Semantics: Linguistics and Meaning
SEMANTICS
A short story of semantics
Why study semantics?
Semantics (as the study of meaning) is central to the study of communication; and as communication becomes more and more a crucial factor in social organization, the need to understand it becomes more and more pressing.
Semantics is also at the centre of human mind – thought processes, cognition, conceptualization – all these are strongly connected to the way in which we classify and convey our experience of the world through language.
Semantics can be defined as a branch of linguistics; it is an area of study parallel to, and interacting with syntax and phonology. While syntax and phonology study the structure of expressive possibilities in language, semantics studies the meaning that can be expressed. Nearly all linguists have accepted a linguistic model in which semantics is at one end and phonetics at the other, with grammar somewhere in the middle. However, until recently, semantics has been the ‘Cinderella’ of linguistics, a branch that had been abandoned to philosophers and anthropologists. But in the past20 –25 years there has been a swing away from the view that semantics is a messy, unstructured intellectual no-man’s-land on the fringes of linguistics, and little by little it has acquired a central position in linguistic studies. The concentration on semantics has come not only from linguists, but from logicians, too. Consequently, in semantics we witness an unusual convergence of disciplines; the techniques and investigations of philosophy and cognitive psychology, in particular, have helped to lay a more solid foundation for linguistic studies.
A short history of semantics
Although semantics is consider a rather young branch of linguistics, interest in today’s problems of semantics was alive already in ancient times.
Antiquity
In ancient Greece, philosophers dealt with the problem of the way in which words acquired their meaning. One of the questions they tried to find an answer to was the
A short story of semantics
Why study semantics?
Semantics (as the study of meaning) is central to the study of communication; and as communication becomes more and more a crucial factor in social organization, the need to understand it becomes more and more pressing.
Semantics is also at the centre of human mind – thought processes, cognition, conceptualization – all these are strongly connected to the way in which we classify and convey our experience of the world through language.
Semantics can be defined as a branch of linguistics; it is an area of study parallel to, and interacting with syntax and phonology. While syntax and phonology study the structure of expressive possibilities in language, semantics studies the meaning that can be expressed. Nearly all linguists have accepted a linguistic model in which semantics is at one end and phonetics at the other, with grammar somewhere in the middle. However, until recently, semantics has been the ‘Cinderella’ of linguistics, a branch that had been abandoned to philosophers and anthropologists. But in the past20 –25 years there has been a swing away from the view that semantics is a messy, unstructured intellectual no-man’s-land on the fringes of linguistics, and little by little it has acquired a central position in linguistic studies. The concentration on semantics has come not only from linguists, but from logicians, too. Consequently, in semantics we witness an unusual convergence of disciplines; the techniques and investigations of philosophy and cognitive psychology, in particular, have helped to lay a more solid foundation for linguistic studies.
A short history of semantics
Although semantics is consider a rather young branch of linguistics, interest in today’s problems of semantics was alive already in ancient times.
Antiquity
In ancient Greece, philosophers dealt with the problem of the way in which words acquired their meaning. One of the questions they tried to find an answer to was the