File 6 - Semantics Flashcards
Semantics
The study of linguistic meaning.
Lexical Semantics
A subfield of semantics that studies meanings of lexical expressions.
Compositional Semantics
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.
Sense
A mental representation of an expressions’ meaning.
Referent
An actual entity or an individual in the world to which some expression refers.
Mental Image Definition
A conception of a word’s sense as a picture in the mind of the language user that represents its meaning.
Hyponymy
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.
Sister Terms
Words that, in terms of their reference, are at the same level in the hierarchy, i.e. have exactly the same hypernyms.
Synonymy
A meaning relationship between words where their reference is exactly the same. For example, couch and sofa are synonyms.
Antonymy
A meaning relationship between words where their meanings are in some sense opposite.
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.
Gradable Antonyms
Words that are antonyms and denote opposite ends of a scale.
Reverses
Antonyms in which one word in the pair suggests movement that “undoes” the movement suggested by the other.
Converses
Antonyms in which the first word of the pair suggests a point of view opposite to that of the second word.
Proposition
The sense expressed by a sentence. Characteristically, propositions can be true or false.
Truth Value
Either true or false. The reference of a sentence.
Truth Conditions
The set of conditions that would have to hold in the world in order for the proposition expressed by some sentence to be true.
Entailment
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.
Mutual Entailment
The relationship between two propositions where they entail one another.
Incompatibility
The relationship between two propositions where it is impossible for both of them to be true simultaneously.
Principle of Compositionality
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.
Compositional Meaning
The meaning of a phrasal expression that is predictable from the meanings of the smaller expressions it contains and how they are syntactically combined.
Idiom
A multi-word lexical expression 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 Adjective
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 Adjectives
Adjectives whose reference is included in the set of things that the noun they modify refers to.
Non-Intersection Adjective
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 Adjective
An adjective whose referents are not in the set referred to by the noun that it modifies.
Prototype
For any given set, a member that exhibits the typical qualities of the member of that set.
