Sinngleichen

Sinngleichen is a term used in linguistics, philosophy, and translation studies to describe semantic equivalence between expressions. Expressions are sinngleich when they convey the same meaning, information content, and, in many cases, identical truth-conditions within a given interpretation or possible world. The concept focuses on meaning rather than surface form or syntactic structure.

In practice, sinngleichheit supports the study of paraphrase and translation. Two sentences can be sinngleich even if they differ in wording or grammar, as long as they express the same proposition or have the same practical implications in a specified context. For example, in standard German, "Alle Menschen sind sterblich" and "Jeder Mensch ist sterblich" are sinngleich because they share the same meaning, though they use different syntactic constructions. Conversely, statements that differ in time, scope, or reference may fail to be sinngleich, such as "Es regnet" and "Es regnet heute," which may have different truth conditions.

In formal semantics and logic, sinngleichheit is related to, but distinct from, logical equivalence. Logical (or truth-functional) equivalence concerns identical truth values under all interpretations, while sinngleichheit centers on representing the same meaning within a given context, which may involve world knowledge, presuppositions, or pragmatic factors.

Computationally, the idea informs natural language processing and machine translation, where achieving sinngleichheit between source and target text is a core objective of semantic alignment and paraphrase generation. Limitations arise from ambiguity, context dependence, and cultural or linguistic variation that can affect perceived semantic identity.

Etymology stems from Sinn (sense/meaning) and Gleichheit (equality). See also semantic equivalence, paraphrase, and synonymy.