Sank's Glossary of Linguistics 
 Sem

SEMANTIC BLEACHING
(Semantics; Diachronic) Or, semantic loss, semantic reduction, desemanticization, and weakening. The loss or reduction of meaning in a word as a result of semantic change.

 | Richard Nordquist, 2018

SEMANTIC CONTENT

  1. (Semantics) A complex expression relative to a context c has a referential content that is the result of combining the referential contents of its constituent terms relative to the context c in accord with the semantic composition rules corresponding to the syntactic structure of that expression. The result of this latter process is a genuine level of semantic value, which we shall call the semantic content of that complex expression relative to the context c. The semantic content of a lexical item relative to a context c is, on this view, its referential content in that context. | Jeffrey C. King and Jason Stanley, 2005
  2. (Examples) 

SEMANTIC DUPLICATION

  1. (Computational; Semantics) In online document collections, users often wish to identify whether incoming documents have close semantic matches in the existing collection, i.e. the specific content or topic of the incoming document matches with that of a previously published document. We consider semantic duplication to occur over a document pair {A, B} in one of two forms:
    1. Subsumption: where A properly subsumes B (i.e. B ⊂ A).
    2. Synonymy: where A and B have identical semantic content (i.e. A ≡ B), that is the two documents subsume each other.
     | Andrew MacKinlay and Timothy Baldwin, 2009
  2. (Computational; Semantics) Language models need to be taught all basic facts, but teaching them these basic facts while also testing them on these facts necessarily constitutes semantic duplication.
     Consider the following example:
    1. a. Train set question: "What formula could one use to calculate the area of a circle?"
      b. Test set question: "What is the formula for the area of a circle?"
     These questions are semantically equivalent. There's no way to teach a model basic factual questions without having semantic duplicates like this.  | Jade, 2023

SEMANTIC EMPTINESS
(Examples)

SEMANTIC EXTENDEDNESS
(Semantics) The basis conceptual category for entities. Just as entities may or may not have extension in space (extended or nonextended), so may events have (or have not) temporal extension by virtue of the nature of their internal contour. Durative events are extended; punctual events are nonextended.
 Both progressive and habitual aspect involve extendedness: The former extends from within the event; the latter from without. | William Frawley, 1992

SEMANTIC EXTENSION
(Semantics) Involves applying a word to something that falls outside of the word's linguistically specified denotation, on the basis of a principled relationship between the literal and the extended denotation, e.g. rabbit meaning 'animal' is extended to mean the meat of that animal, mouth meaning the oral cavity is extended to mean the opening of a cave, based on its resemblance to a mouth.
 In the historical linguistics literature, semantic extension is widely acknowledged as playing a key role in semantic change and grammaticalization, a word's journey from a lexical, concept-encoding word to a functional item with a more abstract grammatical meaning (see e.g. Givón 1979, Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994, Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer 1991, Heine 1997, Haspelmath 1998, Traugott and Dasher 2001). | Josephine Bowerman and Kenny Smith, 2022

SEMANTIC FORMULA
(Pragmatics) Represents "the means by which a particular speech act is accomplished, in terms of the primary content of an utterance" (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford 1991). A semantic formula refers to "a word, phrase, or sentence that meets a particular semantic criterion or strategy; any one or more of these can be used to perform the act in question" (Cohen 1996). For instance:

  1. I am so sorry that I cannot make it, because I have an appointment with my wife. Thanks for your invitation.
 This example includes four semantic formulas:
  1. Statement of regret (I am so sorry).
  2. Negative willingness ability (I cannot make it).
  3. Reason (because I have an appointment with my wife).
  4. Appreciation (Thanks for your invitation).
 | Zhao Chunli, 2016

SEMANTIC IDENTITY CONDITION
(Syntax) The SIC accepts the view that there is a semantic relation between E (elided clause) and A (antecedent clause) to license sluicing (see Dalrymple et al. 1991, Hardt 1999, Ginzburg and Sag 2001, Merchant 2001, van Craenenbroeck 2010, van Craenenbroeck and Merchant 2013, a.o.). The semantic view, elaborated by Merchant (2001) and others, requires a mutual entailment relationship between the elided material and its antecedent. The semantic entailment condition allows examples like (1) since the antecedent clause in (2) and the elided clause in (3) entail each other and thus the latter can be deleted:

  1. He resembled someone, but I do not know who.
  2. Antecedent clause ⟦A⟧ = ∃x (He resembled x)
  3. Elided clause ⟦E⟧ = ∃x (He resembled x)
 | Jong-Bok Kim, 2015

SEMANTIC LOAN
(Sociolinguistics) A process of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language. The complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning is extended to include another meaning that its existing translation has in the lending language.
 A typical example is the French word souris, which means 'mouse' (the animal). After the English word mouse acquired the additional sense of 'computer mouse,' when French speakers began speaking of computer mice, they did so by extending the meaning of their own word souris by analogy with how English speakers had extended the meaning of mouse. (Had French speakers started using the word mouse, that would have been a borrowing; had they created a new lexeme out of multiple French morphemes, as with disque dur for 'hard disk,' that would have been a calque.) | Wikipedia, 2022

SEMANTIC POTENCY

  1. (Semantics) The capacity of a word in producing primary, secondary and tertiary levels of meaning. | Joby John, 2018
  2. (Semantics) We call the semantic potency of a code (language) the number of meanings it distinguishes within its noetic field (De Mauro 2008). | Karmen Lazri and Irena Ndreu, 2023

SEMANTIC SHIFT

  1. (Semantics) The use of slang in our society today has grown tremendously, and as slang becomes more popular, words and their meanings often change to adapt to users' needs. Dialect is such a fundamental part of society as it allows people to verbally communicate with each other in unique ways. As the use of the internet has increased over the past few decades, humans have created different uses for the same word, with slang terms in particular. This change in meaning of a word is what linguists have classified as a semantic shift. | Ali Dimaio, 2023
  2. (Semantics) Words and morphemes may seem to any individual speaker of a language to be timeless and unchanging in their meanings. And while this may be true for most of the words any given language user knows, changes in meaning over time are actually quite common. Many of our words are no longer what they once were. This process is generally known as semantic shift, or semantic change.
     The changes that words and morphemes go through can be classified into a number of different kinds of processes. A word can gain a more extensive meaning over time (broadening), or come to apply to a smaller set of circumstances (narrowing). Or how good or bad a word is taken to be can drift, too: a morpheme can generally improve in meaning (amelioration), or become more negative instead (pejoration). Sometimes, the meaning of a word can become weaker over time, so that a word with an extreme meaning becomes softer (weakening). Finally, if the evolution of the word's meaning doesn't really seem to fit a given category, but it's clearly changed, we just can refer to this as shift.
     We can find these kinds of changes in pretty much every language in the world we've documented, and there's no limit on the number of time a given word can have its meaning change. Every generation of language learners can decide anew what they want a word to mean, and shift the word's use over time. And when they make their adjustments, they do it along the same lines people have made changes before. | The Ling Space, 2016

SEMANTIC TRANSPARENCY
(Semantics) This term aims to capture the intuitive difference felt between compounds like hogwash, meaning 'nonsense', and a compound like milkman. In the literature, semantic transparency is defined in two main ways. One is the idea that it can be linked to meaning predictability. Plag (2003) states that words are semantically transparent if "their meaning is predictable on the basis of the word-formation rule according to which they have been formed."
 The second kind of definition uses analyzability rather than predictability. A classic example is Zwitserlood (1994), who writes that "[t]he meaning of a fully transparent compound is synchronically related to the meaning of its composite words". In this sense, milkman clearly is transparent because any possible usage will allow linking the interpretation in some way to the meanings of the constituent parts. | Melanie J. Bell and Martin Schäfer, 2013

SEMANTIC UNITY

  1. (Semantics) In contrast to studies that have focused on the syntactic properties of English -self pronouns (myself, yourself, etc.), this paper investigates the semantic and pragmatic contributions these forms make in different structural contexts, including not only appositive uses, but also reflexives and a wide variety of so-called exceptional uses, such as logophoric expressions and picture noun phrases. An extensive examination of data from a collection of spoken and written texts reveals that -self pronouns in different structural environments nevertheless exhibit the same semantic and pragmatic characteristics. The structurally diverse assemblage of reflexives, emphatics, and a list of other exceptions are shown to have semantic unity, since the same message effects are seen in all of these environments, including argument and appositive, reflexive and emphatic, as well as what are traditionally described as discourse-based uses. | Nancy Stern, 2004
  2. (Stylistics) Textual unity and semantic unity are two important features of a text. Different linguistic items present in a text weave together to give textual unity to the text and at deep level these linguistic features contribute to produce unified meanings which create semantic unity in the text. Enkvist (1987) also believes that semantic connections take two forms i.e. a connection at surface level called cohesion and a connection at more profound level takes the form of coherence. A text as a cohesive semantic unit must have surface cohesion and overall coherence in order to present a flow of thought and meanings in the text. | Amina Shahzadi, Rahat Chaudhary, and Abdul Ghaffar Bhatti, 2022

 

Page Created By Split April 24, 2025

 
 B a c k   T o   I n d e x