Essential concepts and terminologies

• A word stands for a single CONCEPT

• Three types of word are: syntactic, phonological and morphological
• The term sentence refers to the largest structural unit that is
constructed according to the grammatical rules of a language (units
larger than sentences, such as paragraphs, are not constructed
according to any particular grammatical rules).
• Meaning is the particular INTERPRETATION of the expression’s
REFERENCE in a particular CONTEXT
• Denotation is the ordinary or literal meaning of a word
• Truth condition is the condition a world must meet in order for its
proposition to be true.
• A proposition is defined as the meaning of a SENTENCE that makes
a statement about some state of affairs.
• The term connotation generally refers to aspects of meaning that
do not contribute to the DENOTATION of an expression.
 Lexical Fields

• Lexical field refers to a theoretical representation of a set of related

vocabulary.
• A semantic relation can refer to any relation of meaning between any two
or more meaningful things, including the PROPOSITIONAL RELATIONS of
ENTAILMENT, PARAPHRASE and CONTRADICTION.
• Semantic roles (sometimes, particularly in GENERATIVE GRAMMAR, also
called thematic roles or theta roles) are the roles played by participants in
some situation.
 Sense relations and semantic features
• sense is the semantic aspect of meaning – the definitional properties that
determine which things are referred to when an expression is used.
• Two expressions are in a relation of semantic contrast if they are not in a
relation of semantic INCLUSION, and particularly if they have opposite
POLARITY or are otherwise INCOMPATIBLE.
• Hyponymy is the LEXICAL RELATION that expresses a relationship of
INCLUSION between two LEXEMES, such as Linguistics and Semantics or
Toyota and Highlander.
• A lexical gap is a concept for which a language has no word, especially in cases
where there is a gap in a pattern of lexicalization of other similar concepts.
• Taxonymy is a subtype of HYPONYMY where the relationship between the
hyponym and the hyperonym can be expressed in the frame X is a kind of Y or
X is a type of Y.
• Componential analysis include the analysis of a word according to its smaller
units called semantic components.
 Selectional restrictions
• Selectional (or selection) restrictions are
constraints that determine which co-
occurrences of words or meanings of words
are semantically well-formed, rather than
ANOMALOUS or abnormal.