Meaning postulate

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