File 6.0 What is Semantics? Flashcards
Semantics
A sub-field of linguistics that studies linguistic meaning and how expressions convey meanings.
Lexical Semantics
Deals with the meanings of words and other lexical expressions, including meaning relationships among them.
Compositional Semantics
Compositional Semantics is concerned with phrasal meanings and how phrasal meanings are assembled.
Sense
Sense of an expression is to have some mental representation of its meaning.
Reference
To know what things in the world the expression refers to.
Referents
The particular entities in the world to which some expression refers to. The collection of all referents of an expression is its reference.
Dictionary Style Definitions
That defines words in terms of other words, but also reflects the way that speakers of a language really use that word. We can envision an imaginary idealized dictionary that changes with the times, lists all of the words in a language at a given time, and provides a verbal definition of each according to speakers’ use of that word.
Mental Image Definitions
Word’s meaning that is stored in our minds as a mental image.
Usage-Based Definitions
When it is suitable to use that word in order to convey a particular meaning or grammatical relationship.
Hyponumy
One kind of word meaning relation.
Hypernym
A word with a broad meaning that more specific words fall under; a superordinate. EX: Poodle is a hypernym of Dog.
Sister Terms
When two words reference is intuitively on the same level in the hierarchy. This means that they are contained in all the same sets, or that they have the same hypernyms.
Synonymy
Two words are synonymous if they have the exactly the same reference.
Antonymy
The basic notion of being the “opposite” in some sense. In order for two words to be antonyms of one another, they must have meanings that are related, yet these meanings must contrast with each other in some significant way.
Complementary
We characterize complementary antonomy in the terms of word reference. Two words X and Y are complementary antonyms if there is nothing in the world that is a part of both X’s reference and Y’s reference.
Gradable
Gradable antonyms typically represent points on a continuum, so whole something can be one or the other but not both, it can also easily be between the two (in contrast to complementary pairs), so saying “not X” does not imply “and therefore Y”.
Proposition
The claim expressed by a sentence. Note that words in isolation do not express propositions.
Truth Value
The ability of a proposition to be true or false. This is something to which we can inquire on.
Truth Conditions
The conditions that would have to hold in the world in order for some proposition to be true.
Entailment
Evaluating a prepositions truth conditions. EX If all dogs bark, then Sally’s dog also barks. This relationship is an example of entailment.
Mutual Entailment
When two prepositions entail one another, we refer to their relationship as one of mutual entailment.
Incompatible
Means that it would be impossible for both of them to be true; that is, the truth conditions for one are incompatible prepositions.
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.
Idioms
Whenever the meaning of some multi-word expression is not compositional, it has to be stored in the mental lexicon. In the vast majority of cases, phrasal meanings are compositional.
