ENG 211 - Ch 6

Question 1

semantics

Answer 1

subfield of linguistics that studies meaning in language

Question 2

lexical

Answer 2

deals w/ the meanings of words and other lexical expressions, including the meaning relationships among them

Question 3

compositional

Answer 3

how lexical meanings combine to give rise to phrasal meanings, while lexical semantics focus on meanings of words

Question 4

sense

Answer 4

mental representation of its meaning (sense of an expression)

Question 5

reference

Answer 5

the collection of all the referents of an expression

Question 6

mental image definitions

Answer 6

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

Question 7

usage-based definitions

Answer 7

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

Question 8

hyponymy

Answer 8

a meaning relationship between words where the reference of some 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 9

sister terms

Answer 9

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

Question 10

synonymy

Answer 10

a meaning relationship between words where their reference is exactly the same

Question 11

antonymy

Answer 11

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

Question 12

complementary antonyms

Answer 12

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 is not a member of the set denoted by the first word implicates that it is in the set denoted by the second word

Question 13

gradable antonyms

Answer 13

words that are antonyms and denote opposite ends of a scale (also known as gradable pairs and as scalar antonyms)

Question 14

proposition

Answer 14

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

Question 15

truth value

Answer 15

either true or false. the reference of a sentence.

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

mutual entailment

Answer 17

the relationship between two propositions where they entail one another

Question 18

incompatible

Answer 18

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

Question 19

priciple of compositionality

Answer 19

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

Question 20

compositional meaning

Answer 20

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

Question 21

idiom

Answer 21

a multi-word lexical expression whose meaning is not compositional

Question 22

pure intersection

Answer 22

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

Question 23

intersective adjective

Answer 23

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

Question 24

relative intersection

Answer 24

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

Question 25

subsective adjectives

Answer 25

an adjective whose reference is included in the set of things that the noun it modifies refers to

Question 26

non-intersection

Answer 26

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

Question 27

anti-intersection adjectives

Answer 27

and adjective whose referents are not int he set referred to by the noun that modifies it