particular entities in the world to which some expression refers.
Mental Image
A conception of a words’s sense as a picture in the mind of the language user that represents its meaning.
Prototype
For any given set, a member that exhibits the typical qualities of the members of that set.
Hyponymy
A meaning relationship between words where the reference of some word X is included in the reference of some word Y.
Hypernym
Y is a hypernym of X.
Sister Terms
Words that, in terms of their reference, are at the same level of the hierarchy. For example, have the same hypernyms.
Synonymy
A meaning relationship between words where their reference is exactly the same.
Antonymy
A meaning relationship between words where their meanings are in some sense opposite.
Gradable Antonyms
Words that are antonyms and denote opposite ends of a scale.
Complementary Antonyms
Pair of antonyms such that everything must be described by the first word, the second word, or neither; and such that saying of something that it is not.a member of the set denoted by the first word implicates that it is in the set denoted by the second word.
Proposition
The claims expressed by a sentence.
Truth Value
The ability for a proposition to be true or false.
Converse
Have to do with two opposing points of view or a change in perspective: for one member of the pair to have references the other must as well.
Principle of Compositionality
The meaning of a sentence (or any other multi-word expression) is a function of the meanings of the words it contains and the way in which these words are syntactically combined.
Compositional
Predictable from the meanings of words and their syntactic combination.
Pure Intersection
Simplest form of adjectival combination.
Intersective Adjective
An adjective whose references determined independently from the reference of the noun it modifies.
Subsective Adjectives
An adjective whose reference is included in the set of things that the noun it modifies 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.
