W4 Semantics Flashcards
3 types of semantics
Lexical
Phrasal/Sentential
Pragmatics
Semantics
The study of the linguistic meaning or morphemes, words, phrases and sentences
Lexical semantics
concerned with the meaning of words and the meaning relationships among words
Phrasal/sentence semantics
meaning of syntactic units larger than the word
Pragmatics
The study of how context affects meaning
Lexical semantics
the part of the meaning of a word or phrase that associates it with some entity
(relationship between words and things in the world)
Lexicon
Representations of words in permanent memory
Contains all stored information, word meaning, spelling, pronunciation, relationship to other words and connotations
Central idea of lexicon
the lexicon is set up as a semantic network of interconnected elements
Semantic features
Aspects of meaning expressed by binary features
[+] - has that features
[-] - does not have that feature
Meaning relationships
Meaning between words
Taxonomic relationships (3)
Superordinate
Ordinate
Subordinate
Attributive relationships
Meanings that are attributive to a word that refers to an object
Part-whole relationships
Parts of an object that refers to the object
Functional relationship
Meaning relationships that refers to the function or purpose of an object
Hierarchical model - intersection search
The two nodes are activates, continue to search relevant information until the two items in the search intersect
* Higher the location of a node in relation to another node, the longer the reaction time
The distance between the nodes is determined by
- Structural characteristics - Taxonomic relations
- Typicality and degree of association between related concepts
- May include phonological, syntactic and morphological aspects of words
