Semantics Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards for key concepts in semantics.

Semantics

The subfield of linguistics that studies the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences; specifically, literal meaning.

Lexical Meaning

What we know when we know the meaning of a word.

Extension of an expression

The set of things with the property named by that expression.

Truth Conditions

Knowing when a sentence is true and when it is false.

Semantic Compositionality

The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of its parts and by the ways in which those parts are assembled.

Entailment

Sentence S1 entails sentence S2 if, and only if, whenever S1 is true in a situation, S2 is also true in that situation.

Presupposition

A sentence S1 presupposes S2 just in case S1 entails S2 and the negation of S1 also entails S2.

Negation Test

Used to test for presupposition. If a sentence S1 presupposes S2, then both S1 and the negation of S1 entail S2.

Lexical Ambiguity

The case in which words have multiple meanings. For instance, 'bank' can refer to a financial institution or the side of a river.

Compositional Semantics

Focuses on how the meanings of individual words combine to form the meanings of larger phrases or sentences.

Reference

The relationship between a word or phrase and the object or idea it refers to.

Sense

The mental representation of a word's meaning.

The Principle of Compositionality

The meaning of a sentence (or any other multi-word expression) is a function of the meaning of the parts it contains and how these parts are syntactically combined.