Palmer (1976: 1-2) Semantics is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning. The term ‘semantics’ is a recent addition to the English language.

Although there is one occurrence ‘semantick’ in the phrase semantic philosophy to mean ‘divination’ in the 17th century ‘semantics’ does not occur until it was introduced on a paper read the American Philological Association in 1894 entitled ‘Reflected meanings: a point in semantics’. The French term ‘semantique’ had been coined from the Greek in the previous year by M. Breal. In both cases the term was not used to simply refer to meaning but to its development – with what we shall call later ‘historical semantics’. In 1900, however, there appeared Breal’s book ‘Semantics: studies in the science of meaning’. It is one of the earliest books in linguistics as we understand it today, in that, first, it treated semantics as the ‘science of meaning, and secondly, that it was not primarily concerned with historical change in meaning. Yet the term ‘semantics did not catch on for some time. One of the most famous books on semantics is ‘The meaning of meaning’ by Ogden and Richards, first published in 1923. Yet ‘semantics does not occur in the main body of the book itself. Yet it appears in the appendix, which itself was a classic in the field, entitled ‘The problem of meaning in primitive languages, written by the anthropologist, B Malinowski.

Other terms besides ‘semantics have used. H.G. Wells in the ‘The shape of things to come’ speaks of the science of significs’ but he says it was lost sight of and not revived until the twenty-first century. Other names that have been used include ‘semasiology, semology, sememics and semics’, though scholars have used these terms to suit their own interests and orientation, and in both wider and narrower senses than our ‘semantics’ will have here.

J.I. Saeed (2006)Semantics is the study of meaning communicated through language. We make the basic assumption that a person’s linguistic abilities are based on knowledge that they have. it is this knowledge we are seeking to investigate. One of the insights of modern linguistics is that speakers of a language have different types of linguistic knowledge, including how to pronounce words, how to construct sentences and about the meaning of individual words and sentences. To reflect thi,s linguistic description has levels of analysis. So phonology is the study of sounds a language has and how these sounds combine to form words; syntax is the study of how words can be combined into sentences and semantics is the study of meaning of words and sentences. Since linguistic description is an attempt to reflect a speaker’s knowledge the semanticist is committed to describing semantic knowledge. So we see that our basic task in Semantics is showing how people communicate meanings with pieces of language. Note, though, that this is only part of a larger enterprise of investigating how people understand meaning. Linguistic meaning is a special subset of the more general human ability to use signs.