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 expression’s meaning.
Reference
A component of linguistic meaning that relates the sense some expression to entities in the outside world.
Dictionary-style Definitions
Defines words in terms of other words, but also reflects the way that speakers of a language really use that word.
Mental Image Definitions
A conception of a word’s sense as a picture in the mind of the language user that represents its meaning.
Usage Based Definitions
A characterization of a word’s sense based on the way the word is used by speakers of that language.
Prototype
For any given set, a member that exhibits the typical qualities of the members of that set.
Hyponymy
A meaning relationship between words where the reference of some word x is included in the reference of some word y. X is then said to be the hyponym of Y, and conversely Y is said to be a hypernym of X.
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 meaning are in some sense opposite.
Sister Terms
Words that, in terms of their reference, are at the same level in their hierarchy, i.e., have exactly the same hypernyms.
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 is not a member of a set denoted by the first word implicates that it is denoted by the second word.
Gradable Antonyms
Word 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, i.e. have truth values.
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 p is true, q has to be true as well.
Incompatiblility
The relationship between two proposiwtionswhere 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 form the meanings of the expressions it contains and how they were 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 Adjectives
An adjective whose reference is determined independently from the reference of the noun that it modifies.
Subsective Adjectives
An adjective whose reference is included in the set of thing that the noun it modifies 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.
Referent
An actual entity or an individual in the world to which some expression refers.