The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Bentham Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) did almost all his work in philosophy of language during the last twenty years of his life, primarily under the influence of Locke, the idéologues , and the...
Semantics, History Of The scope of this article is in part determined by the following restrictions. (1) Although the development of semantics in the twentieth century equals or surpasses all that was done earlier, it receives very little attention...
Semantics Semantics is the study of meaning. More specifically, semantics is concerned with the systematic assignment of meanings to the simple and complex expressions of a language. The best way to understand the field of semantics is to appreciate...
Non-Truth-Conditional Meaning There are two dominant approaches to semantics. One sees the task of semantics as to provide a systematic account of the truth conditions of (actual and potential) sentence uses. The other assumes that a use of a sentence...
Propositional Attitudes: Issues in Semantics Propositional attitudes like knowledge, belief, and assertion play an important foundational role for semantic theory, the goal of which is to specify the meanings of sentences and their semantic contents...
Syntactical and Semantical Categories The basis for any theory of syntactical categories is the linguistic fact that in all natural languages there are strings of (one or more) words which are mutually interchangeable in all well-formed contexts salva...
Events in Semantic Theory It is an ancient idea that many verbs are used to describe events—things that happen, in places and at times. Frank Plumpton Ramsey introduced an important twist, in the context of distinguishing events from facts....
Quantifiers in Natural Language Quantifiers in natural language correspond to words such as every, some, most, few , and many others. The Semantics of Determiners What is the semantics of expressions like every and most ? An answer to this question...
Semantics, History of [addendum] In the 1960s, the semantics in vogue in linguistics seems to have favored some kind of decompositional approach. Consider kinship terms. Taking P to mean "parent of" and F to mean female you can analyze...
Any system used to carry information must be characterized syntactically, defining its grammatical expressions, and semantically, defining how they are used to express meaning. Its semantics is distinguished in addition from its phonology, the sound...
Term coined by Bréal (1897) for the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the analysis and description of the so-called ‘literal‘meaning of linguistic expressions. Depending on the focus, various aspects of meaning may be...
SEMANTICS conveniently divides into two branches, the theory of designation and/or denotation and the theory of meaning. The former constitutes extensional, the latter intensional semantics. Both branches are thus parts of the modern trivium of syntax,...
Term coined by Porzig (1934) to denote the syntagmatic relationship of compatibility between pairs of linguistic expressions with a unidirectional semantic implication, such as bark: dog, blond: hair. This type of semantic relation plays an especially...
1 Cover term for all relations that exist between the meanings of expressions (words, sentences) in natural languages. Such relations of meaning concern either (a) syntagmatic wellformedness, i.e. semantic agreement between the subject and the finite...
// n. The branch of linguistics dealing with the meanings of words and sentences. The relation between syntax and semantics and the location of the dividing line between them have long been matters of controversy. Several extreme positions have been...
Basic principle of linguistic communication, postulated by K.Bühler with reference to mathematics and logic, from which allegedly all linguistic factors can be deductively derived and explained: (a) the basic functions of language are...
1 Typical property of morphemes in agglutinating languages (e.g. Turkish) which expresses exactly one meaning component ( agglutination). In contrast, inflection. ( also language typology) 2 An expression is monosemic if it has exactly one meaning, as...
The description of the semantic structure of sentences based on the meaning of individual lexemes and their syntactic roles in the given sentence. ( also meaning, principle of compositionality, sentence...
Semantics (Greek sÄ"mantikos, giving signs, significant, symptomatic meaning, from sÄ"ma (σá¿μα), sign) refers to aspects of meaning, as expressed in language or other systems of signs. As discussed in semiotics, the theory of signs, by the Vienna...
