SemanticsDr. Francisco Perlas Dumanig

What is semantics?

Semantics - the study of meaning in human language.

Four major topics in semantics:

1. The nature of meaning.

2. Some properties of the conceptual system underlying meaning.

3. The contribution of syntactic structure to the interpretation of sentences.

4.The role of non-grammatical factors in the understanding of utterances.

What is semantics?

Semantics – the study of meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences.

Morphemes - a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided

Example: in, come, -ing, forming incoming

Word - is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning)

Examples: walk, book, write

Phrase - is two or more words that do not contain the subject-verb pair necessary to form a clause. Phrases can be very short or quite long.

Examples: in the garden, at the office

Sentence – is a word or group of words that has a complete thought.

Example: He comes to class on time.

Semantics

Lexical semantics - deals with the meaning of words, and the relationship among words.

Sentential/phrasal semantics - deals with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word.

Semantics

- is the study of word meaning and sentence meaning abstracted away from the context of use.

- it is an attempt to describe and understand the nature of the knowledge about meaning in their language that people have from knowing the language.

Example: Hold out your arm. That’s it.

Note:

You need to know the meaning of the expressions arm, your arm, hold out, that’s, it.

hold out – denotes an action

arm – denotes a part of a person

your arm – denotes “arm of the person being spoken to”

that – denotes something which is obvious to whomever is addressed

it - denotes that has been recently spoken about

Expression

• is any meaningful language unit or sequence of meaningful units, from a sentence down: a clause, a phrase, a word, or meaningful part of a word.

What is Pragmatics?

Pragmatics - is the study of how context affects meaning.

- is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with our knowledge of the world, taking into account the contexts of use.

Example: Hold out your arm. That’s it.

Refer to the detailed explanation on page 2, paragraph 3.

Semantics versus Pragmatics

• See Table 1.1 on page 3

Differences between Semantics and Pragmatics

• Utterances and sentences

• Stages of interpretation

Utterances – are the raw data of linguistics. Each utterance is unique, having been produced by a particular sender in a specific situation.

• Sentence – is the abstract linguistic object on which an utterance is based.