semantics
Terms
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- Goal of Linguistics
- to explain precisely how languages are structured and used
- Ambiguous
- term used to characterize an expression that can be interpreted in more than one way as a consequence of having more than one constituent structure, or more than one referential meaning
- Constituent Structure
- linear and hierarchical organization of the words of a sentence into syntactic units
- Referential Meaning
- The meaning that an expression has by virtue of its ability to refer to an entity; referential meaning is contrasted with social meaning and affective meaning and is sometimes called denotation
- Expression
- Any bit of spoken, written, or signed language; the audible or bisible aspect of language use that conveys particular context in a given context
- Social Meaning
- Information that linguistic expressions convey about the social characteristics of their producers and of the situation in which they are produced; together with affective meaning, social meaning is sometimes called connotation
- Affective Meaning
- Information conveyed about the attitudes and emotions of the language user toward the content or context of their expression; together with social meaning, affective meaning is sometimes called connotation
- Linguistic Meaning
- Made up of Referential, Social, and Affective Meaning
- Content Words
- A word whose primary function is to describe entities, ideas, qualities, and states of being in the world. Nouns, verbs, adj, and adv. are content words. Content words are contrasted with function words
- Function Words
- Words such as detterminers and conjunctions whose primary role is to mark grammatical relationships between content words or structures such as phrases and clauses
- Utterance
- Expression produced in a particular context with a particular intention
- Pragmatics
- The branch of linguistics that studies language use, in particular the relationship among syntax, semantics, and interpretation in light of the context of situation
- Semantics
- Branch of linguistics that examines word and sentence meaning while gererally ignoring context
- Lexical Items
- A unit in the lexicon; the notion of lexical item includes all inflected forms; thus, child, child's, children, and children's constitute the lexical item child
- Lexical Semantics
- Branch of semantics that deals with word meaning
- Semantic Fields
- A set of words with an identifiable semantic affinity ex. angry, sad, happy, exuberant, depressed
- Hyonymy
- The term used for the state of having identical expression but different meanings (book a flight/buy a book) homophonous is sometimes used with the related sense of sounding alike but not necessarily having the same written form or meaning
- homophony
- term used in semantic analysis to refer to words that are pronounced alike but have different meanings, as in: two, to, too
- Hyponym
- A term whose referent is included in the referent of another term. Ex. blue, is a hyponym of color
- Referent
- Real-world entity (person, object, notion, situation) referred to by a linguistic expression.
- Superordinate
- less marked referent ex. color is the superordinate of blue
- Part/Whole Relationships
- the referent of the first term is part of the referent of the second term: hand/arm...the hand is not a type of arm, so it is not a hyponym
- Synonymous
- We can say that term A is synonymous with term B if every referent of A is a referent of B and vice-versa
- Antonymy
- Terms A and B are antonyms if, when A describes a referent, B cannot describe the same referent, and vice-versa...in the same context
- Converseness
-
Characterizes a reciprocal semantic relationship between pairs of words.
A is the husband of B, then B is the wife of A and vice-versa - Polysemy
- term used to refer to multiple related meanings for a given word or sentence; a wordwith more than one meaning is said to be polysemic
- Modality
- Grammatical category of verbs marking speakers' attitudes toward the status of their assertions as factual (indicative), hypothetical (subjective), and so on; also called mood.
- Tense
- Category of the verb that marks time reference, for example past or present
- Reference
- Semantic category through which language provides information about the relationoship between noun phrases and their referents
- Deixis
- The marking of the orientation or position of entities and situations with respect to certain points of reference such as the place (here/there) and time (now/then) of utterence
- Personal Deixis
- Pronouns I, you, and we along with she, he, it and they are markers of personal Deixis.
- Spatial Deixis
- Marking of the orientation or position in space of the referent of a linguistic expression. Usually expressed by demonstratives (this, that) and adv. (here, there)
- Temporal Deixis
- orientation or position of the referent of actions and events in time.
- Aspect
- Grammatical category of verbs, marking the way in which a situation described by the verb takes place in time, for example, as continuous, repetitive, or instantaneous
- Textual Deixis
- The orientation of an utterance with respect to other utterances in a string of utterances
- Agent
- Responsible initiator of an action
- Patient
- entity that undergoes a certaini change of state
- Experiencers
- That which receives a sensory input
- Instruments
- intermediary through which an agent performs the action
- Causes
- any natural force that brings about a change of state
- Recipients
- that which receives a physical object
- Benefactives
- That for which an action is performed
- Locatives
- The location of an action or state
- Temporals
- The time at which the action or state occurred