Semantics

Today I wanna share a little of about semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in language.  The term is taken from the Greek seme, meaning sign.   The word meaning can be defined in many ways, but the definition most pertinent to linguistics and the one we will use is that meaning is "the function of signs in language."  This understanding of meaning corresponds to German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's definition: 'the meaning of a word is its use in the language' (in other words, the role a word plays in the language). Semantic relationships between words

A note about spelling and semantics

      In a language like English where spelling often diverges widely from pronunciation, There is a special type of homonym called the homophone. Homophones have the same pronunciation but different spellings: meet/meat,  peace/piece, whether/weather, you, ewe, through/threw, to, two, too. cot/caught. flour/flower.  Homophones are usually are true homonyms in that they derive from completely unrelated sources. There are also occasional polysemous homophones: draft (into the army), draught (of beer), or the Russian voskresenie (Resurrection) --> voskresenye  (Sunday).

Other terminology in lexical semantics

In discussing semantics, linguists sometimes use the term lexeme (as opposed to word), so that word can be retained for the inflected variants. Thus one can say that the words walk, walks, walked, and walking are different forms of the same lexeme.

There are several kinds of sense relations among lexemes. First is the opposition between syntagmatic relations (the way lexemes are related in sentences) and paradigmatic relations (the way words can substitute for each other in the same sentence context).

Important paradigmatic relations include:

   synonymy - "sameness of meaning" (pavement is a synonym of sidewalk)

    hyponymy - "inclusion of meaning" (cat is a hyponym of animal)

    antonymy - "oppositeness of meaning" (big is an antonym of small)

    incompatibility - "mutual exclusiveness within the same superordinate category" (e.g. red and green)

We also need to distinguish homonymy from polysemy: two words are homonyms if they are (accidentally) pronounced the same (e.g. "too" and "two"); a single word is polysemous if it has several meanings (e.g. "louse" the bug and "louse" the despicable person).