Questions tagged [semantics]
Semantics is the study of meaning, used to understand expressions through language.
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Tools for converting text to logical form
What's the State of the Art in software for converting text to some sort of logical form? Pros and con's of different packages approaches, if more than one exists?
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Is there evidence that English speakers associate black with bad and/or white with good
Prompted by the recent move towards replacing the terms "blacklist" and "whitelist", I wonder if there is research around the topic of how people feel about the words "black&...
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50 views
A question about connotation meaning and denotation meaning
Here is a word, "flightless" which means "(of a bird or an insect) naturally unable to fly". So should we say it refers to the word's denotation meaning or connotation meaning?
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Comparing the crude geographical names in different regions?
I walked past a well called the old piss recently, and saw a street called the poop. I was surprised. So i studied google maps for places called "the piss" and "the poop" in ...
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21 views
Are there single-word and generally accepted terms for the referents of the arguments in comparative clauses?
AFAIK, in any statement comparing two entities, there are typically at least three terms:
NPa stands for the thing compared
VG stands for nature of comparison
NPb stands for the thing that the ...
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1answer
60 views
What's the name of the process in which a word acquires new meanings?
I am almost sure there is a proper name for that but I forgot. It would be the opposite of semantic bleaching...
3
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1answer
70 views
Are there languages with separate words for 'mouth opening' and 'mouth cavity'?
I am looking for languages which have separate words for the visible opening of the mouth (the external part, including or not including the lips), and the cavity (the internal part). Put another way, ...
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2answers
53 views
What are the target and source domain of this metaphor
The metaphor is: "the shower of arrows was over".
Could "War" the source domain? And the target domain could be "water"? It doesn't make sense to me.
I have read the ...
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1answer
30 views
What is the relation among connotation, semantics, and pragmatics?
I know that connotation meaning belongs to semantic meaning, but what I'm confused about is the connotation meaning is affected by the context, isn't it? If so, why does it not belong to pragmatic ...
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What is shallow semantic processing?
What exactly is "shallow semantic processing", and how is it related to syntactic analysis?
Is it correct to say that syntactic processing of a text is the preliminary step for shallow semantic ...
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46 views
Is syntactic understanding of a text actually the most elementary form of semantical understanding of the text?
I am not a Linguist, but I am curious about the question below:
Is there a linguistic theory that points out that syntactic understanding of a text constitutes the lowest level of semantical ...
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2answers
51 views
Is it possible to test statistical significance of difference between two distance/similarity scores?
I have a corpus consisting of tweets by men and another corpus of female tweets. I was thinking of using a word embeddings approach (e.g., glove and fasttext) and examine the cosine similarity between ...
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1answer
47 views
The semantics of grammatical transformations? [closed]
Please see the following:
We start with a sentence/clause like -
Mr Wilkins is the oldest person in the village.
It seems like we can "transform" the clause using certain "grammatical rules":
Mr ...
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Semantic category of [VERB] + as a + [NOUN]
I have the following examples from a corpus (ICNALE corpus)
"They can grow as a member of society."
"At university, students are regarded as adults not children."
"I worked in a hotel as a service ...
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1answer
47 views
Difference between intonation and tonality?
I have used them interchangeably, but I think that might be wrong. So, is this understanding of the distinction correct? Tonality is pitch affecting semantics (like the Chinese langauge), and ...
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2answers
67 views
Allowed surface locations of [+wh] phrases apparently depend on semanticsāif so, how and why?
Consider
Harvey's machine can resemble a human completely or not at all.
1a) ... The extent to which it resembles a human is determined by its software.
1b) ... To which extent it resembles a human ...
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42 views
Do nouns in simple apposition semantically unpack to predicate nominatives in English?
A Koine Greek grammar states that nouns in simple apposition are semantically understood as predicate nominatives.
So, "Paul the apostle" unpacks to "Paul is the apostle" and "the apostle is Paul" ...
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Do most semanticists maintain that there is a distinction between secondary agents and tools?
I've heard some people say that there are two types of instrument: secondary agents and tools.
A secondary agent is something that accomplishes a task when the agent wields it. So we CAN say ...
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2answers
48 views
What is the semantic term for the things that the single arguments of reflexive and reciprocal verbs stand for?
In my native English, the first argument in "Mary feeds her pigs" stands for an agent, and the second stands for a patient.
But what about the arguments in reflexive and reciprocal clauses in single-...
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1answer
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Does any of these sentences entail the other? [closed]
Does any of these sentences entail the other one?
My last name is Jones.
My father's last name was Jones.
3
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1answer
28 views
How do I write the predicate logic notation for a proposition containing a plural argument?
I need to translate a sentence with an indefinite plural object, as in "I eat apples" to predicate logic notation.
If I write it as EAT(i, a), how will the plurality of the argument be accounted for (...
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1answer
40 views
Is it possible to construct a language that is not semantically ambiguous?
I understand that several work has been done in regards to constructing languages that are both lexically and syntactically non ambiguous such as lojban. Is it possible to extend the work to eliminate ...
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Determining the semantic “complexity” of a grammar computationally from text
I'm working on a computational text analysis project which uses ngram data from journal articles, and I'm trying to find a way to measure some aspect of the semantic "complexity" of the grammar in one ...
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1answer
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What is the entailment of this sentence?
I found that most of the examples of entailment are statements about a third person, but never the speakers themselves. So I wonder what the utterance like "I'm cold." entails?
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2answers
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Compositional Semantics of relative clauses
How do relative pronouns (which, who, invisible which= WH) fit into a sentences compositionality? Given that relative clauses modify Noun Phrases, I'd expect them to be of type <et,<et>> ...
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4answers
991 views
How do we know that abstract words mean the same thing to all of us?
When a baby is learning a language some words must be easier to grasp. You show them a banana and say "This is a banana." You show them a train and say "This is a train." But how can we really be sure ...
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1answer
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Sentence ambiguitiy
The sentence āWhy did everyoneās father think that Tom said that you were fired?ā is supposedly ambiguous in three different ways. However, I canāt seem to get any ambiguous reading from it. I have ...
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2answers
44 views
Relation between entailment and semantic features
From my textbook:
According to this theory, the truth of "I saw a boy" entails the truth of "I saw a child" because "boy" has all the semantic features of "child&...
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27 views
What's the difference between connotative meaning and connotation?
I'm reading an introduction about Geoffrey Leech's seven types of meaning, and confused by the definition of connotative meaning. According to Wikipedia:
The connotative meanings of an expression ...
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49 views
Reduce the number of semantic primes
I was reading up on the semantic primes and I have the impression that the list is too long.
Indeed, if one were to add the term OPPOSITE, GOOD could be OPPOSITE BAD, DIE would be OPPOSITE LIVE and ...
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3answers
209 views
Etymology of some Romance languages' verbs meaning “to sleep”
Portuguese, Spanish and French dormir, Italian dormire etc. come from the Latin verb dormīo.
Wiktionary's entry says that its etymology is:
From Latin dormÄ«re, present active infinitive of dormiÅ, ...
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2answers
111 views
Compositional semantic: Type of conjunctions
My question is in regard to semantic type theory in connection with syntax. I understand the underlying structure of what type a certain type of phrase is ( i.e., proper names are <e>, verbs can ...
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9answers
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Is the connection between 'right' in the sense of direction and concepts like 'correct' limited to Indo-European languages?
I'm now familiar with enough Indo-European languages to know in almost all of them there's an etymological connection or outright homonymy between the word(s) for 'right' in the sense of direction and ...
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2answers
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Proto-Indo-European words for moon? [closed]
There are two words for moon in Proto-Indo-European, *lĆ³wksneh (cognate with 'lunar'), and *mĆ©hns (cognate with 'moon' and 'month'). I think that *lĆ³wksneh means "a shining moon" and is more common, ...
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1answer
83 views
What is meaning according to Saussure?
Did Ferdinand de Saussure define meaning in his Course in General Linguistics?
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Acyclic Graph of Definitions of a Language
Given a certain language L, let's define it's language graph G as the graph where nodes correspond to words and a directed edge between node B and node A implies that the word referenced by B belongs ...
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2answers
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What is the semantic relationship of the words 'ask' and 'tell'?
I'm not quite sure which of these semantic relationships it would be: Synonymy, Hyponymy, Hypernymy, and Antonymy. Or would there be no semantic relationship between these words?
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3answers
209 views
What explanatory advantages does so-called “type theory” have?
Some linguists use a theory called "type theory"; you can see it in a few questions on this site.
Apparently it is based on the "type theory" of maths, logic, and computer science. Wikipedia's ...
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1answer
88 views
Is this an example of the third person? [closed]
Suppose Alice says to Bob, "I cook dinner with Bob." Is Alice talking about Bob in the third person?
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Why don't modern Romance languages have the verb “to stand”?
I noticed that modern Romance languages don't have a specific word for the verb "to stand", or - you could say - don't consider the notion of standing to be a verb.
For example, in Spanish - you can ...
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0answers
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What word category do twink, adonis, muse etc. belong to? [closed]
Terms such as candy, cutie, honey, princess, diamond, queen(?), stud and bunny are terms of endearment (these terms are often used in a relationship to show affection and may also be used, with ...
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51 views
Two meanings of “Someone believes everyone to be invited”
Carnie claims in his syntax book that the sentence
Someone believes everyone to be invited
has two meanings. I can see only one (when the existential quantifier has scope over universal one: when ...
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0answers
129 views
How would languages that use an absolute frame of reference say that the heart is on the left side of the body?
In languages that use a relative frame of reference we can say that the heart is on the left side of the body, and no matter what direction you are facing that is true. But in an absolute frame of ...
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1answer
69 views
What are linguistics foundations of how a message can be on topic?
What I am looking for
Is there a linguistics perspective on a message being "on topic" or "off topic" in some context and/or something inbetween?
Is there even a linguistics definition and research ...
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2answers
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Is there a formal definition of the term meaning?
According to Wiktionary and Wikipedia,
meaningfulness is "the state or measure of being meaningful",
while meaningful is "having meaning, significant",
while meaning is "the information or ...
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1answer
50 views
Has the notion of “semainophoric” structure been considered so far?
Semitic languages like Arabic use consonantic roots conveying meaning, like ktb which is related to writing. The vowels to be added to form a word vary and give a nuance to this general meaning. ...
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How to cite an edited book [closed]
I want to cite some articles directly in Semantics, Volume 2 by de Gruyter (2011). I wonder if each article in it is a journal or conference paper that can be cited directly. Otherwise, I should cite ...
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3answers
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Etymological Fallacy
What is actually wrong with using Etymology to infer a word's meaning?
I mean other than semantics( or more subtle meaning, nuance) of what other use could studying etymology be.
I cannot see the ...
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2answers
52 views
Predicate logic and always?
How do I translate a sentence like this into predicate logic?
Always if an amateur chef bakes a burnt cookie, then nobody eats that burnt cookie.
My attempt is something like this
ā[chefā(x)ā§ ...
3
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1answer
187 views
When turned “to hear” into “to belong” in Germanic Languages?
In most Germanic languages the verbs for āto hearā and āto belong [to]ā are the same or very closely related.
It seems a plausible explanation, that in practice belonging to someone (G. gehƶren) meant ...
