Semantics

Question 1

semantics

Answer 1

the study of linguistic meaning

Question 2

compositional semantics

Answer 2

a subfield of semantics that studies the meanings of phrasal expressions and how those meanings arise given the meanings of the lexical expressions they contain and how they are syntactically combined

Question 3

sense

Answer 3

a mental representation of an expression’s meaning

Question 4

reference

Answer 4

a component of linguistic meaning that relates the sense of some expression to entities in the outside world

Question 5

referents

Answer 5

an actual entity or an individual in the world to which some expression refers

Question 6

mental image

Answer 6

a conception of a word’s sense as a picture in the mind of the language user that represents its meaning

Question 7

prototype

Answer 7

for any given set, a member that exhibits the typical qualities of the members of that set

Question 8

hyponymy

Answer 8

a meaning relationship between words where the reference of some word X is included in the reference of some other word Y

Question 9

synonymy

Answer 9

a meaning relationship between words where their reference is exactly the same

Question 10

anyonymy

Answer 10

a meaning relationship between words where their meanings are in some sense opposite

Question 11

hyperhym

Answer 11

a meaning relationship between words where the reference of some word X is included in the reference of some other word Y

Question 12

sister term

Answer 12

words that, in therms of their reference are at the same level in the hierarchy

Question 13

gradable antonyms

Answer 13

words that are antonyms and denote opposite ends of a scale

Question 14

complementary antonyms

Answer 14

pair of antonyms such that everything must be described by the first word, the second word, or neither; and such that saying of something that it is not a member of the set denoted by the first word implicates that it is in the set denoted by the second word

Question 15

reverses

Answer 15

antonyms in which one word in the pair suggests movement that “undoes” the movement suggested by the other

Question 16

truth value

Answer 16

either true or false

Question 17

proposition

Answer 17

the sense expressed by a sentence

Question 18

truth condition

Answer 18

the set of conditions that would have to hold in the world in order for the proposition expressed by some sentence to be true

Question 19

entailment

Answer 19

a relationship between propositions where a proposition p is said to entail another proposition q just in case if p is true, q has to be true as well

Question 20

mutual entailment

Answer 20

the relationship between two propositions where they entail one another

Question 21

incompatible

Answer 21

the relationship between two propositions where it is impossible for both of them to be true simultaneously

Question 22

principle of compositionality

Answer 22

the notion that the meaning of a phrasal expression is predictable from the meanings of the expressions it contains and how they were syntactically combined

Question 23

compositional meaning

Answer 23

the meaning of a phrasal expression that is predictable from the meanings of smaller expressions it contains and how they are syntactically combined

Question 24

idioms

Answer 24

a multi-word lexical expression whose meaning is not compositional

Question 25

pure intersection

Answer 25

the relationship between the reference of an adjective and a noun it modifies such that each picks out a particular group of things, and the reference of the resulting phrase is all of the things that are in both the reference set of the adjective and the reference set of the noun

Question 26

subsective adjective

Answer 26

an adjective whose reference is included in the set of things that the noun it modifies refers to

Question 27

non-intersection

Answer 27

an adjective whose reference is a subset of the set that the noun it modifies refers to, but that does not, in and of itself, refer to any particular set of things

Question 28

anti-intersection adjective

Answer 28

an adjective whose referents are not in the set referred to by the noun that it modifies

Question 29

intersection adjective

Answer 29

an adjective whose reference is determined independently from the reference of the noun that it modifies

Question 30

relative intersection

Answer 30

type of relationship between adjective and noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference