Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference. Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression points. Semantics contrasts with syntax, which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics, which investigates how people use language in communication.
In semantics, mathematical logic and related disciplines, the principle of compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them. The principle is also called Frege's principle, because Gottlob Frege is widely credited for the first modern formulation of it. However, the principle has never been explicitly stated by Frege, and arguably it was already assumed by George Boole decades before Frege's work.
In linguistics, anaphora is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context. In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression. The anaphoric (referring) term is called an anaphor. For example, in the sentence Sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is an anaphor, referring back to the antecedent Sally. In the sentence Before her arrival, nobody saw Sally, the pronoun her refers forward to the postcedent Sally, so her is now a cataphor. Usually, an anaphoric expression is a pro-form or some other kind of deictic expression. Both anaphora and cataphora are species of endophora, referring to something mentioned elsewhere in a dialog or text.
Jerry R. Hobbs is an American researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence.
Computational semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with meaning representations of natural language expressions. It consequently plays an important role in natural-language processing and computational linguistics.
In natural language, a deferred reference is the metonymic use of an expression to refer to an entity related to the conventional meaning of that expression, but not denoted by it. Several types of deferred reference have been studied in the literature.
In semantics, a donkey sentence is a sentence containing a pronoun which is semantically bound but syntactically free. They are a classic puzzle in formal semantics and philosophy of language because they are fully grammatical and yet defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. In order to explain how speakers are able to understand them, semanticists have proposed a variety of formalisms including systems of dynamic semantics such as Discourse representation theory. Their name comes from the example sentence "Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it", in which "it" acts as a donkey pronoun because it is semantically but not syntactically bound by the indefinite noun phrase "a donkey". The phenomenon is known as donkey anaphora.
A discourse relation is a description of how two segments of discourse are logically and/or structurally connected to one another.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal concepts from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.
Ann Alicia Copestake is professor of computational linguistics and head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Judith Tonhauser is a Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart.
Lisa Christine Matthewson is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at University of British Columbia with specialties in pragmatics and semantics. She has also done significant work with semantic fieldwork and in the preservation and oral history of First Nations languages, especially St'át'imcets and Gitksan. Matthewson's appointment at UBC was notable because she was the first female full professor in the department's history.
Emily Menon Bender is an American linguist who is a professor at the University of Washington. She specializes in computational linguistics and natural language processing. She is also the director of the University of Washington's Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She has published several papers on the risks of large language models and on ethics in natural language processing.
Mirella Lapata is a computer scientist and Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Working on the general problem of extracting semantic information from large bodies of text, Lapata develops computer algorithms and models in the field of natural language processing (NLP).
Martha (Stone) Palmer is an American computer scientist. She is best known for her work on verb semantics, and for the creation of ontological resources such as PropBank and VerbNet.
Nissim Francez is an Israeli professor, emeritus in the computer science faculty at the Technion, and former head of computational linguistics laboratory in the faculty.
Friederike Moltmann is a German linguist and philosopher. She has done pioneering work at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics, especially on the interface between metaphysics and natural language semantics, but also on the interface between philosophy of mind and mathematics. She is an important proponent of natural language ontology. She is currently Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.
In linguistics, a rising declarative is an utterance which has the syntactic form of a declarative but the rising intonation typically associated with polar interrogatives.
- Rising declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me?
- Falling declarative: Justin Bieber wants to hang out with me.
- Polar question: Does Justin Bieber want to hang out with me?
Alice Geraldine Baltina ter Meulen is a Dutch linguist, logician, and philosopher of language whose research topics include genericity in linguistics, intensional logic, generalized quantifiers, discourse representation theory, and the linguistic representation of time. She is a professor emerita at the University of Geneva.
In linguistics and philosophy of language, the conversational scoreboard is a tuple which represents the discourse context at a given point in a conversation. The scoreboard is updated by each speech act performed by one of the interlocutors.
