LIN 3010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Lexical Semantics
28 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Semantics: subfield of linguistics that studies meaning in language. Divided further into: lexical semantics: deals with the meaning of words and other lexical expressions, including the meaning relationships among them, compositional semantics: concerned with phrasal meaning and how they are assembled. Sense: some kind of mental representation of its meaning, or perhaps a concept: ex: what comes to mind when you think of a cat. Reference: the entities in the real world that the word refers to: garfield, tom, and grumpy cat are all referents of the expression cat, the collection of all referents of an expression is its reference. You can only know the reference if an expression when you know its sense. However, knowing an expression"s sense does not guarantee that you are able to pick out its referents. Different expressions with distinct senses sometimes pick the same referent. The ultimate authority on word meaning is the community of native speakers of a language.
