Semantics (from Ancient Greek: σημαντικός sēmantikós,
"significant")[1][a] is the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning in language, programming
languages, formal logics, and semiotics. It is concerned with
the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand
for in reality, their denotation.
In International scientific vocabulary semantics is
also called semasiology. The word semantics was
first used by Michel Bréal, a French
philologist.[2] It denotes a
range of ideas—from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in
ordinary language for denoting a problem of understanding that comes down to
word selection or connotation. This problem of
understanding has been the subject of many formal enquiries, over a long period
of time, especially in the field of formal semantics. In linguistics, it is the study of the interpretation of
signs or symbols used in agents or communitieswithin
particular circumstances and contexts.[3] Within this
view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, and proxemics have semantic
(meaningful) content, and each comprises several branches of study. In written
language, things like paragraph structure and punctuation bear semantic
content; other forms of language bear other semantic content.[3]
The formal study of
semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, including lexicology, syntax, pragmatics, etymology and others.
Independently, semantics is also a well-defined field in its own right, often
with synthetic properties.[4] In the philosophy of language, semantics and reference are closely
connected. Further related fields include philology, communication, and semiotics. The formal study of
semantics can therefore be manifold and complex.
Semantics contrasts
with syntax, the study of the
combinatorics of units of a language (without reference to their meaning),
and pragmatics, the study of the
relationships between the symbols of a language, their meaning, and the users
of the language.[5] Semantics as a
field of study also has significant ties to various representational theories
of meaning including truth theories of meaning, coherence theories of meaning,
and correspondence theories of meaning. Each of these is related to the general
philosophical study of reality and the representation of meaning. In 1960s
psychosemantic studies became popular after Osgood's massive
cross-cultural studies using his semantic differential(SD) method that used
thousands of nouns and adjective bipolar scales. A specific form of the SD,
Projective Semantics method[6] uses only most
common and neutral nouns that correspond to the 7 groups (factors) of
adjective-scales most consistently found in cross-cultural studies (Evaluation,
Potency, Activity as found by Osgood, and Reality, Organization, Complexity,
Limitation as found in other studies). In this method, seven groups of bipolar
adjective scales corresponded to seven types of nouns so the method was thought
to have the object-scale symmetry (OSS) between the scales and nouns for
evaluation using these scales. For example, the nouns corresponding to the
listed 7 factors would be: Beauty, Power, Motion, Life, Work, Chaos, Law.
Beauty was expected to be assessed unequivocally as “very good” on adjectives
of Evaluation-related scales, Life as “very real” on Reality-related scales,
etc. However, deviations in this symmetric and very basic matrix might show
underlying biases of two types: scales-related bias and objects-related bias.
This OSS design meant to increase the sensitivity of the SD method to any
semantic biases in responses of people within the same culture and educational
background.
In linguistics, semantics is
the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels
of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse (termed texts,
or narratives). The study of semantics is also closely linked to
the subjects of representation, reference and denotation. The basic study of
semantics is oriented to the examination of the meaning of signs, and the study of
relations between different linguistic units and compounds: homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, paronyms. A key
concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a result
of the composition from smaller units of meaning. Traditionally, semantics has
included the study of sense and
denotative reference, truth conditions, argument
structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis, and the linkage of
all of these to syntax.
Conceptual semantics
This theory is an
effort to explain properties of argument structure. The assumption behind this
theory is that syntactic properties of phrases reflect the meanings of the
words that head them.[16] With this
theory, linguists can better deal with the fact that subtle differences in word
meaning correlate with other differences in the syntactic structure that the
word appears in.[16] The way this is
gone about is by looking at the internal structure of words.[17] These small
parts that make up the internal structure of words are termed semantic
primitives.[17]
A linguistic theory
that investigates word meaning. This theory understands that the meaning of a
word is fully reflected by its context. Here, the meaning of a word is
constituted by its contextual relations.[18] Therefore, a
distinction between degrees of participation as well as modes of participation
are made.[18] In order to
accomplish this distinction any part of a sentence that bears a meaning and
combines with the meanings of other constituents is labeled as a semantic
constituent. Semantic constituents that cannot be broken down into more
elementary constituents are labeled minimal semantic constituents.[18]
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