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In formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the scope of negation, but the proposition that Paulina drinks wine does not.
Semantics studies meaning in language, which is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep. [22]
Some theories of scope posit a level of syntactic structure called logical form, in which an item's syntactic position corresponds to its semantic scope. Others theories compute scope relations in the semantics itself, using formal tools such as type shifters, monads, and continuations. [12] [13] [14] [15]
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. [1] [2] [3] The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language, and analogous systems of sign languages), and pragmatics ...
However, this approach does not make predictions for some examples with inverse scope (wide scope in object position). For example, everyone loves someone. When there is no scope interaction in the relevant portion of the sentence, making either choice shows no difference in semantics. A short time later, May suggested a different idea.
In the philosophy of language and metaphysics, metasemantics is the study of the foundations of natural language semantics (the philosophical study of meaning). [1] [2] [3] Metasemantics searches for "the proper understanding of compositionality, the object of truth-conditional analysis, metaphysics of reference, as well as, and most importantly, the scope of semantic theory itself" [4] and ...
Lexical ambiguity is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a word or morpheme is ambiguous. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called polysemy . For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the foot of a person or ...
Mathematical semantics is the application of mathematics to study the meaning of expressions in a formal language. It has three elements: a mathematical specification of a class of objects via syntax , a mathematical specification of various semantic domains and the relation between the two, which is usually expressed as a function from ...