semantons

Semantons are a theoretical construct in linguistic semantics describing minimal units of meaning that can be concatenated to form larger semantic structures. They are conceived to be the semantic counterpart to phonemes: discrete, combinable elements that encode basic content such as properties, relations, or predicates.

In formal treatments, semantons may be represented as symbolic tokens, feature bundles, or elements of a vector space. Semantic composition then proceeds by operations such as function application, conjunction, or tensor-based combination to build complex meanings from simpler semantons, analogous to how syntactic structure is assembled in other theories. In some frameworks, a semanton corresponds to a basic lambda-term or a semantic type that can be applied to arguments to yield truth-conditional content.

Applications include semantic parsing, knowledge representation, and natural language understanding, where texts are mapped to sequences or trees of semantons and then composed into logical forms, query representations, or grounded representations in knowledge bases.

Status: the term semanton is not widely adopted in mainstream linguistics and philosophy of language. Some researchers treat meaning as arising from larger units, distributed representations, or context-dependent interpretations, and the use of semantons is mainly seen in pedagogical discussions or speculative models.

See also: Semantics, Formal semantics, Lambda calculus, Compositional semantics, Semantic representation.