Sememe

Encyclopedia : S : SE : SEM : Sememe

A Sememe is a proposed unit of transmitted or intended meaning; it is atomic or indivisible. A sememe can be the meaning expressed by a morpheme, such as the English pluralizing morpheme -s, which carries the sememic feature [+ plural]. Alternately, a single sememe (for example [go] or [move]) can be conceived as the abstract representation of such verbs as skate, roll, jump, slide, turn, or boogie.

The term was coined by Sydney Lamb of Yale University as part of his theory of Stratificational Linguistics, much of which now appears under the name Neuro-Cognive linguistics.^{[[Citing sources citation needed]]} The sememe notion was one of the inspirations of Roger Schank's theory of Conceptual Dependency, a methodology for representing language meaning directly within the Artificial Intelligence movement of the 1960s/1970s.

Cf. Gesamtbedeutung, semantic field.

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