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SEMANTICS

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Strawberry Cub
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18 views15 pages

SEMANTICS

Uploaded by

Strawberry Cub
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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SEMANTICS

SEMANTICS
 the branch of linguistics
and logic concerned with
meaning.

derived from the Greek


term “SEME” , meaning sign
TWO OPPOSING VIEWS

The NATURALIST view

- held by Plato and his followers


- there was an intrinsic
motivation between a word and
its meaning
The CONVENTIONALIST view
- view of Aristotle and his
followers
- holds that the connection
between sound and meaning is
completely arbitrary
- a matter of social convention
and prior agreement between
speakers
- the form of most words is
PHILOLOGISTS
- A broader term for people who
study language as well as
anything created by language
- Often make a distinction between
concept and meaning
CONCEPT
- is the totality of real world
knowledge about an item
MEANING
- category of language
Linguists have second way of looking at
the distinction between linguistic and
real-world knowledge

WORD’S SENSE
- how the word relates to other
words in a language
REFERENCE
- how the word relates to real
world concept
A group of linguists have tried to
reduce all meaning in language
to a set of universal core
concepts such as tall, short,
female, male, etc. This finite set
of concepts are then used
universally, to describe the
meanings of all words in all
languages.
1. deciding which concepts are
basic and which are derived.
2. old difficulty of distinguishing
between sense and reference
3. meaning is more than simply a
reflection of real world
categories ; meaning is a
linguistic category rather than a
real world category reducible to
pure logic and perception.
How meaning affects word
association in language?

The purely linguistic side of


meaning is equally evident when
examining how words combine
with one another to produce
phrases. The set of restrictions on
how a word may combine with
other words of a single syntactic
category is referred to as word’s
“collocability”.
Examples
Flockto sheep
School to fish

Get or grow old


Get drunk
Get ready
From the POV of etymology, set
phrases are of two types
Collocation
- set of phrases which still makes
sense
Idioms
- phrases whose words no longer
make sense when taken literally
Semantic relationship between
words
 Synonyms – words with similar meanings
denotative (referring to some actual, real
world difference in the referents; objective)
connotative (how the speaker feels about
the referent; subjective)

 Paronyms

- words associated meanings which also have


great similarities in form
Example :
Proscribe/ prescribe
Affect/ effect
Paronyms
- words associated meanings
which also have great similarities
in form

Examples :
Proscribe/ prescribe
Affect/ effect
Antonyms – words that have the
opposite meaning.

Homonyms – words that have the


same form but different
meanings

Tropes – words used in other than


their literal meaning

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