Semantics

speech expressing things other people have said without quoting

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.

A contronym or contranym is a word with two opposite meanings. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cling" or "to split apart". This feature is also called enantiosemy, enantionymy (enantio- means "opposite"), antilogy or autoantonymy. An enantiosemic term is by definition polysemic (having more than one meaning).

impossibility for separate objects to have all their properties in common

Verbosity, or verboseness, is speech or writing that uses more words than necessary. The opposite of verbosity is succinctness.

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, information that is expressed more than once

sentence coined by Noam Chomsky to describe proper syntax with improper semantics

subfield of linguistic semantics

philosophical terms

using an acronym followed by one of the words composing that acronym

psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word to temporarily lose meaning for the listener

distinction within some fields of language analysis

word or phrase that manages the flow of discourse: e.g. oh, well, now, then, you know, and I mean, so, because, and, but, or

assignment of meaning to the symbols of a formal language

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.

thumb|A sculpture demonstrating an example of Japanese sound symbolism, "jaan!" () An ideophone (also known as a mimetic or expressive) is a member of the class of words that depict sensory imagery or sensations, evoking ideas of action, sound, movement, color, or shape. The class of ideophones is the least common syntactic category cross-linguistically; it occurs mostly in African, Australian, and Amerindian languages, and sporadically elsewhere. Ideophones resemble interjections but are different owing to their special phonetic or derivational characteristics, and based on their syntactic fu

Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another (given) language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a lacuna, or lexical gap. The term arises when describing the difficulty of achieving the so-called perfect translation. It is based on the notion that there are certain concepts and words that are so interrelated that an accurate translation becomes an impossible task.

classical logic of two values, either true and false

either a declarative sentence that is true or false, or that which a true or false declarative sentence asserts

style of third-person narration which uses some of the characteristics of third-person along with the essence of first-person direct speech

concept in grammar

linguistic term coined by J. L. Austin

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

distinction that separates a concept from the objects which are particular instances of the concept

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

set of entities which discourse talks about and which nouns and noun phrases refer to, or set of entities over which universal and existential quantifiers range

type of logic whose elements are concepts

conditional with a false "if" clause

grammatical category

thumb|upright=1.35|right|Most syntactic treebanks annotate variants of either Phrase structure grammar|phrase structure (left) or dependency structure (right).

one of the meanings of a word

A referent ( ) is an entity to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence Mary saw me, the referent of the word Mary is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken of, while the referent of the word me is the person uttering the sentence.

word or form that does not exist in a language but would be permitted by the grammatical rules of that language

In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked; the other, secondary one is marked. In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.

the set of objects to which a term or concept applies

mathematical paper by Gottlob Frege

study in linguistics of resemblances between sounds and meanings

grammatical construction occurring when two forms of negation are used in the same sentence

thumb|300px|Claude Monet's [[Impression, soleil levant was ridiculed as "Impression-ist" in 1872, but the term then became the name of the art movement, "impressionism", and painters began to self-identify as "impressionist".]] In linguistics, reappropriation, reclamation, or resignification is the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. It is a specific form of a semantic change (i.e., change in a word's meaning). Linguistic reclamation can have wider implications in the fields of discourse and has been descri

word that expresses a property it also possesses

nature of meaning in the philosophy of language, semantics, methaphysics and metasemantics

the notion that a mind is composed of innate neural structures or mental modules which have distinct, established, and evolutionarily developed functions

Rebracketing (also known as resegmentation or metanalysis) is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one set of morphemes is broken down or bracketed into a different set. For example, hamburger, originally from Hamburg+er, has been rebracketed into ham+burger, and burger was later reused as a productive morpheme in coinages such as cheeseburger. It is usually a form of folk etymology, or may seem to be the result of valid morphological processes.

linguistic borrowing in which the sound and meaning of a foreign word are adjusted to match existing phonetic and semantic elements in the target language

terms of opposite meaning which may be applied to statements, verb phrases, clauses, or other utterances

sentences with structures permitting multiple possible interpretations

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

Cognitive science issue

In common usage and linguistics, concision (also called conciseness, succinctness, terseness, brevity, or laconicism) is a communication principle of eliminating redundancy, generally achieved by using as few words as possible in a sentence while preserving its meaning. More generally, it is achieved through the omission of parts that impart information that was already given, that is obvious or that is irrelevant. Outside of linguistics, a message may be similarly "dense" in other forms of communication.

model in semiotics

"natural" grouping, not an artificial one; family of entities possessing properties bound by natural law

A sobriquet ( ) is a descriptive nickname, sometimes assumed, but often given by another. A sobriquet is distinct from a pseudonym in that it is typically a familiar name used in place of a real name without the need for explanation; it may even become more familiar than the original name.

conveying the meaning of a term by pointing out examples

type of linguistic determiner that indicates quantity

research area in semantic similarities between linguistic items

principle in linguistics about meaning

performance of an utterance in linguistics and the philosophy of mind