Formal semantics (natural language)

In logic, negation, also called the logical not or logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord{\sim} P, P^\prime or \overline{P}. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and false when P is true. For example, if P is "The dog runs", then "not P" is "The dog does not run". An operand of a negation is called a negand or negatum.

logical connective OR

omission from a clause of one or more words that are nevertheless understood in the context of the remaining elements

thumb|250px|alt=Drawing of the back an anthropomorphic caterpillar, seated on a toadstool amid grass and flowers, blowing smoke from a hookah; a blonde girl in an old-fashioned frock is standing on tiptoe to peer at the caterpillar over the toadstool's edge|Sir John Tenniel's illustration of the Caterpillar for [[Lewis Carroll's ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' is noted for its ambiguous central figure, whose head can be viewed as either a man's face with a pointed nose and chin smoking a pipe or as the end of an actual caterpillar, with the first two right "true" legs visible (1865).]]

utterance that serves a performative function

In logic, a reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to refer to the second object. It is called a name for the second object. The next object, the one to which the first object refers, is called the referent of the first object. A name is usually a phrase or expression, or some other symbolic representation. Its referent may be anything – a material object, a person, an event, an activity, or an abstract concept.

type of expression whose reference depends upon another referential element

In philosophy and linguistics, the denotation of a word or expression is its strictly literal meaning. For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature. Denotation is contrasted with other aspects of meaning, in particular connotation. For instance, the word "warm" may evoke calmness, coziness, or kindness (as in the warmth of someone's personality) but these associations are not part of the word's denotation. Similarly, an expression's denotation is separate from pragmatic inferences it may trigger. For instance, describing something as "warm" often implic

feature of language that allows for communicating things about, or based on, situations which need not be actual

In linguistics and philosophy, a presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world or background belief relating to an utterance whose truth is taken for granted in discourse. Examples of presuppositions include: Jane no longer writes fiction. Presupposition: Jane once wrote fiction. Have you stopped eating meat? Presupposition: you had once eaten meat. Have you talked to Hans? Presupposition: Hans exists.

thumb | right | alt=A linguistic diagram of a cataphora in German | Example of a cataphora in German In linguistics, cataphora (; from Greek, καταφορά, kataphora, "a downward motion" from κατά, kata, "downwards" and φέρω, pherō, "I carry") is the use of an expression or word that co-refers with a later, more specific expression in the discourse. The preceding expression, whose meaning is determined or specified by the later expression, may be called a cataphor. Cataphora is in contrast to anaphora which denotes cases where the order of the expressions is the reverse of that found in cataphora.

In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and if so, what kind. An evidential (also verificational or validational) is the particular grammatical element (affix, clitic, or particle) that indicates evidentiality. Languages with only a single evidential have had terms such as mediative, médiatif, médiaphorique, and indirective used instead of evidential.

In linguistics, definiteness is a semantic feature of noun phrases that distinguishes between referents or senses that are identifiable in a given context (definite noun phrases) and those that are not (indefinite noun phrases). The prototypical definite noun phrase picks out a unique, familiar, specific referent such as the sun or Australia, as opposed to indefinite examples like an idea or some fish.

subfield of linguistic semantics

concept in epistemology referring to the mental state held by an agent toward a proposition

In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a sign pointing to (or indexing) some element in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, in philosophy, an indexical.

family of formal knowledge representation languages

study of the semantics, or interpretations, of formal and natural languages

type of logic whose elements are concepts

In linguistics and philosophy, a vague predicate is one which gives rise to borderline cases. For example, the English adjective "tall" is vague since it is not clearly true or false for someone of middling height. By contrast, the word "prime" is not vague since every number is definitively either prime or not. Vagueness is commonly diagnosed by a predicate's ability to give rise to the sorites paradox. Vagueness is separate from ambiguity, in which an expression has multiple denotations. For instance the word "bank" is ambiguous since it can refer either to a river bank or to a financial ins

denoting phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun. The definite description is proper if X applies to a unique individual or object

conditional with a false "if" clause

grammatical category

the set of objects to which a term or concept applies

a rigorous method of deriving an ontology from a collection of objects and their properties

In linguistics, telicity (; from Greek τέλος "end, goal") is the property of a verb or verb phrase that presents an action or event as having a specific endpoint. A verb or verb phrase with this property is said to be telic; if the situation it describes is not heading for any particular endpoint, it is said to be atelic.

sentence expressing factual implications, or a hypothetical situation and its consequences

information repository structured as a graph of entities and relationships; used by search engines and AI systems for entity resolution, retrieval composition, and knowledge representation

sentence which changes social reality

Tense–aspect–mood (commonly abbreviated ' in linguistics) or tense–modality–aspect (abbreviated as TMA') is an important group of grammatical categories, which are marked in different ways by different languages.

principle in linguistics about meaning

term with invariant possible designations

theory of linguistic meaning developed by Charles J. Fillmore, relating linguistic semantics to encyclopedic knowledge; posits that one cannot understand the meaning of a word without access to all the essential knowledge relating to that word

In linguistics, mirativity, initially proposed by Scott DeLancey, is a grammatical category in a language, independent of evidentiality, that encodes the speaker's surprise or the unpreparedness of their mind. Grammatical elements that encode the semantic category of mirativity are called miratives (abbreviated ).

linguistic phenomenon in which anaphoric elements such as pronouns are grammatically associated with their antecedents

phrase

formal way of expressing the meaning of a conditional sentence

way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence

term to describe the linguistic context of co-referential terms

study of meaning in natural languages

theory in philosophy of language

in linguistics, a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by a possessor; e.g. “hand” or “mother” implies someone’s hand or mother; in English, “father of Mary” is acceptable (because inalienable), but “squirrel of Mary” is not