Chapter 2: Knowledge of Meaning

Flashcards created to review key concepts of Chapter 2 regarding knowledge of meaning in linguistics.

Linguistics

The science of language aimed at understanding the unconscious knowledge of language that speakers have.

Semantics

The study of linguistic meaning, a branch of linguistics that makes explicit the unconscious knowledge of meaning.

Semantic composition

The computation that combines words and their meanings to produce the meanings of sentences.

Meaning

The significance or interpretation of words, phrases, or sentences, which can be basic or contextual.

Truth conditions

The specific conditions that must hold true for a sentence to be considered true.

Ambiguity

A situation where a word or sentence can have multiple meanings or interpretations.

Lexical ambiguity

Ambiguity that arises from a single word having more than one meaning.

Syntactic ambiguity

Ambiguity that arises from the arrangement of words in a sentence allowing for multiple interpretations.

Entailment

A semantic relation where the truth of one sentence guarantees the truth of another.

Contradiction

A sentence that cannot be true in any possible world.

Tautology

A sentence that is true in all possible worlds.

Contingent sentence

A sentence that is true in some possible worlds and false in others.

Scope ambiguity

An ambiguity that arises when it is unclear which part of a sentence a modifier relates to.

Frame sensitivity

The phenomenon where the acceptability of certain expressions depends on its syntactic context.

Polarity items

Expressions that are sensitive to the presence of negation in the surrounding context.

Semantic relations

The relationships between sentences based on meaning, such as independence, contrariness, and entailment.