File. 6 Semantics key terms and phrases

Question 1

semantics

Answer 1

the study of linguistic meaning.

Question 2

lexical semantics

Answer 2

a subfield of semantics that studies meaning of lexical expressions

Question 3

compositional meaning

Answer 3

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

Question 4

sense

Answer 4

a mental representation of an expression’s meaning.

Question 5

reference

Answer 5

a component of linguistic meaning that relates the sense of some expression to entitles in the outside world. the collection of all the referents of an expression.

Question 6

referent

Answer 6

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

Question 7

dictionary-style definitions

Answer 7

defines words in terms of other words, but also reflects the way that speakers of a language really use that word.

Question 8

mental image definition

Answer 8

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

Question 9

usage-based definitions

Answer 9

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

Question 10

prototype

Answer 10

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

Question 11

hyponymy

Answer 11

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 is said to be hypernym.

Question 12

sister terms

Answer 12

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

Question 13

synonymy

Answer 13

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

Question 14

antonymy

Answer 14

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

Question 15

gradable antonyms

Answer 15

words that antonyms and denote opposite ends of a scale.

Question 16

reverses

Answer 16

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

Question 17

converses

Answer 17

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

Question 18

proposition

Answer 18

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

Question 19

truth value

Answer 19

either true of false. the reference of a sentence.

Question 20

truth conditions

Answer 20

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 21

entailment

Answer 21

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 22

mutual entailment

Answer 22

the relationship between two propositions where they entail one another.

Question 23

incompatibility

Answer 23

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

Question 24

principle of compositionality

Answer 24

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 25

compositional semantics

Answer 25

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 26

idiom

Answer 26

a multi-word lexical expression whose meaning is not compositional.

Question 27

pure intersection

Answer 27

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 28

intersective adjective

Answer 28

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

Question 29

subsective adjective

Answer 29

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

Question 30

non-intersection adjective

Answer 30

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 31

anti-intersection adjective

Answer 31

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