Chapter 6 Vocab Terms

Question 1

sense

Answer 1

a mental representation of an expression’s meaning

Question 2

reference

Answer 2

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

Question 3

referent

Answer 3

an actual entity or an individual in the world to which some expression refers

Question 4

mental image definition

Answer 4

a conception of a word’s sense as a picture in the mind of the language user that represents its meaning

Question 5

usage-based definitions

Answer 5

a characterization of a word’s sense based on the way that the word is used by speakers of a language

Question 6

prototype

Answer 6

for any given set, a member that exhibits the typical qualities of the members of that set

Question 7

hyponymy

Answer 7

a meaning relationship between words, where the reference of some word X is included in the reference of some other word X is included in the reference of some other word Y. X is then said to be a hyponym of Y, and conversely, Y is said to be a hypernym of X

Question 8

sister terms

Answer 8

words that, in terms of their reference, are at the same level in the hierarchy, i.e. have exactly the same hypernyms

Question 9

synonymy

Answer 9

a meaning relationship between words where their a reference is exactly the same. For example, couch and sofa are synonyms

Question 10

antonymy

Answer 10

a meaning relationship between words where their meanings are in some sense opposite

Question 11

complimentary antonyms

Answer 11

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 se denoted by the second word

Question 12

gradable antonyms

Answer 12

words that are anonyms and denote opposite ends of a scale

Question 13

reverses

Answer 13

antonyms in which one word in the pair suggests movement that “undoes” the movement suggested by the other

Question 14

converses

Answer 14

antonyms in which the first word of the pair suggests a point of view opposite to that of the second word

Question 15

proposition

Answer 15

the sense expressed by a sentence. Characteristically, propositions can be true or false, i.e. have truth values

Question 16

truth conditions

Answer 16

the set of conditions that would have to hold in the world in order for the proposition expressed by some sentence to be true

Question 17

entailment

Answer 17

a relationship between propositions where a proposition p is said to entail another proposition q just in case if p is true, q has to be true as well

Question 18

mutual entailment

Answer 18

the relationship between two propositions where they entail one another

Question 19

incompatibility

Answer 19

the relationship between two propositions where it is impossible for both of them to be true simultaneously

Question 20

principle of compositionality

Answer 20

the notion that the meaning of a phrasal expression is predictable from the meaning of the expressions it contains and how they were syntactically combined

Question 21

compositional semantics

Answer 21

a subfield of semantics that studies the meanings of phrasal expressions, and how those meanings arise given the meanings of the lexical expressions they contain and how they are syntactically combined

Question 22

idioms

Answer 22

a multi-word lexical expression whose meaning is not compositional

Question 23

compositional meaning

Answer 23

the meaning of the phrasal expression that is predictable from the meanings of smaller expressions it contains and how they are syntactically combined

Question 24

pure intersection

Answer 24

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 adjectives and the reference set of the noun

Question 25

intersective adjectives

Answer 25

an adjective whose reference is determined independently from the reference of the noun that it modifies

Question 26

relative intersection

Answer 26

type of relationship between adjective and noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference

Question 27

subsective adjectives

Answer 27

adjectives whose reference is included in the set of things that the noun they modify refers to

Question 28

anti-intersection adjectives

Answer 28

an adjective whose referents are not the set referred to by the noun that it modifies

Question 29

semantics

Answer 29

the study of linguistic meaning

Question 30

lexical semantics

Answer 30

a subfield of semantics that studies meanings of lexical expressions

Question 31

non-intersection adjective

Answer 31

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