Semantics

Question 1

semantics

Answer 1

subfield of linguistics that studies linguistic meaning and how expressions convey meanings

Question 2

lexical semantics

Answer 2

deals with the meanings of words and other lexical expressions, including the meaning relationships behind them

Question 3

compositional semantics

Answer 3

concerned with phrasal meanings and how phrasal meanings are assembled

Question 4

sense

Answer 4

to have some mental representation of a words meaning

Question 5

reference

Answer 5

knowing the relationship of the word to the world

Question 6

referents

Answer 6

particular entities in the world to which some expression refers

Question 7

mental image

Answer 7

representation in a person’s mind of the physical world outside that person

Question 8

hyponomy

Answer 8

shows the relationship between a generic term (hypernym) and a specific instance of it (hyponym)

Question 9

hyponym

Answer 9

a word of more specific meaning than a general or super-ordinate term applicable to it

Question 10

hypernym

Answer 10

a word with a broad meaning that more specific words fall under; a super-ordinate

Question 11

sister terms

Answer 11

if a words’ reference is on the same level in the hierarchy

Question 12

synonymy

Answer 12

when two words have exactly the same reference

Question 13

antonymy

Answer 13

when words must have meanings that are related, yet must contrast with each other in some significant way

Question 14

complementary antonyms

Answer 14

word pairs whose meanings are opposite but whose meanings do not lie on a continuous spectrum (push, pull)

Question 15

gradable antonyms

Answer 15

represent points on a continuum, so while something can be one of the other but not both, it can also easily be between the two

Question 16

reverses

Answer 16

pairs of words that suggest some kind of movement, where one word in the pair suggests movement that “undoes” the movement suggested by the other

Question 17

converses

Answer 17

have to do with two opposing points of view or a change in perspective: for one member of the pair to have reference, the other must as well

Question 18

truth value

Answer 18

ability to be true or false

Question 19

truth conditions

Answer 19

conditions that would have to hold in the world in order for some proposition to be true

Question 20

entailment

Answer 20

the principle that under certain conditions the truth of one statement ensures the truth of a second statement

Question 21

mutual entailment

Answer 21

when two propositions entail one another

Question 22

incompatible

Answer 22

it would be impossible for both propositions to be true; that is, the truth conditions for one are incompatible with the truth conditions for the other

Question 23

principle of compositionality

Answer 23

the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of the words it contains and the way in which these words are syntactically combined

Question 24

compositonal

Answer 24

predictable from the meanings of words and their syntactic combination

Question 25

idioms

Answer 25

a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words

Question 26

pure intersection

Answer 26

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 27

intersective adjectives

Answer 27

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

Question 28

relative intersection

Answer 28

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

Question 29

non-intersection adjective

Answer 29

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 30

anti-intersection adjective

Answer 30

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