SEMANTICS

Well, I am going to review an article that I got from ACADEMIA related to our course “Semantics”.

This article is published by Abbdullah . Its title is “SEMANTICS Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning of morphemes”. which is talking about the word “Meaning of Morphemes”

I am interested to review this article because the title. I think it is enough interesting to read and know more about semantics ( the study of meaning). Actually so many explaination about this subject and I just took some points of it that enough important.

SEMANTICS

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. Subfields of semantics are;

Lexical Semantics is concerned with the meaning of words, and the meaning relationships among words.

Phrasal or Sentential Semantics is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word.

Pragmatics is the study of how context and situation affect meaning.

MEANING

Conceptual Meaning: Conceptual meaning covers those basic, essential components of meaning that are conveyed by the literal use of a word. It is the type of meaning that dictionaries are designed to describe. Some of the basic components of a word like needle in English might include “thin, sharp, steel instrument.”

Associative Meaning is the type of meaning that people might connect with the use of words. The associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the speaker. Different people might have different associations or connotations attached to a word like needle. They might associate it with “pain,” or “illness,” or “blood,” or “drugs,” or “thread,” or “knitting,” or “hard to find” (especially in a haystack), and these associations may differ from one person to the next. These types of associations are not treated as part of the word’s conceptual meaning.

TRUTH- CONDITINAL SEMANTICS

Truth-conditional semantics is a theory of meaning that takes semantic knowledge of knowing when sentences are true or false as basic. It is the study of conditions under which a statement can be judged true or false. It is also called compositional semantics because it calculates the truth value of a sentence by composing, or putting together, the meaning of smaller units. The study of truth or truth conditions in semantics falls into two basic categories:

1.       The study of different types of truth embodied in individual sentences:

a)      Tautologies (Analytic Sentences)

b)     Contradictions

c)      Synthetic Sentences

2.       The study of different types of truth relations that hold between sentences.

a)      Entailment

b)     Contradictory Sentences