Semantics Key Concepts & Vocab

Lexical Semantics

focuses on the meaning of words or few word expressions

Compositional Semantics

focuses on the meaning of phrases and how lexical meanings combine to make these phrases.

Sense

the mental representation or concept of an expressions’ meaning (that is diverse).

ex: “Cat” = some imagine fur and paws, while others think of pet allergy

ex: “Bank” = while some imagine the financial institution, others imagine the side of a river. 

Referents

the things in the world that an expression refers to.

• things that don’t exist can have sense, but not reference (ex: Queen of the US, Unicorn)

ex: Garfield and Nermal are referents to the expression “Cat”

Reference

the collection of all the referents of an expression.

Hyponym

the more specific thing or word that fall under a broader category. 

• ex: Poodle, Golden Retreiver, Saint Bernard are specific for the category Dog

Hypernym

are the broad categories that hyponyms fall under.

• ex: Dog

Complimentary antonyms/pairs

word pairs that are mutually exclusive - there aren’t references in the world where both exist at the same time. 

ex: married/unmarried, alive/dead, rich/broke 

Gradable antonyms/pairs

word pairs that fall on a spectrum or continuum.

• both pairs can’t exist at the same time, but it can be in between the word pair.

ex: easy/hard, old/young, love/hate

Reverses/Reverse Pairs

word pairs that suggest movement, with one word undoing the action from the other word. 

ex: expand/contract

Converses/Converse Pairs

word pairs that represent opposites in physical points of view. 

• the existence of each word in the pair depends on each other.

ex: to borrow, something had to be lended.

ex: to be an employee, there has to be an employee. 

Proposition

the claim expressed by a sentence

• words alone don’t have prepositions.

Truth Value

the ability of a proposition to be true or false. 

• a single word doesn’t always have a proposition. 

Entailment

occurs when sentence B is true because of sentence A’s proposition.

• isn’t always possible for sentence B to entail sentence a (make a true because of B)

Mutual Entailment

when both sentences entail each other.

a = Ian has a female sibling

B = Ian has a sister

Principle of Compositionality

states that the meaning of a sentence is based on the meanings of the words used and the way the words are structured/combined. 

Idioms

a phrase whose meaning isn't literal

ex: it’s raining cats and dogs, Polly kicked the bucket