Key Terms
What is semantics?
The study of how meaning is produced and interpreted; the study of meaning in language.
In phrases and sentences, scope is influenced by:
- The clustering of _________
- _____________ linguistic features like stress and intonation
- The clustering of constituents.
- Suprasegmental linguistic features like stress and intonation.
_______: a subordinate, specific term whose reference is included in the referent of a superordinate term
- hint: highly specific to cultural contexts.
Hyponym
[Animal [cat] [dog] [otter] [mouse] ]
_______ words: carry grammatical (but not semantic) meaning
_______ words: carry clear reference or sense
Function words: carry grammatical (but not semantic) meaning
Content words: carry clear reference or sense
What is the challenge with the following sentences?
I saw her duck.
She ate the pie.
They are ambiguous.
Duck - action or animal?
Her/She - who?
the pie - which pie?
_____________ meaning: the actual entity or concept in the physical world that a segment of language identifies or names.
Reference/referential
(AKA "denotational meaning")
_______ ________ studies how the relationships among words create sense through and beyond reference
Lexical semantics
_________: Part/whole relationships where the referent of one term is part of the referent of a second term
Meronymy
_________: A grammatical marking of speaker attitude toward the truth or reliability of their statements
Bonus: What are the two differentiations of this?
Mood/Modality
Bonus:
Epistemic modality: speaker’s sense of truth or reliability of the information they are conveying – Example: “could,” “must have,” “definitely”
Deontic modality: speaker’s expression of obligation – Example: “should"
_____ meaning and ________ meaning: how constituents modify one another affects the scope of meaning.
Phrase meaning and sentence meaning
_____: how people actually interpret the world through languages and their categories
Sense
Lexical semantics are influenced by:
– Word families: categories of words formed through derivation that share common root meanings by virtue of morphological rules
– Paradigms: categories of words formed through inflection that share both common grammatical functions and common root meanings
– Semantic fields: categories of words formed through shared meaning but not necessarily their linguistic form
________: a word has two or more related meanings
Polysemy
____: Expressions of time which can be articulated through inflection of verbs (morphology) or through separate words (syntax), including adverbs.
Tense
_______: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable
_____: The breadth of meaning that a word, phrase, or sentence entails
Scope
The following are an example in variation in ________ meaning.
Example: She keeps boasting about her book awards and told me about it all night vs. She explained her history of award-winning books last night.
Affective
________: a word has the same written or spoken form but different completely different senses (i.e. the multiple meanings are not related)
Homonymy
______: a word or particle whose meaning shifts depending on context
What are the three semantic notions of this?
Deixis
Personal Deixis: meaning depends on who is participating in the conversation
Spatial Deixis: meaning depends on orientation in space
Temporal Deixis: meaning depends on orientation
Where is the metaphor in the following sentence, and what is it indirectly referring to?
I spent so much time studying for that exam.
I spent so much time studying for that exam.
Time metaphor - time as money.
____ _______: the “domain” of meaning included in an individual word
Word meaning
There are multiple types of social meanings encoded in language variation including...
– Race/ethnicity
– Gender
– Social class
– Communities of practice: how individual communities define meaningful social differences
How do Antonymy and Converseness differ?
(How are they similar?)
Antonymy: two words mean their opposite
Converseness: reciprocal semantic relationship between two words
(Both opposing binary pairs)
Is the following sentence relying on sense of referential meaning?
Fathers enjoy playing with their children.
Sense.
Is the following sentence relying on sense or referential meaning?
That father enjoyed playing with his children.
Referential.