Linguistic Fundemantals for Natural Language Processing II: 100 Essentials from Semantics and Pragmatics

Semantics is commonly defined as “the study of meaning” while pragmatics is generally referred to as “the study of meaning in context”. In other words, semantics deal with the sentence meaning (e.g., literal meaning of “How are you?”), while pragmatics is more concerned with the speaker/utterance meaning (e.g., the greeting meaning of “How are you?”). Both fields interact with each other and with other lower layers of language such as phonology, morphology and syntax in many ways. Semantics and pragmatics have been established as research fields a long time ago and been widely studied ever since, as also evidenced by a number of introductory text books dating from 80s to this date (Kroeger 2018; Levinson 1983; Cruse 2000; Birner 2012/2013; Kadmon 2001). Previous introductory books are remarkably rich with linguistic theorems and provide a comprehensive introduction to the topic. However, the majority of them offer a