Ling20 Ch.7 Semantics

Meaning

is dependent upon the speaker’s use of the language, the context, their communicative intentions and the hearer’s interpretation

Lexical semantics

studied individual lexemes and morphemes

Synonyms

words with similar/identical meanings; share a common sense; same/similar entailments

Antonyms

pairs of words with opposite meanings

Polysemes

the property of a single word have multiple but related meanings to a common concept

Homophones

words that have the same form but completely different meanings that have no real semantic connection

Entailment

specify necessary conditions for something to be true

Denotation

the thing/state/event that a linguistic expression refers to in the real world; denotes possible referents

Connotation

encompasses all of the non-referential effects that can arise from the use of an expression

Affective meaning

the emotions, attitudes, and personal feelings conveyed through language; goes beyond a word's literal dictionary definition; can be conveyed through connotation, tone, context, non-verbal cues, etc

Intension

a term's meaning, concept, or defining properties

Extension

the set of actual objects or things in the world that the term applies to

Reference

the relationship between a linguistic expression and its potential referents

Sense

a kind of prompt to imagine something to compose the thought of something in a particular way; technically psychological entities but are not purely subjective because they must be shared within communities to understand meaning

The conceptual system

a cognitive framework that organizes concepts and knowledge to enable humans to understand and interact with the world through language

Prototypes

a salient exemplar or subtype of a category

Semantic features

Periphrastic features

Inference

the process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true

Sentential semantics

the study of meaning in sentences, clauses, and phrases, focusing on how the meanings of individual words combine to create the overall meaning of a larger syntactic unit

Presupposition

a proposition that comes embedded in the use of a construction and so it gets expressed without be asserted (i.e. using again to imply an event’s prior occurrence)

Truth conditions

conditions that have to hold for propositions to count as true

contrary (gradable antonyms)

terms that designate opposite regions of a scale with some intermediate range of values between them (i.e. hot:cold, long:short, fast:slow)

complementaries

pairs of terms such that whenever one is true the other is false (i.e. dead:alive, odd:even, present:absent)

reversive antonyms

terms that denote movement in opposite directions (i.e. come:go, give:take, raise:slow) OR reversible states (freeze:melt, dress:undress)

conversive antonyms

terms that denote different participants in a binary relationship (i.e. husband:wife, teacher:student) OR the same situation from opposite perspectives (above:below)

proposition

describes an event or state of being; defined by truth conditions

prototype effect

a way of reasoning about a category based on one or a few especially salient models or exemplars

hyponymy

a word that is more specific than another

Taxonomic sisterhood

Words that are both at the same level in a hyponymic hierarchy