Vocab and Terms Chapter 6

Question 1

semantics

Answer 1

the study of linguistic meaning

Question 2

lexical semantics

Answer 2

a sub-field of semantics that studies meaning of lexical expressions

Question 3

compositional semantics

Answer 3

a sub-field of semantics that studies the meaning of phrasal expressions and how those meanings arise given the meaning of the lexical expressions they contain and how they are syntactically combined.

Question 4

subjective adjectives

Answer 4

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

Question 5

reference

Answer 5

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

Question 6

referents

Answer 6

an actual entity or an individual in the word to which some expression refers

Question 7

mental image

Answer 7

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

Question 8

prototype

Answer 8

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

Question 9

hyponymy/hypernym

Answer 9

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 hyponymy of Y, and conversely, Y is said to be a hypernym of X.

Question 10

sense

Answer 10

a mental representation of an expression’s meaning

Question 11

sister terms

Answer 11

words that in terms of their reference, are at the same level in the hierarchy. Ex: have the exact same hypernyms

Question 12

synonymy

Answer 12

a meaning relationship between words where their reference is exactly the same. Ex: couch and sofa are synonyms

Question 13

antonymy

Answer 13

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

Question 14

gradable antonyms

Answer 14

words that are antonyms and denote opposite ends of a scale

Question 15

reverses

Answer 15

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

Question 16

proposition

Answer 16

the sense expressed by a sentence. Characteristically, propositions can be true or false

Question 17

truth value

Answer 17

either true or false. The reference of a sentence

Question 18

converses

Answer 18

antonyms in which the 1st word of the pair suggests a point of view opposite to that of the 2nd word

Question 19

truth conditions

Answer 19

the set of conditions hat would have to hold in the world in order for the preposition expressed by some sentence to be true

Question 20

entailment

Answer 20

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 21

mutual entailment

Answer 21

the relationship between 2 propositions where they entail one another

Question 22

incompatibility

Answer 22

the relationship between 2 propositions where it is impossible for both of them to be true simultaneously

Question 23

idioms

Answer 23

a multi-word lexical expression whose meaning is not compositional

Question 24

compositional

Answer 24

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

Question 25

pure intersection

Answer 25

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 26

intersective adjectives

Answer 26

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

Question 27

relative intersection

Answer 27

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

Question 28

non-intersection adjective

Answer 28

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 29

anti-intersection adjectives

Answer 29

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

Question 30

complementary antonyms

Answer 30

pair of antonyms such that everything must be described by the first word, the 2nd word, or neither; and such that saying of something that it is not a member of the set denoted by the 1st word implicates that it is in the set denoted by the 2nd word.