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In logic, the semantic principleof bivalence states that every declarative sentence expressing a proposition has exactly one truth value, either true or false. A logic satisfying this principle is called a two-valued logic or bivalent logic.
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).
Linguistic entailments are entailments which arise in natural language. If a sentence A entails a sentence B, sentence A cannot be true without B being true as well. For instance, the English sentence "Pat is a fluffy cat" entails the sentence "Pat is a cat" since one cannot be a fluffy cat without being a cat. On the other hand, this sentence does not entail "Pat chases mice" since it is possible for a cat to not chase mice.
Counterfactual conditionals are conditional sentences which discuss what would have been true under different circumstances, e.g. "If Peter believed in ghosts, he would be afraid to be here." Counterfactuals are contrasted with indicatives, which are generally restricted to discussing open possibilities. Counterfactuals are characterized grammatically by their use of fake tense morphology, which some languages use in combination with other kinds of morphology including aspect and mood.
In formal semantics and philosophy of language, a definite description is a denoting phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun. The definite description is proper if X applies to a unique individual or object. For example: "the first person in space" and "the 42nd President of the United States of America", are proper. The definite descriptions "the person in space" and "the Senator from Ohio" are improper because the noun phrase X applies to more than one thing, and the definite descriptions "the first man on Mars" and "the Senator from Washington D.C." are improper because X applies to nothing. Improper descriptions raise some difficult questions about the law of excluded middle, denotation, modality, and mental content.
In linguistics and philosophy, a presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include:
In linguistics, a polarity item is a lexical item that is associated with affirmation or negation. An affirmation is a positive polarity item, abbreviated PPI or AFF. A negation is a negative polarity item, abbreviated NPI or NEG.
In linguistic semantics, a downward entailing (DE) propositional operator is one that constrains the meaning of an expression to a lower number or degree than would be possible without the expression. For example, "not," "nobody," "few people," "at most two boys." Conversely, an upward-entailing operator constrains the meaning of an expression to a higher number or degree, for example "more than one." A context that is neither downward nor upward entailing is non-monotone, such as "exactly five."
In philosophy—more specifically, in its sub-fields semantics, semiotics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metasemantics—meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify".
In generative grammar and related approaches, the logical form (LF) of a linguistic expression is the variant of its syntactic structure which undergoes semantic interpretation. It is distinguished from phonetic form, the structure which corresponds to a sentence's pronunciation. These separate representations are postulated in order to explain the ways in which an expression's meaning can be partially independent of its pronunciation, e.g. scope ambiguities.
A truth-bearer is an entity that is said to be either true or false and nothing else. The thesis that some things are true while others are false has led to different theories about the nature of these entities. Since there is divergence of opinion on the matter, the term truth-bearer is used to be neutral among the various theories. Truth-bearer candidates include propositions, sentences, sentence-tokens, statements, beliefs, thoughts, intuitions, utterances, and judgements but different authors exclude one or more of these, deny their existence, argue that they are true only in a derivative sense, assert or assume that the terms are synonymous, or seek to avoid addressing their distinction or do not clarify it.
The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions that are of two types: analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true or not true solely by virtue of their meaning, whereas synthetic propositions' truth, if any, derives from how their meaning relates to the world.
In formal semantics, a generalized quantifier (GQ) is an expression that denotes a set of sets. This is the standard semantics assigned to quantified noun phrases. For example, the generalized quantifier every boy denotes the set of sets of which every boy is a member:
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.
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.
In linguistics, veridicality is a semantic or grammatical assertion of the truth of an utterance.
Logical consequence is a fundamental concept in logic which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically follows from one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one in which the conclusion is entailed by the premises, because the conclusion is the consequence of the premises. The philosophical analysis of logical consequence involves the questions: In what sense does a conclusion follow from its premises? and What does it mean for a conclusion to be a consequence of premises? All of philosophical logic is meant to provide accounts of the nature of logical consequence and the nature of logical truth.
In formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not. Scope can be thought of as the semantic order of operations.
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 Hurford disjunction is a disjunction in which one of the disjuncts entails the other. The concept was first identified by British linguist James Hurford. The sentence "Mary is in the Netherlands or she is in Amsterdam" is an example of a Hurford disjunction since one cannot be in Amsterdam without being in the Netherlands. Other examples are shown below:
- #Tamina saw a Beatle or Paul McCartney.
- #The number I'm thinking of is divisible by 4 or it's even.
- #Is Wilbur a pig or an animal?
References
- 1 2 3 Homer, Vincent (2020). "Negative Polarity" (PDF). In Daniel, Gutzmann; Matthewson, Lisa; Meier, Cécile; Hotze, Rullmann; Zimmermann, Thomas Ede (eds.). Blackwell Companion to Semantics. Wiley Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118788516.sem057.
- 1 2 Esipova, Masha; Theiler, Nadine; Champollion, Lucas. "Introduction to Semantics: NPIs" (PDF). NYU Introduction to Semantics Fall 2018. Retrieved 2024-09-21.
- 1 2 3 Sharvit, Yael (2017). "A note on (Strawson) entailment". Semantics and Pragmatics . 10. doi:10.3765/sp.10.1.
- ↑ McCulloch, Gretchen. "A detailed explanation of Negative Polarity Items and Downwards Entailment, using Mean Girls references". All Things Linguistic. Retrieved 2024-09-21.
- ↑ Barker, Chris (2018). "Negative polarity as scope marking" (PDF). Linguistics and Philosophy . 41 (5): 483–510. doi:10.1007/s10988-018-9234-2.
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