Semantics and Pragmatics

Semantics

study of linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences

Lexical Semantics: Meanings of words and relationships among words

Compositional Semantics: how the meaning of words are combined to form the meanings of larger syntactic units (ex: phrases and sentences)

Pragmatics: study of how context affects meaning

Truth-Conditional/Compositional Semantics: calculates the truth conditions of a sentence by composing (putting together) meanings of smaller units according to semantic rules

Truth value: whether a sentence is true or false

Tautologies (Analytic): restricted number of sentences that are always true regardless of circumstances

Contradictions: sentences that are always false

Entailment: meaning relations between sentences

Contradictory – if when one sentence is true, the other is false (no situation where both true or both false) - Always have opposite truth values

Synonymous (Paraphrases) - if two sentences are both true or both false with respect to the same situation

Principle of Compositionality: meaning of an expression is composed of the meanings of its parts and how they are combined structurally

Proper noun: refers to precise object in the world (referent)

Predicates: verbs, adjectives, and common nouns

Semantic Anomaly: sentences that violate semantic or syntactic rules Uninterpretable sentences: One or more words do not have meaning – would not be able to compute meaning for entire sentence

Semantically Anomalous sentences

Individual words have meaning, but cannot be combined based on syntax and semantic rules – also cannot get meaning

Metaphor

Expression that appears to be an anomaly but is understood in terms of a meaningful concept

Paradox

situation which it is impossible to ascribe a truth value

Reference

association with the object it refers to

Synonyms

words or expressions that have the same meaning in some or all contexts

Antonyms

words that opposite in meaning, several kinds

Complementary pairs

one or the other (a = not b) - alive/dead, present/absent, awake/asleep

Gradable pairs

related to objects they modify, do not provide an absolute scale, but has a range – big/small, hot/cold, fast/slow, happy/sad

Relational Opposites

display symmetry in meaning, if x does to y, y does to x – give/receive, -er/-ee, buy/sell, teacher/pupil

Homonyms(Homophones)

words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings

Polysemy/Polysemous

word has multiple meanings that are related conceptually or historically

Hyponyms

relationship between more general term and specific instances, hyponym is more specific

Semantic features

properties that comprise some of the meaning of a word or morpheme that clarify how certain words relate to other words

classifiers

grammatical morphemes that indicate the semantic class of the noun

"Count” noun

can be enumerated and pluralized – may be preceded by indefinite determiner a and quantifier many – must occur with a determine of some kind

“Mass” noun

cannot be enumerated or pluralized – can occur with quantifier much or without any determiner

Arguments

NPs that occur with a verb

Intransitive verbs

have one argument (subject)

Transitive Verbs

have two arguments (subject and direct object)

Ditransitive verbs

three arguments (subject, direct object, and indirect object)

Goal

endpoint of a change in location or possession

Deictics

Words that receive part of their meaning via context and orientation of speaker - pronouns, demonstratives, adverbs, prepositions

Reference resolution

look at the context where the word is used to determine its referent

Linguistic context

anything that has been uttered prior or along with the word

Situational context

any nonlinguistic knowledge that allows you to interpret meaning

Reflexive pronoun

pronoun that needs to receive reference based on sentence-internal linguistic context

Grice's Maxims of Discourse

quality (truth), quanity(information), relation (relevance), manner (clarity)

Presuppositions

situations that must exist for utterances to be appropriate