Semantics

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Semantics
The study of meaning

Semantics is the study of
meaning communicated through language… One of the insights of modern linguistics is that 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 this, linguistic description has different levels of analysis. So phonology is the study of what 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 the meaning of words and sentences.[i]CONTENT

LEXICON

THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPOSITIONALITY

SENSE AND REFERENCE

SEMANTIC CLASS & SEMANTIC PROPERTIES (FEATURES)

NYM WORDS
    Homonyms
    Heteronyms
    Antonyms
    Synonyms
    Retronyms
    Hypernyms
Hyponyms
    Metonyms

POLYSEMOUS WORDS

AMBIGUITY         

THEMATIC ROLES

ANOMALY, IDIOMS & METAPHORS                

Recommended websites:http://www.sfu.ca/person/dearmond/322/322.theta.roles.htm
http://www.fun-with-words.com/nym_words.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity

Lexicon

In linguistics, lexicon is a term used to describe the total inventory of morphemes in a given language, and the inventory of base morphemes plus their combinations with derivational morphemes. Mental lexicon, on the other hand, is the store of words ina person's mind, that is, it refers to a language user's knowledge of words, the vocabulary and the representation of knowledge about words in minds. The mental lexicon differs radically from a dictionary. There are so many words and they are found so fast. Native speakers can recognize a word of their language in 200 microseconds or less and can reject a non-word sound sequence in about half asecond. In a 1940 study Seashore & Erickson estimated that an educated adult knows more than 150,000 words and is able to use 90% of these.

The Principle of Compositionality
The meaning of the whole is a function of the meaning of the parts.

The principle of compositionality, the fundamental principle in logical semantics, states that the meaning of a compound expression is a function of themeaning of its parts and of the syntactic rule by which they are combined. In plain words, the meaning of a complex expression is the result of both, the meaning of individual units and the way those units are combined.

For instance, the expressions a good scare and a bad scare have just about the same meaning, even though good and bad are opposites. Likewise, the sentences the tired girlarrived and the girl arrived tired do not have the same meaning (same words, different order). In Spanish, for example, una mesa buena (in good condition) is not the same as una buena mesa (with plenty of food). The expressions "half full" and "half empty" don't really have the same meanings but happen to be applicable to the same state of affairs.

Sense and Reference

Sense and reference aretwo different aspect of meaning. Roughly speaking, a term's reference is the object it refers to and its sense is the way in which it refers to that object. For example, the two expressions 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' have the same reference, since they each referred to the same planet. But they could not be said to have the same sense. The phrases the man who wrote Cien años deSoledad, el Gabo and Gabriel García Marquez have the same reference, but different sense. Also, the Big Apple, the City That Never Sleeps, and New York City have the same reference.

Semantic Properties, Semantic Class & Semantic Features

The term semantic property refers to the components of meaning of a particular word. Thus, male is a semantic property that helps to define father, son, dad,...