Semantics and Pragmatics Glossary Course 2024-25, day 1.

Flashcards based on Semantics and Pragmatics Glossary Course 2024-25 lecture notes.

A situation type that is dynamic, durative and telic, i.e., has an inherent end point.

Accomplishment

A situation type that is dynamic and telic and non-durative, i.e., a point event.

Achievement

A situation type that is dynamic, durative and atelic, i.e., a process that does not have an inherent end point.

Activity

A German-language term for situation type.

Aktionsart

When its linguistically encoded content is compatible with more than one meaning; may be lexical or structural/syntactic.

Ambiguity

A referential relationship where further expressions are used to refer to the same entity.

Anaphora

Words in a semantic opposition, including complementary, gradable, relational, and reverse antonyms.

Antonymy

Illocutionary acts which commit the speaker to something being the case; includes asserting and stating.

Assertives

Beliefs that a person holds to be true; sometimes referred to as contextual assumptions.

Assumptions

A feature of situation types where the process has no inherent end point.

Atelic

Features that can only have two values, + or –.

Binary Features

Theory of categorization based on the ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’ conditions that an element needs to comply with in order to be included in a category.

Classical view of categories

The changes that processing an input (such as an utterance) creates to the assumptions held by an individual.

Cognitive effects

An individual’s cognitive environment is the set of assumptions that are manifest to that individual at a particular time.

Cognitive environment

Branch of semantics that deals with issues of meaning, relating them to its psychological, neurological, and cultural bases.

Cognitive/embodied semantics

The semantic effects on expressions of frequently occurring together, e.g., becoming routinized.

Collocation

Illocutionary acts which commit the speaker to some future action; includes promises and threats.

Commissives

All the knowledge that is shared by speaker and hearer.

Common ground

The intention to inform an audience of one’s informative intention.

Communicative intention

A type of oppositeness where terms divide a domain into two mutually exclusive subdomains so that something must be one or the other but not both.

Complementary antonyms

An expression is compositional when its meaning is made up, or ‘composed’, of the meanings of its constituent parts.

Compositionality

Theory that tries to explain the behaviour of cognitive agents by exploiting the parallels between the human brain and digital computers.

Computational theory of mind; computationalism

A mental representation of something.

Concept

The account of metaphor given in cognitive linguistic approaches, where metaphor is seen as part of a general process of analogical mapping between cognitive domains rather than a strictly linguistic strategy.

Conceptual metaphor theory

An expression’s connotation is those aspects of its meaning which do not affect its sense or denotation, but which have to do with secondary factors such as its emotional force, its level of formality, its character as a euphemism, etc.

Connotation

In Speech Act Theory an utterance that has the performative force of stating, usually via a declarative sentence.

Constatives

The circumstances in which an utterance is interpreted.

Context

A Gricean category of implicature which arises because of the use of a particular word or expression.

Conventional implicatures

A Gricean category of implicatures which draw on the workings of the cooperative principle and maxims.

Conversational implicatures

In Grice's theory of inferential communication, principles that speakers and hearers expect each other to follow.

Conversational maxims