| Term | Definition |
|---|
| utterance | any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of that person |
| sentence | a string of words put together by the grammatical rules of a language; the ideal string of words behind an utterance |
| proposition | part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs |
| reference | the means by which a speaker indicates which things in the world are being talked about |
| sense | its place in a system of sematic relationships with other expressions in the language; |
| referring expression | any expression used in an utterance to refer to something or someone |
| Leibniz's Law | If A & B are identical, anything true of A is true of B and visa versa. |
| predicator | the word in a simple declarative sentence which does not belong to any of the referring expressions and which, of the remainder, makes the most specific contribution to the meaning of the sentence; describes the state or process in which the referring expressions are involved |
| predicate | any word which can function as the predicator of a sentence |
| generic sentence | a sentence in which some statement is made about a whole unrestricted class of individuals, as opposed to any particular individual |
| presupposition | assumptions about what our listeners know or would agree to |
| deictic word | a word which takes some element of its meaning from the context or situation of the utterance in which it is used |
| definiteness | feature of a noun phrase selected by a speaker to convey his assumption that the hearer will be able to identify the referent of the noun phrase, usually because it is the only thing of its kind in the context of the utterance, or because it is unique in the universe of discourse |
| extension | set of all individuals to which a one-place predicate |
| prototype | typical member of its extension |
| referent | thing picked out of a referring expression by the use of that expression on a particular occasion of utterance |
| analytic sentence | a sentence that is necessarily true, as a result of the senses of the words in it |
| synthetic sentence | a sentence which may either be true or false, depending of the way the world is |
| contradictory sentence | a sentence that is necessarily false, as a result of the senses of the words in it; opposite of analytic sentence |
| synonymy | relationship between two predicates that have the same sense |
| paraphrase | a sentence that expresses the same proposition as another sentence |
| hyponymy | a sense relation between predicates such that the meaning of one predicate is included in the meaning of the other |
| entailment | when the truth of Y follows necessarily from the truth of X |
| basic rule of sense inclusion | given two sentences A and B, identical in every way except that A contains a word X where B contains a different word Y, and X is a hyponym of Y, then sentence A entails sentence B. |
| homonymy | ambiguous word whose different senses are far apart from each other and not obviously related to each other in any way with respect to a native speaker's intuition |
| polysemy | a word has several very closely related senses |
| ambiguity | a word or phrase that has two or more synonyms that are not themselves synonyms of each other |
| stereotype | list of the typical characteristics or features of things to which the predicate may be applied |
| opaque context | part of a sentence which could be made into a complete sentence by the adition of a referring expressions, but where the additio nof different referring expressions, even though they refer to the same thing or person, in a given situation, will yield sentences with different meaning when uttered in a given situation; Wayne believes that the person in the corner killed David |
| characteristics of gradable antonyms | allow comparisons, relative terms, negative of one does not mean the assertion of the other, pairs have marked and unmarked terms, modified by "very" |
| universe of discourse | any utterance as the particular world, real or imaginary, that the speaker assumes he is talking about at the time |
| wh- and how questions | presupposes there is an answer to the question |
| factive verbs | realize, know, regret, thank you for ___; presupposes it is correct or valid |
| iteratives | words characterized by repetition in appearance; again, still, another, too, more, redo, either |
| change of state predicates | stop, continue, keep |
| temporal clauses | after, before, when |
| restrictive modifiers | non-restrictive as pre, restrictive as post; industrious Japanese, my brother who lives in Provo |
| possessive pronouns | presupposes you have something |
| cleft sentences | It is food that I want.; presupposes that you want something |
| pseudo cleft sentences | What you need is...; presupposes you need something |
| comparisons and contrasts | She doesn't hate you as much as I do.; presupposes that I hate you |
| counterfactual constructions | If I had a million dollars...; presupposes I don't |
| marked expressions | How tall are you? How short are you?; presupposes that you're short |
| equivocation | use words in different senses; a woman is not a rational being |
| amphiboli | structural ambiguity; part of speech--wheels and flies, grammatical--likes to catch flies |
| appeal to authority | use someone's title |
| adhomynym | attack the opponent instead of the argument |
| appeal to emotion | pity, pride, fear, vanity |
| argument ad nausium | repeating argument |
| begging the question | assume the initial point |
| bandwagon | everyone else is doing it |
| false dilemma, excluded middle, either/or | to be or not to be |
| composition | every member of the group has a quality, then the whole group has that quality |
| division | if unit has quality, individuals will too |
| unqualified or faulty generalization | dictosimplicitor--based on insufficient information; statistics without quality sampling, meeting one person from NYC |
| negative proof | absence of evidence is not evidence; he didn't say that... so it must be false |
| posttalk | if event x preceded event y, then x caused y. WRONG! |
| misrepresenting, straw man | use irrelevant topic to divert from issue |
Combine with other sets
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