Semantics is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science.
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
In computer science, denotational semantics is an approach of formalizing the meanings of programming languages by constructing mathematical objects that describe the meanings of expressions from the languages. Other approaches providing formal semantics of programming languages include axiomatic semantics and operational semantics.
In lexical semantics, opposites are words lying in an inherently incompatible binary relationship. For example, something that is long entails that it is not short. It is referred to as a 'binary' relationship because there are two members in a set of opposites. The relationship between opposites is known as opposition. A member of a pair of opposites can generally be determined by the question What is the opposite of X ?
Donald Herbert Davidson was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and the depth and difficulty of his thought. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, and most of his influence lies in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas.
In programming language theory, semantics is the rigorous mathematical study of the meaning of programming languages. Semantics assigns computational meaning to valid strings in a programming language syntax.
A possible world is a complete and consistent way the world is or could have been. Possible worlds are widely used as a formal device in logic, philosophy, and linguistics in order to provide a semantics for intensional and modal logic. Their metaphysical status has been a subject of controversy in philosophy, with modal realists such as David Lewis arguing that they are literally existing alternate realities, and others such as Robert Stalnaker arguing that they are not.
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. This principle is also called Frege's principle, because Gottlob Frege is widely credited for the first modern formulation of it. The principle was never explicitly stated by Frege, and it was arguably already assumed by George Boole decades before Frege's work.
Douglas Quentin Adams is a professor of English at the University of Idaho and an Indo-European comparativist. Adams studied at the University of Chicago, taking his PhD in 1972. He is an expert on Tocharian and a contributor on this subject to the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Cognitive grammar is a cognitive approach to language developed by Ronald Langacker, which hypothesizes that grammar, semantics, and lexicon exist on a continuum instead of as separate processes altogether. This approach to language was one of the first projects of cognitive linguistics. In this system, grammar is not a formal system operating independently of meaning. Rather, grammar is itself meaningful and inextricable from semantics.
Stephen Roy Albert Neale is a British philosopher and specialist in the philosophy of language who has written extensively about meaning, information, interpretation, and communication, and more generally about issues at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics. Neale is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics and holder of the John H. Kornblith Family Chair in the Philosophy of Science and Values at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY).
Robert Culp Stalnaker is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Angelika Kratzer is a professor emerita of linguistics in the department of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic 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.
Modality is a non-fiction book by the semanticist Paul Portner. The book, first published by the Oxford University Press in 2009, lays out the basic problems in linguistic modality and some of the standard approaches to solving them.
Inquisitive semantics is a framework in logic and natural language semantics. In inquisitive semantics, the semantic content of a sentence captures both the information that the sentence conveys and the issue that it raises. The framework provides a foundation for the linguistic analysis of statements and questions. It was originally developed by Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk, Salvador Mascarenhas, and Floris Roelofsen.
Alternative semantics is a framework in formal semantics and logic. In alternative semantics, expressions denote alternative sets, understood as sets of objects of the same semantic type. For instance, while the word "Lena" might denote Lena herself in a classical semantics, it would denote the singleton set containing Lena in alternative semantics. The framework was introduced by Charles Leonard Hamblin in 1973 as a way of extending Montague grammar to provide an analysis for questions. In this framework, a question denotes the set of its possible answers. Thus, if and are propositions, then is the denotation of the question whether or is true. Since the 1970s, it has been extended and adapted to analyze phenomena including focus, scope, disjunction, NPIs, presupposition, and implicature.
In formal semantics, a type shifter is an interpretation rule which changes an expression's semantic type. For instance, while the English expression "John" might ordinarily denote John himself, a type shifting rule called Lift can raise its denotation to a function which takes a property and returns "true" if John himself has that property. Lift can be seen as mapping an individual onto the principal ultrafilter which it generates.
- Without type shifting:
- Type shifting with Lift:
In formal semantics a responsive predicate is an embedding predicate which can take either a declarative or an interrogative complement. For instance, the English verb know is responsive as shown by the following examples.
- Bill knows whether Mary left.
- Bill knows that Mary left.
