SANDHI

1. (Phonology) The ways in which speech sounds influence each other when they are neighbors is of great interest to contemporary phoneticians and phonologists (cf. assimilation and coalescence), but the subject is also one which interested the Sanskrit grammarians of India (who introduced the term) over two thousand years ago. The notion of sandhi is used mainly in the area between morphology and phonology, and is not much used in the study of pronunciation. It is most commonly found in discussion of tone languages and the contextual influences on tones. | Peter Roach, 2011
2. (Phonology) Literally, juncture phenomena: assimilation or other combinatory phenomena that cross word boundaries. Example: Deletion of /t/ in the Dutch phrase post brengen. | ?
3. (Morphophonology) From Sanskrit sandhi, 'joining'. A cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function of the adjacent words.
    Sandhi occurs in many languages, particularly in the phonology of Indian languages, especially Sanskrit, Tamil, Sinhala, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Pali, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese, Malayalam. Many dialects of British English show linking and intrusive R. | Wikipedia, 2022

SATELLITE-FRAMING
See VERB-FRAMING.

SATISFACTION
(Syntax) A probe H interacts with feature F by copying F back to H. A probe H is satisfied by feature G iff copying G back to H terminates further probing for G by H. | Amy Rose Deal, 2015

SCALAR IMPLICATURE
(Pragmatics) Where a weaker term on a scale implicates the negation of a stronger term.

1. John ate some of the chocolates.
   The implicature: John did not eat all of the chocolates.

2. John ate some of the chocolates, in fact, he ate all of the chocolates.

SCALE OF UNIQUENESS
(Syntax) A. Ortmann (2014) proposes a scale of types of uniqueness:

deictic > anaphoric > with establishing relative clause > relational definite associative anaphors > part-whole definite associative anaphors > number/superlative + N > generis/uniques > proper names  > personal pronouns

1. Overt articles are less obligatory as you move rightward down the scale.
2. Diachronically, article use spreads rightward down the scale.

SCOPE AMBIGUITY

1. (Semantics) The kind of ambiguity that arises when an operator can enter into different scope relations with other scoped elements.
    (1) has the two readings, (2) and (3). In (2) every farmer is construed as having scope over a donkey and in (3) a donkey is construed as having scope over every farmer:
   1. Every farmer loves a donkey.
   2. For every farmer there is a donkey such that he loves him.
   3. There is a donkey such that every farmer loves him.
    (May 1977, Montague 1974) | Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics, 2001
2. (Semantics) An ambiguity that occurs when two quantifiers or similar expressions can take scope over each other in different ways in the meaning of a sentence.
   1. Every man loves a woman.
   2. Every student did not pass the exam.
    Let's look at (1) to see the ambiguity. The more prominent meaning of (1) is that for every man, there is a woman, and it's possible that each man loves a different woman. But the sentence also has a second possible meaning, which says that there is one particular woman who is loved by every man. This reading becomes clearer if we continue the example by adding namely Brigitte Bardot.
    To further underline the difference, have a look at the two readings represented in first-order logic.

   1. ∀x.MAN (x) → (∃y.WOMAN (y) ∧ LOVE ( x, y))
   2. ∃y.WOMAN (y) ∧ (∀x.MAN (x) → LOVE (x, y))

    We see that (1) has two different meanings: it is ambiguous. Moreover, there is no good reason to assume that the ambiguity should be syntactic. So we can say that scope ambiguities are genuine semantic ambiguities. It is important to observe here that both readings are made up of the same material (the semantic representations of the quantified NPs every man and a woman, and the nuclear scope love). The only difference is the way in which the material is put together.
    Example (2) shows that not only quantifiers can give rise to scope ambiguities. If you find (2) a little odd, you can play the same game with the German Jeder Student hat nicht bestanden.. In (2) it is the relative scope of the quantifier and the negation that is ambiguous. The two readings mean that either every single student failed, or, respectively, that not everyone of the students passed.
    In formulae:

   1. ∀x.STUDENT (x) → ¬PASS (x)
   2. ¬∀x.(STUDENT (x) → PASS (x))

    | Aljoscha Burchardt, Stephan Walter, Alexander Koller, Michael Kohlhase, Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos, 2003

SCRAMBLING
(Syntax) A phenomenon wherein sentences can be formulated using a variety of different word orders without any change in meaning. Scrambling often results in a discontinuity, since the scrambled expression can end up at a distance from its head. Scrambling does not occur in English, but it is frequent in languages with freer word order, such as German, Russian, Persian and Turkic languages. The term was coined by Haj Ross in his 1967 dissertation and is widely used in present work, particularly with the generative tradition.
 Typical instances:

1. German
   daß
   that

   der
   the

   Mann
   man

   der
   the

   Frau
   woman

   die
   the

   Bohnen
   beans

   gab
   gave

   'that the man gave the woman the beans'
2. daß der Mann die Bohnen der Frau gab
3. daß der Frau der Mann die Bohnen gab
4. daß der Frau die Bohnen der Mann gab
5. daß die Bohnen der Mann der Frau gab
6. daß die Bohnen der Frau der Mann gab

SECONDARY PREDICATE
(Syntax) A (mostly adjectival) predicative expression that conveys information about the subject or the object but is not the main predicate of the clause. This structure may be analyzed in many different ways. These may be resultative, as in (1) and (2), or descriptive (also called depictive), as in (3).

1. She painted the town red.
2. The film left me cold.
3. Susan walked around naked. (Depictive over the subject, or subject-oriented depictive.)
4. John ate the meat raw. (Depictive over the object, or object-oriented depictive.)
5. All men are created equal.

SELECTIVE OPACITY EFFECTS
(Syntax) Configurations in which the same constituent is opaque for some operations but transparent for others. Classical observations of selective opacity lie in the realm of movement. Finite clauses, for instance, are opaque for A-movement but transparent for Ā-extraction, a pattern that generalizes beyond the A/Ā distinction. | Stefan Keine, 2019

SELOSISMO
(Syntax) Mexican speech has a non-standard use of se los/las to express a plural indirect object and a singular direct object; something that would normatively be expressed as se lo/la, the classic example being se los dije [a ellos] rather than se lo dije. The author proposes the name selosísmo to define the phenomenon that, until now, has had multiple names. | Riley VanMeter, 2022

SEMANTIC BLEACHING
(Semantics; Diachronic) Or, semantic loss, semantic reduction, desemanticization, and weakening. The loss or reduction of meaning in a word as a result of semantic change.

• "Related to broadening is 'bleaching', where the semantic content of a word becomes reduced as the grammatical content increases, for instance in the development of intensifiers such as awfully, terribly, horribly (e.g. awfully late, awfully big, awfully small) or pretty (pretty good, pretty bad ... )."
   ~Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology. Oxford University Press, 2009
• "Words like horrible or terrible used to mean 'inducing awe' or 'full of wonder.' But humans naturally exaggerate, and so over time, people used these words in cases where there wasn't actually terror or true wonder. The result is what we call 'semantic bleaching': the 'awe' has been bleached out of the meaning of awesome. Semantic bleaching is pervasive with these emotional or affective words, even applying to verbs like love. Linguist and lexicographer Erin McKean notes that it was only recently, in the late 1800s, that young women began to generalize the word love to talk about their relationship to inanimate objects like food."
   ~Dan Jurafsky, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu. W.W. Norton, 2015
• "The process by which the literal meaning of a word or phrase evanesces is called 'semantic bleaching' and was first elucidated in an influential book by the German linguist Georg von der Gabelentz in 1891. Invoking the metaphor of 'the civil servant [who] is hired, promoted, has his hours cut back, and finally gets pensioned off completely,' Gabelentz says that when new words get created from old, 'fresher new colors cover the bleached old ones. ... In all of this, there are two possibilities: either the old word is made to vanish without a trace by the new, or it carries on but in a more or less vestigial existence—retires from public life.'"
   ~Alexander Humez, Nicholas Humez, and Rob Flynn, Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication. Oxford University Press, 2010

SEMANTIC CONTENT

1. (Semantics) A complex expression relative to a context c has a referential content that is the result of combining the referential contents of its constituent terms relative to the context c in accord with the semantic composition rules corresponding to the syntactic structure of that expression. The result of this latter process is a genuine level of semantic value, which we shall call the semantic content of that complex expression relative to the context c. The semantic content of a lexical item relative to a context c is, on this view, its referential content in that context. | Jeffry C. King and Jason Stanley, 2003
2. Occurrences of This Term:
   1. The grammatical framework of Distributed Morphology [has implications] for semantic interpretation. The derivation of a sample sentence is given, illustrating the dissociation between the semantically contentful abstract units which are the input to syntactic and semantic composition, and the phonologically contentful Vocabulary items which compete to realize them. | Heidi Harley, 2019
   2. The granularity of dependency labels is much greater in PSD [Prague Semantic Dependencies] than in CCD [Combinatory Categorial Grammar Dependencies], for example; ... Conversely, PSD only annotates senses on verbal predicates, whereas CCD and DM [DELPH-IN MRS Bi-Lexical Dependencies] provide frame identifiers for all semantically contentful nodes. | Stephan Oepen, Marco Kuhlmann, et al., 2016
   3. Our proposal provides an argument for function composition as a compositional primitive, albeit one whose distribution is very restricted. The proposal also argues that certain instances of head movement are semantically contentful. | Rajesh Bhatt and Stefan Keine, 2015
   4. This corpus study investigates the distribution of epistemics in naturalistic data. Our results indicate that they do embed, supporting the view that they contribute semantic content. ... [W]hile epistemics are semantically contentful, they may require special licensing conditions. | Valentine Hacquard and Alexis Wellwood, 2011
   5. Silent prepositions are hypothesized to be prepositions that are phonologically null, but syntactically and semantically contentful. | Ivano Caponigro and Lisa Pearl, 2008
   6. [For purposes such as providing] a straightforward description of grammatical relations for any user who could benefit from automatic text understanding, we argue that dependency schemes must follow a simple design and provide semantically contentful information, as well as offer an automatic procedure to extract the relations. | Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Christopher D. Manning, 2008
   7. Can music in fact convey something like a semantic content, with "semantic" understood as whatever systematically contributes to the sense, reference, or truth of propositions? | Jeanette Bicknell, 2002
   8. This paper corroborates the interpretability proposal of Chomsky (1995) with evidence from scrambling in Japanese and German. First it is shown that scrambling in Japanese is semantically vacuous, whereas scrambling in German is semantically contentful. | Uli Sauerland, 2002
   9. How are the structures of sentences related to the propositions they encode? Specifically, to what extent is it true that the semantic content of a verb is marked by the structure of sentences in which that verb appears? It is obvious that there are strong relationships of some kind here. | Cynthia Fisher, Henry Gleitman, and Lila R. Gleitman, 1991

SEMANTIC DUPLICATION

1. (Computational; Semantics) In online document collections, users often wish to identify whether incoming documents have close semantic matches in the existing collection, i.e. the specific content or topic of the incoming document matches with that of a previously-published document. We consider "semantic duplication" to occur over a document pair {A, B} in one of two forms:
   1. Subsumption: where A properly subsumes B (i.e. B ⊂ A).
   2. Synonymy: where A and B have identical semantic content (i.e. A ≡ B), that is the two documents subsume one another.
    | Andrew MacKinlay and Timothy Baldwin, 2009
2. (Computational; Semantics) Language models need to be taught all basic facts, but teaching them these basic facts while also testing them on these facts necessarily constitutes "semantic duplication".
    Consider the following example:
   1. a. Train set question: "What formula could one use to calculate the area of a circle?"
      b. Test set question: "What is the formula for the area of a circle?"
    These questions are semantically equivalent. There's no way to teach a model basic factual questions without having semantic duplicates like this.  | Jade, 2023

SEMANTIC EMPTINESS
(Semantics) Definition not found. Example:
 I argue that certain "semi-lexical heads" are actually fully lexical heads that lack intrinsic semantic content. These heads are used as last resort defaults to spell out syntactic positions whose presence is forced by purely formal requirements, of two general types: morphological (cf. traditional accounts of do-support) and syntactic (cf. English-type resumptive pronouns, which rescue island violations). The empty heads make no semantic contribution to the sentence beyond the inherent meaning of their lexical category and (for Noun and Adjective) what may be acquired from an antecedent. | Carson T. Schütze, 2001

SEMANTIC EXTENDEDNESS
(Semantics) The basis conceptual category for entities. Just as entities may or may not have extension in space (extended or nonextended), so may events have (or have not) temporal extension by virtue of the nature of their internal contour. Durative events are extended; punctual events are nonextended.
 Both progressive and habitual aspect involve extendedness: The former extends from within the event; the latter from without. | William Frawley, 2013

SEMANTIC FORMULA
(Pragmatics) Represents "the means by which a particular speech act is accomplished, in terms of the primary content of an utterance" (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford 1991). A semantic formula refers to "a word, phrase, or sentence that meets a particular semantic criterion or strategy; any one or more of these can be used to perform the act in question" (Cohen 1996). For instance:

1. I am so sorry that I cannot make it, because I have an appointment with my wife. Thanks for your invitation.

1. Statement of regret (I am so sorry).
2. Negative willingness ability (I cannot make it).
3. Reason (because I have an appointment with my wife).
4. Appreciation (Thanks for your invitation).

SEMANTIC IDENTITY CONDITION
(Syntax) The SIC accepts the view that there is a semantic relation between E (elided clause) and A (antecedent clause) to license sluicing (see Dalrymple et al. 1991, Hardt 1999, Ginzburg and Sag 2000, Merchant 2001, van Craenenbroeck 2010, van Craenenbroeck and Merchant 2013, a.o.). The semantic view, elaborated by Merchant (2001) and others, requires a mutual entailment relationship between the elided material and its antecedent. The semantic entailment condition allows examples like (1) since the antecedent clause in (2) and the elided clause in (3) entail each other and thus the latter can be deleted:

1. He resembled someone, but I do not know who.
2. Antecedent clause ⟦A⟧ = ∃x (He resembled x)
3. Elided clause ⟦E⟧ = ∃x (He resembled x)

SEMANTIC LOAN
(Sociolinguistics) A process of borrowing semantic meaning (rather than lexical items) from another language. The complete word in the borrowing language already exists; the change is that its meaning is extended to include another meaning that its existing translation has in the lending language.
 A typical example is the French word souris, which means 'mouse' (the animal). After the English word mouse acquired the additional sense of 'computer mouse,' when French speakers began speaking of computer mice, they did so by extending the meaning of their own word souris by analogy with how English speakers had extended the meaning of mouse. (Had French speakers started using the word mouse, that would have been a borrowing; had they created a new lexeme out of multiple French morphemes, as with disque dur for 'hard disk,' that would have been a calque.) | Wikipedia, 2022

SEMANTIC POTENCY

1. (Semantics) The capacity of a word in producing primary, secondary and tertiary levels of meaning. | Joby John, 2018
2. (Semantics) We call the "semantic potency" of a code (language) the number of meanings it distinguishes within its noetic field (De Mauro 2008). | Karmen Lazri and Irena Ndreu, 2023

SEMANTIC SHIFT

1. (Semantics) The use of slang in our society today has grown tremendously, and as slang becomes more popular, words and their meanings often change to adapt to users' needs. Dialect is such a fundamental part of society as it allows people to verbally communicate with each other in unique ways. As the use of the internet has increased over the past few decades, humans have created different uses for the same word, with slang terms in particular. This change in meaning of a word is what linguists have classified as a "semantic shift". | Ali Dimaio, 2023
2. (Semantics) Words and morphemes may seem to any individual speaker of a language to be timeless and unchanging in their meanings. And while this may be true for most of the words any given language user knows, changes in meaning over time are actually quite common. Many of our words are no longer what they once were. This process is generally known as "semantic shift", or semantic change.
    The changes that words and morphemes go through can be classified into a number of different kinds of processes. A word can gain a more extensive meaning over time (broadening), or come to apply to a smaller set of circumstances (narrowing). Or how good or bad a word is taken to be can drift, too: a morpheme can generally improve in meaning (amelioration), or become more negative instead (pejoration). Sometimes, the meaning of a word can become weaker over time, so that a word with an extreme meaning becomes softer (weakening). Finally, if the evolution of the word's meaning doesn't really seem to fit a given category, but it's clearly changed, we just can refer to this as shift.
    We can find these kinds of changes in pretty much every language in the world we've documented, and there's no limit on the number of time a given word can have its meaning change. Every generation of language learners can decide anew what they want a word to mean, and shift the word's use over time. And when they make their adjustments, they do it along the same lines people have made changes before. | The Ling Space, 2016

SEMANTIC TRANSPARENCY
(Semantics) This term aims to capture the intuitive difference felt between compounds like hogwash, meaning 'nonsense', and a compound like milkman. In the literature, "semantic transparency" is defined in two main ways. One is the idea that it can be linked to meaning predictability. Plag (2003) states that words are semantically transparent if "their meaning is predictable on the basis of the word-formation rule according to which they have been formed."
 The second kind of definition uses analyzability rather than predictability. A classic example is Zwitserlood (1994), who writes that "[t]he meaning of a fully transparent compound is synchronically related to the meaning of its composite words". In this sense, milkman clearly is transparent because any possible usage will allow linking the interpretation in some way to the meanings of the constituent parts. | Melanie J Bell and Martin Schäfer, 2013

SEMANTIC UNITY

1. (Semantics) In contrast to studies that have focused on the syntactic properties of English -self pronouns (myself, yourself, etc.), this paper investigates the semantic and pragmatic contributions these forms make in different structural contexts, including not only appositive uses, but also reflexives and a wide variety of so-called exceptional uses, such as logophoric expressions and picture noun phrases. An extensive examination of data from a collection of spoken and written texts reveals that -self pronouns in different structural environments nevertheless exhibit the same semantic and pragmatic characteristics. The structurally diverse assemblage of reflexives, emphatics, and a list of other exceptions are shown to have "semantic unity", since the same message effects are seen in all of these environments, including argument and appositive, reflexive and emphatic, as well as what are traditionally described as discourse-based uses. | Nancy Stern, 2018
2. (Stylistics) Textual unity and "semantic unity" are two important features of a text. Different linguistic items present in a text weave together to give textual unity to the text and at deep level these linguistic features contribute to produce unified meanings which create semantic unity in the text. Enkvist (1978) also believes that semantic connections take two forms i.e. a connection at surface level called cohesion and a connection at more profound level takes the form of coherence. A text as a cohesive semantic unit must have surface cohesion and overall coherence in order to present a flow of thought and meanings in the text. | Amina Shahzadi, Rahat Chaudhary, and Abdul Ghaffar Bhatti, 2022

Page Last Modified January 17, 2024

 

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