Semantics Glossary Flashcards
Dictionary knowledge
Knowledge of a word’s inherent meaning.
Pragmatic concerns…
the use of language in real contexts, also studying them, it cannot study language without a prior concept of meaning.
Intentionality
Property shared by thoughts and meanings of being about things other than themselves-objects in the world.
Sentences by Frege
The expressions of thoughts, so the sense of a sentence is the thought it expresses.
Ambiguity
Term used to describe those words which have more than just one meaning.
Underspecified meaning
Phenomenon characterized as the conscious omission of data from a description. It must be predictable in order to be able to underspecify it
Levinson: “with a linguistic expression that is apparently systematically ambiguous…
We should entertain the possibility that the correct analysis is in fact a simple, univocal, semantically broad sense with a defeasible set of generalized pragmatic restrictions.
It is very hard to determine where information stops being part of a word´s dictionary meaning and…
Becomes part of the encyclopaedic knowledge we have of its denotation.
In terms of centrality…
The multitude of specifications that figure in our encyclopaedic conception of an entity form a gradation. Some bits of information are central and some are peripheral.
Sense
General meaning, abstracted from its use to refer.
Reference
Concerns the entities which an expression is about, the object to which it refers.
Encyclopaedic knowledge
Knowledge of facts about the world’s external context.
The sense of a proper name
Some information which uniquely distinguishes the referent.
Causal-historical theory about the referent of proper names
In the first instance, a referent is a given name, and the name is passed down through the speech community.
Tone
Differences of register and connotation.
Sense by Frege
It is sense which gives an expression its cognitive value or significance. Sense is the mode of presentation of its referent: the way in which the referent is presented to our understanding.
Linguistic expression
A form of words with a specific meaning.
Pragmatics defend that without knowing what words mean…
One cannot decide how speakers modify and manipulate these meanings in actual situations of language use.
Truth is the basic notion in…
Frege’s semantic theory
Thoughts for Frege are…
Objective but intangible entities.
Deictic or Indexical expressions are…
Defined as those which make reference to some aspect of the context of utterance as an essential part of their meaning.
Code
A speech style in which speaker and hearer have agreed to reassign conventional referents.
For Frege it is not just an arbitrary fact that words have denotations…
A word only refers in virtue of its sense. Senses, not referents, form part of our thoughts.
Truth is the basic notion in…
Frege´s semantic theory.
Thoughts for Frege are…
Objective but intangible entities.
