Related Research Articles
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
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 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 ?
Herbert Paul Grice, usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle, which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.
In pragmatics, a subdiscipline of linguistics, an implicature is something the speaker suggests or implies with an utterance, even though it is not literally expressed. Implicatures can aid in communicating more efficiently than by explicitly saying everything we want to communicate. The philosopher H. P. Grice coined the term in 1975. Grice distinguished conversational implicatures, which arise because speakers are expected to respect general rules of conversation, and conventional ones, which are tied to certain words such as "but" or "therefore". Take for example the following exchange:
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.
A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are interrogative in form but may not be considered bona fide questions, as they are not expected to be answered.
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.
Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. Cognitive semantics holds that language is part of a more general human cognitive ability, and can therefore only describe the world as people conceive of it. It is implicit that different linguistic communities conceive of simple things and processes in the world differently, not necessarily some difference between a person's conceptual world and the real world.
In the branch of linguistics known as pragmatics, 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 pragmatics, scalar implicature, or quantity implicature, is an implicature that attributes an implicit meaning beyond the explicit or literal meaning of an utterance, and which suggests that the utterer had a reason for not using a more informative or stronger term on the same scale. The choice of the weaker characterization suggests that, as far as the speaker knows, none of the stronger characterizations in the scale holds. This is commonly seen in the use of 'some' to suggest the meaning 'not all', even though 'some' is logically consistent with 'all'. If Bill says 'I have some of my money in cash', this utterance suggests to a hearer that Bill does not have all his money in cash.
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools 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 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.
Free choice is a phenomenon in natural language where a linguistic disjunction appears to receive a logical conjunctive interpretation when it interacts with a modal operator. For example, the following English sentences can be interpreted to mean that the addressee can watch a movie and that they can also play video games, depending on their preference:
- You can watch a movie or play video games.
- You can watch a movie or you can play video games.
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?
In the linguistic field of pragmatics, an inference is said to be defeasible or cancellable if it can be made to disappear by the addition of another statement, or an appropriate context. For example, sentence [i] would normally implicate [ii] by scalar implicature:
In linguistics, exhaustivity is the phenomenon where a proposition can be strengthened with the negation of certain alternatives. For example, in response to the question "Which students got an A?", the utterance "Ava got an A" has an exhaustive interpretation when it conveys that no other students got an A. It has a non-exhaustive interpretation when it merely conveys that Ava was among the students who got an A.
References
- ↑ Beth, Evert Willem (1955). Semantic Entailment and Formal Derivability.
- ↑ Murphy, M. Lynne (2010). Lexical Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge Textbooks in Semantics. pp. 31–40.
- 1 2 Sauerland, U (2007). Presupposition and Implicature in Compositional Semantics. Pelgrave.
- ↑ Indarti, Gatri Asti Putri (2015-04-01). "Distinguishing Entailment and Presupposition Under Negation Test". Language and Language Teaching Journal. 18 (01): 27–38. doi:10.24071/llt.2015.180104. ISSN 1410-7201.
