Semantics

Semantics

1. The study of linguistic meaning of words, phrases and sentences.

2. Types of Semantics

   • Lexical
     • the meaning of individual words
   • Sentence
     • the semantic relations among the parts of a sentence
   • Text
     • the meaning of spoken/written discourse

3. Semantic Features

   • They differentiate the meaning of each word in a language from every other word
     • -animate / +animate
     • -human / +human
     • -color / +color

4. Semantic Roles

   • Agent: performs the action. Theme: affected by the action.
   • Instrument: entity the agent uses to perform an action. Experiencer: the person who has a feeling or state.
   • Location: where an entity is. Source: where the entity moves from. Goal: where it moves to.

5. Involves...

   • Relationships between words
     • Lexical
       • Synonymy
         • +2 words have very alike meanings
           • happy = content
       • Homonymy
         • a word has +2 unrelated meanings
       • Meronymy
         • part-whole relation between words
       • Member - collection
         • membership to a whole
       • Portion - mass
         • a mass noun and its unit of measurement
       • Hyponymy
         • the meaning of a word is included in the meaning of another.
       • Polysemy
         • a word has +2 related meanings
       • Antonymy
         • 2 words have opposite meanings
           • • big ≠ small
       • Metonymy
         • the replacement of a concept for another to which it is related
     • Semantic
       • Paraphrase: expressing the same idea with words that have a similar meaning.
       • Entailment: the second statement is a logically necessary consequence of the first.
       • Inclusion: one statement includes another.
       • Contradiction: two opposite statements.
       • Anomaly: a sentence has no meaning in the everyday world
       • Lexical ambiguity: a word allows more than one interpretation in context.
       • Possession: the referent of one entity owns or has a part of the referent of another
       • Attachment: when one of the entities is more prominent than the other.
       • Attribution: to make reference to properties of entities
       • Antonym: words with opposite meanings.
       • Synonm: words with very similar meanings
   • Principle of Compositionality
     • words put together and arranged into a structure.

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