Meaning postulate

From Glottopedia

Revision as of 16:26, 6 October 2007 by Haspelmath (talk | contribs) (from Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics)

(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Jump to navigation Jump to search

A meaning postulate is a device used in logical semantics to stipulate semantic relations between lexical items. Meaning postulates were introduced in Carnap (1947) in order to account for the fact that a sentence like (i) is an analytic truth, true in every model. The meaning postulate in (ii) captures this analyticity:

(i) Bachelors are unmarried
(ii) For all x, if x is a bachelor, then x is unmarried

Meaning postulates can be seen as an alternative for decomposition of word meaning (see componential analysis). They are extensively used in Montague Grammar.

Link

Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics

Reference

Carnap 1947
Gamut, L.T.F. (1991) Logic, language, and meaning, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Other languages

German Bedeutungspostulat

Retrieved from "http://glottopedia.org/index.php?title=Meaning_postulate&oldid=3939"