Semantics Flashcards
(30 cards)
Anti-Intersection Adjective
An adjective whose referents are not in the set referred to by the noun that it modifies.
Antonymy
A meaning relationship between words where their meanings are in some sense opposite.
Compositional Meaning
The meaning of a phrasal expression that is predictable from the meanings of smaller expressions it contains and how they are syntactically combined.
Converses
Antonyms in which the first word of the pair suggests a point of view opposite to that of athe second word.
Entailment
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.
Gradable Antonyms
Words that are antonyms and denote opposite ends of a scale.
Idiom
A multi-word lexical expression whose meaning is not compositional.
Incompatibility
The relationship between two propositions where it is impossible for both of them to be true simultaneously.
Intersective Adjective
An adjective whose reference is determined independently from the reference of the noun that it modifies.
Lexical Expression
A linguistic expression that has to be listed in the mental lexicon.
Lexical Semantics
A subfield of semantics that studies meanings of lexical expressions.
Mental Image Definition
A conception of a word’s sense as a picture in the mind of the language user that represents its meaning.
Mutual Entailment
The relationship between two propositions where they entail one another.
Non-Intersections Adjective
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.
Principle of Compositionality
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.
Propositions
The sense expressed by a sentence. Characteristically, propositions can be true or false.
Prototype
For any given set, a member that exhibits the typical qualities of the members of that set.
Pure Intersection
The relationship between reference of an adjective and a noun it modifier 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.
Reference
A component of linguistic meaning that relates the sense of some expressions to entities in the outside world. The collection of all the referents of an expression.
Referent
An actual entity or an individual in the world to which some expression refers.
Relative Intersection
Type of relationship between adjective and noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference.
Reverses
Antonyms in which one word in the pair suggests movement that “undoes” the movement suggested by the other.
Semantics
The study of linguistic meaning.
Sense
A mental representation of an expression’s meaning.
