C_S_D 1060 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Ruby, Semantic Feature
17 May 2016
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A listener"s inability to solve this riddle rests on his or her semantic representation of the word doctor. This is not something that is in any dictionary definition. Semantics = the study of the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences; the rules for determining the representation of meanings of those units. The meaning of a word is a function of its component morphemes. Word meanings are arbitrary conventions shared by speakers of a particular language. Three main theories that have been proposed: The meaning of a word is the thing to which it refers. The meaning of a word is a mental image. The meaning of a word is its sense, where sense is some sort of situationally independent information. A referent is the real-word object designated by a word. This theory hypothesizes that when we know a word"s meaning, we know what its real-world referents are.
