Semantics Cheat Sheet
The core ideas of Semantics distilled into a single, scannable reference — perfect for review or quick lookup.
Quick Reference
Compositionality (Frege's Principle)
The principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the rules used to combine them. This allows speakers to understand and produce an infinite number of novel sentences.
Sense and Reference
Frege's distinction between the sense (Sinn) of an expression — the mode of presentation or concept associated with it — and its reference (Bedeutung) — the actual object or truth value it picks out in the world.
Truth Conditions
The conditions under which a sentence is true or false. In formal semantics, knowing the meaning of a sentence is often equated with knowing the circumstances that would make it true.
Lexical Semantics
The subfield of semantics that studies the meanings of individual words, including their internal structure, meaning relations, and how word meanings are organized in the mental lexicon.
Entailment
A semantic relation between sentences in which the truth of one sentence necessarily guarantees the truth of another. Unlike implicature, entailment is a matter of logical necessity.
Presupposition
A background assumption that must be true for a sentence to be felicitous. Unlike entailments, presuppositions survive under negation.
Implicature
Meaning that is suggested or implied by an utterance beyond what is strictly said. Grice distinguished between conventional implicature (tied to specific words) and conversational implicature (arising from context and cooperative principles).
Prototype Theory
Eleanor Rosch's theory that categories are organized around central, prototypical members rather than strict necessary-and-sufficient conditions. Category membership is a matter of degree.
Thematic Roles
Semantic labels assigned to the participants in an event described by a verb, capturing the role each noun phrase plays in the action. Common roles include Agent, Patient, Theme, Experiencer, and Instrument.
Word Embeddings
A computational technique that represents words as dense numerical vectors in a high-dimensional space, where proximity between vectors reflects semantic similarity. Foundational to modern NLP.
Key Terms at a Glance
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