Semantics (from Greek Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament of "σημαντικός" - semantikos^[1][2]) is the study of meaning, usually in language Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of human thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of. The word "semantics" itself denotes a range of ideas, from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language to denote a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation Connotation is a subjective cultural and/or emotional coloration in addition to the explicit or denotative meaning of any specific word or phrase in a language, i.e. emotional association with a word. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal inquiries, over a long period of time, most notably in the field of formal semantics Formal semantics is the study of the semantics, or interpretations, of formal and also natural languages. A formal language can be defined apart from any interpretation of it. This is done by designating a set of symbols and a set of formation rules (also called a formal grammar) which determine which strings of symbols are well-formed formulas. In linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words, it is the study of interpretation of signs or symbols as used by agents In linguistics, a grammatical agent is the participant in a situation that carries out the action in this situation. Also, agent is the name of the thematic role with the above definition. The word comes from the present participle agens, agentis ("the one doing") of the Latin verb agere, to "do" or "make" or communities In biological terms, a community is a group of interacting species sharing an environment. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness within particular circumstances and contexts.^[3] Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, proxemics The term proxemics was introduced by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in 1966. Proxemics is the study of set measurable distances between people as they interact. The effects of proxemics, according to Hall, can be summarized by the following loose rule: have semantic (meaningful) content, and each has several branches of study. In written language, such things as paragraph structure and punctuation have semantic content; in other forms of language, there is other semantic content.^[3]

The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, including proxemics The term proxemics was introduced by anthropologist Edward T. Hall in 1966. Proxemics is the study of set measurable distances between people as they interact. The effects of proxemics, according to Hall, can be summarized by the following loose rule:, lexicology Lexicology is the part of linguistics which studies words, their nature and meaning, words' elements, relations between words , word groups and the whole lexicon, syntax In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages, pragmatics Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the, etymology Etymology is the study of the history of words, where they are from, and how their form and meaning have changed over time and others, although semantics is a well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic properties.^[4] In philosophy of language Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language and reality. For continental philosophers, however,, semantics and reference A reference, or a references point, is the intensional use of one thing, a point of reference or reference state, to indicate something else [citation needed]. When reference is intended, what the reference points to is called the referent are related fields. Further related fields include philology Philology is the humanistic study of historical linguistics, considering both form and meaning in linguistic expression, combining linguistics and literary studies, communication Communication is a process of transferring information from one entity to another. Communication processes are sign-mediated interactions between at least two agents which share a repertoire of signs and semiotic rules. Communication is commonly defined as "the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information by speech, writing,, and semiotics In linguistics, semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes , or signification and communication, signs and symbols. It is usually divided into the three following branches:. The formal study of semantics is therefore complex.

Semantics is sometimes contrasted with syntax In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages, the study of the symbols of a language (without reference to their meaning), and pragmatics Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on the, the study of the relationships between the symbols of a language, their meaning, and the users of the language.^[5]

The word semantic in its modern sense is considered to have first appeared in French French is a Romance language spoken as a first language by about 136 million people worldwide. Around 190 million people speak French as a second language, and an additional 200 million speak it as an acquired foreign language. French speaking communities are present in 57 countries and territories. Most native speakers of the language live in as sémantique in Michel Bréal Michel Jules Alfred Bréal , French philologist, was born at Landau in Rhenish Bavaria, of French-Jewish parents. He is often identified as a founder of modern semantics's 1897 book, Essai de sémantique^[6].

In international scientific vocabulary International scientific vocabulary comprises scientific and specialized words whose language of origin may or may not be certain, but which are in current use in several modern languages. The name "International Scientific Vocabulary" was first used by Philip Gove in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961). As noted by semantics is also called semasiology Semasiology (from Greek: σημασία "signification, meaning" σημαίνω (semaino) "indicate, signify") is a discipline within linguistics concerned with the question "what does the word X mean?". It studies the meaning of words regardless of their phonetic expression. Semasiology departs from a word or lexical.

The discipline of Semantics is distinct from Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics General semantics is a non-Aristotelian educational discipline created by Alfred Korzybski during the years 1919 to 1933. General Semantics is distinct from semantics (a sub-field of linguistics), a different subject. The name technically refers to the study of what Korzybski called "semantic reactions", or reactions of the whole human, which is a system for looking at the semantic reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event, symbolic or otherwise.

Linguistics

In linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning (semantics and pragmatics). Grammar encompasses morphology (the formation and composition of words), syntax (the rules that determine how words, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse Discourse means either "written or spoken communication or debate" or "a formal discussion of debate." The term is often used in semantics and discourse analysis (referred to as texts). The basic area of study is the meaning of signs In semiotics, a sign is "something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity" It may be understood as a discrete unit of meaning, and includes words, images, gestures, scents, tastes, textures, sounds – essentially all of the ways in which information can be communicated as a message by any sentient, reasoning mind to, and the study of relations between different linguistic units: homonymy In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings , usually as a result of the two words having different origins. The state of being a homonym is called homonymy. Examples of pairs of homonyms are stalk (part of a plant) and stalk (follow/, synonymy Synonyms are different words with identical or very similar meanings. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy. The word comes from Ancient Greek syn ("with") and onoma (ὄνομα) ("name"). The words car and automobile are synonyms. Similarly, if we talk about a, antonymy In lexical semantics, opposites are words that lie in an inherently incompatible binary relationship as in the opposite pairs male : female, long : short, up : down, and precede : follow. The notion of incompatibility here refers to fact that one word in an opposite pair entails that it is not the other pair member. For example, something that is, polysemy Polysemy (from the Greek: πολυ-, poly-, "many" and σήμα, sêma, "sign") is the capacity for a sign (e.g., a word, phrase, etc.) or signs to have multiple meanings (sememes), i.e., a large semantic field. This is a pivotal concept within social sciences, such as media studies and linguistics, paronyms, hypernymy In linguistics, a hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is included within that of another word, its hypernym . In simpler terms, a hyponym shares a type-of relationship with its hypernym. For example, scarlet, vermilion, carmine, and crimson are all hyponyms of red (their hypernym), which is, in turn, a hyponym of colour, hyponymy In linguistics, a hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is included within that of another word, its hypernym . In simpler terms, a hyponym shares a type-of relationship with its hypernym. For example, scarlet, vermilion, carmine, and crimson are all hyponyms of red (their hypernym), which is, in turn, a hyponym of colour, meronymy Meronymy is a semantic relation used in linguistics. A meronym denotes a constituent part of, or a member of something. That is,, metonymy Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance, "Washington", as the capital of the United States, could be used as a metonym (an instance of metonymy) for its government, "Capitol, holonymy Holonymy is a semantic relation. Holonymy defines the relationship between a term denoting the whole and a term denoting a part of, or a member of, the whole. That is,, exocentricity In linguistics, it refers to phrases and compound words which are not the same part of speech as their constituents / endocentricity In linguistics, an endocentric construction is a grammatical construction that fulfills the same linguistic function as one of its constituents. An endocentric construction consists of an obligatory head and one or more optional, dependent words, whose presence serves to narrow the meaning of the head. For example, the phrase 'lion house' is an, linguistic compounds In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word-formation that creates compound lexemes (the other word-formation process being derivation). Compounding or Word-compounding refers to the faculty and device of language to form new words by combining or putting together old words. In. A key concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a result of the composition from smaller units of meaning. Traditionally, semantics has included the study of sense In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word and denotative reference A reference, or a references point, is the intensional use of one thing, a point of reference or reference state, to indicate something else [citation needed]. When reference is intended, what the reference points to is called the referent, truth conditions In semantics, truth conditions are what obtain precisely when a sentence is true. For example, "It is snowing in Nebraska" is true precisely when it is snowing in Nebraska, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, talk, conversation, communicative event, etc.—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech acts or turns-at-talk. Contrary to much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language use 'beyond the sentence boundary', but also, and the linkage of all of these to syntax.

Formal semanticists Formal semantics is the study of the semantics, or interpretations, of formal and also natural languages. A formal language can be defined apart from any interpretation of it. This is done by designating a set of symbols and a set of formation rules (also called a formal grammar) which determine which strings of symbols are well-formed formulas are concerned with the modeling of meaning in terms of the semantics of logic. Thus the sentence John loves a bagel can be broken down into its constituents (signs), of which the unit loves may serve as both syntactic and semantic head In linguistics, the head is the word that determines the syntactic type of the phrase of which it is a member, or analogously the stem that determines the semantic category of a compound of which it is a component. The other elements modify the head.

Montague grammar

In the late 1960s, Richard Montague proposed a system for defining semantic entries in the lexicon in terms of lambda calculus In mathematical logic and computer science, lambda calculus, also written as λ-calculus, is a formal system for function definition, function application and recursion. It was introduced by Alonzo Church in the 1930s as part of an investigation into the foundations of mathematics. After the original system was shown to be logically inconsistent ,. In these terms, the syntactic parse In computer science and linguistics, parsing, or, more formally, syntactic analysis, is the process of analyzing a text, made of a sequence of tokens , to determine its grammatical structure with respect to a given (more or less) formal grammar of the sentence above would now indicate loves as the head, and its entry in the lexicon would point to the arguments as the agent, John, and the object, bagel, with a special role for the article "a" (which Montague called a quantifier). This resulted in the sentence being associated with the logical predicate loves (John, bagel), thus linking semantics to categorial grammar Categorial grammar is a term used for a family of formalisms in natural language syntax motivated by the principle of compositionality and organized according to the view that syntactic constituents should generally combine as functions or according to a function-argument relationship models of syntax. The logical predicate thus obtained would be elaborated further, e.g. using truth theory models, which ultimately relate meanings to a set of Tarskiian universals, which may lie outside the logic. The notion of such meaning atoms or primitives is basic to the language of thought hypothesis from the 70s.

Despite its elegance, Montague grammar was limited by the context-dependent variability in word sense, and led to several attempts at incorporating context, such as:

• situation semantics ('80s): truth-values are incomplete, they get assigned based on context
• generative lexicon ('90s): categories (types) are incomplete, and get assigned based on context

The dynamic turn in semantics

In Chomskian linguistics there was no mechanism for the learning of semantic relations, and the nativist view considered all semantic notions as inborn. Thus, even novel concepts were proposed to have been dormant in some sense. This view was also thought unable to address many issues such as metaphor or associative meanings, and semantic change, where meanings within a linguistic community change over time, and qualia or subjective experience. Another issue not addressed by the nativist model was how perceptual cues are combined in thought, e.g. in mental rotation.^[7]

This view of semantics, as an innate finite meaning inherent in a lexical unit that can be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of discourse, is now being fiercely debated in the emerging domain of cognitive linguistics^[8] and also in the non-Fodorian camp in Philosophy of Language.^[9] The challenge is motivated by:

• factors internal to language, such as the problem of resolving indexical or anaphora (e.g. this x, him, last week). In these situations "context" serves as the input, but the interpreted utterance also modifies the context, so it is also the output. Thus, the interpretation is necessarily dynamic and the meaning of sentences is viewed as context change potentials instead of propositions.
• factors external to language, i.e. language is not a set of labels stuck on things, but "a toolbox, the importance of whose elements lie in the way they function rather than their attachments to things."^[9] This view reflects the position of the later Wittgenstein and his famous game example, and is related to the positions of Quine, Davidson, and others.

A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semantic underspecification – meanings are not complete without some elements of context. To take an example of a single word, "red", its meaning in a phrase such as red book is similar to many other usages, and can be viewed as compositional.^[10] However, the colours implied in phrases such as "red wine" (very dark), and "red hair" (coppery), or "red soil", or "red skin" are very different. Indeed, these colours by themselves would not be called "red" by native speakers. These instances are contrastive, so "red wine" is so called only in comparison with the other kind of wine (which also is not "white" for the same reasons). This view goes back to de Saussure:

Each of a set of synonyms like redouter ('to dread'), craindre ('to fear'), avoir peur ('to be afraid') has its particular value only because they stand in contrast with one another. No word has a value that can be identified independently of what else is in its vicinity.^[11]

and may go back to earlier Indian views on language, especially the Nyaya view of words as indicators and not carriers of meaning.^[12]

An attempt to defend a system based on propositional meaning for semantic underspecification can be found in the Generative Lexicon model of James Pustejovsky, who extends contextual operations (based on type shifting) into the lexicon. Thus meanings are generated on the fly based on finite context.

Prototype theory

Another set of concepts related to fuzziness in semantics is based on prototypes. The work of Eleanor Rosch and George Lakoff in the 1970s led to a view that natural categories are not characterizable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but are graded (fuzzy at their boundaries) and inconsistent as to the status of their constituent members.

Systems of categories are not objectively "out there" in the world but are rooted in people's experience. These categories evolve as learned concepts of the world – meaning is not an objective truth, but a subjective construct, learned from experience, and language arises out of the "grounding of our conceptual systems in shared embodiment and bodily experience".^[13] A corollary of this is that the conceptual categories (i.e. the lexicon) will not be identical for different cultures, or indeed, for every individual in the same culture. This leads to another debate (see the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis or Eskimo words for snow).

English nouns are found by language analysis to have 25 different semantic features, each associated with its own pattern of fMRI brain activity. The individual contribution of each parameter predicts the fMRI pattern when nouns are considered thus supporting the view that nouns derive their meaning from prior experience linked to a common symbol.^[14]

Theories in Semantics

Lexical & Conceptual Semantics

This theory is an effort to explain properties of argument structure. The assumption behind this theory is that syntactic properties of phrases reflect the meanings of the words that head them.^[15] With this theory, linguists can better deal with the fact that subtle differences in word meaning correlate with other differences in the syntactic structure that the word appears in.^[16] The way this is gone about is by looking at the internal structure of words.^[17] These small parts that make up the internal structure of words are referred to as semantic primitives.^[18]

Lexical Semantics

A linguistic theory that investigates word meaning. This theory understands that the meaning of a word is fully reflected by its context. Here, the meaning of a word is constituted by its contextual relations.^[19] Therefore, a distinction between degrees of participation as well as modes of participation are made.^[20] In order to accomplish this distinction any part of a sentence that bears a meaning and combines with the meanings of other constituents is labeled as a semantic constituent. Semantic constituents that can not be broken down into more elementary constituents is labeled a minimal semantic constituent.^[21]

Computational Semantics

Computational Semantics is focused on the processing of linguistic meaning. In order to do this concrete algorithms and architectures are described. Within this framework the algorithms and architectures are also analyzed in terms of decidability, time/space complexity, data structures which they require and communication protocols.^[22]

Computer science

In computer science, where it is considered as an application of mathematical logic, formal semantics of programming languages reflects the meaning of programs or functions, whereas semantic data models use semantic techniques to incorporate meaning in the expression, storage and exchange of information and knowledge.

In this regard, semantics permits programs to be separated into their syntactical part (grammatical structure) and their semantic part (meaning). For instance, the following statements use different syntaxes, but issue the same instructions:

Generally these operations would all perform an arithmetical addition of 'y' to 'x' and store the result in a variable called 'x'.

Semantics for computer applications falls into three categories:^[23]

• Operational semantics: The meaning of a construct is specified by the computation it induces when it is executed on a machine. In particular, it is of interest how the effect of a computation is produced.
• Denotational semantics: Meanings are modelled by mathematical objects that represent the effect of executing the constructs. Thus only the effect is of interest, not how it is obtained.
• Axiomatic semantics: Specific properties of the effect of executing the constructs as expressed as assertions. Thus there may be aspects of the executions that are ignored.

The Semantic Web refers to the extension of the World Wide Web through the embedding of additional semantic metadata; see also Web Ontology Language (OWL).

Psychology

In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning – in other words, the aspect of memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience – while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details – the individual features, or the unique particulars of experience. Word meaning is measured by the company they keep, i.e. the relationships among words themselves in a semantic network. The memories may be transferred imtergenerationally or isolated in a single generation due to a cultural disruption. Different generations may have different experiences at similar points in their own time-lines. This may then create a vertically heterogenous semantic net for certain words in an otherwise homogeneous culture.^[24] In a network created by people analyzing their understanding of the word (such as Wordnet) the links and decomposition structures of the network are few in number and kind, and include "part of", "kind of", and similar links. In automated ontologies the links are computed vectors without explicit meaning. Various automated technologies are being developed to compute the meaning of words: latent semantic indexing and support vector machines as well as natural language processing, neural networks and predicate calculus techniques.

See also

Major contributors in the field of Semantics

Linguistics and semiotics

Logic and mathematics

Computer science

References

1. ^ σημαντικός, Henry George Liddell, [[Robert Scott (philologist) |Robert Scott]], A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus Digital Library
2. ^ The word is derived from the Greek word σημαντικός (semantikos), "significant", from σημαίνω (semaino), "to signify, to indicate" and that from σῆμα (sema), "sign, mark, token".
3. ^ ^{a b} Otto Neurath (Editor), Rudolf Carnap (Editor), Charles F. W. Morris (Editor) (1955). International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
4. ^ Cruise, Alan. Meaning and Language: An introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics, chapter one, Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics, 2004; Kearns, Kate. Semantics, Palgrave MacMillan 2000; Cruise, D.A. Lexical Semantics. Cambridge, 1986.
5. ^ Kitcher and Salmon (1989). Scientific Explanation. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 35.
6. ^ Bréal, Michel (1897). Essai de sémantique : science des significations. Paris: Hachette. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k50474n.
7. ^ Barsalou, L. (1999). Perceptual Symbol Systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(4)
8. ^ Ronald W. Langacker (1999). Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyer. ISBN 3110166038.
9. ^ ^{a b} Jaroslav Peregrin (2003). Meaning: The Dynamic Turn. Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface. London: Elsevier.
10. ^ Gärdenfors, Peter (2000). Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Thought. MIT Press/Bradford Books. ISBN 9780585228372. http://www.lucs.lu.se/people/Peter.Gardenfors/Abstracts/conceptualspaces.html.
11. ^ Ferdinand de Saussure (1916). The Course of General Linguistics (Cours de linguistique générale).
12. ^ Bimal Krishna Matilal (1990). The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language. Oxford. The Nyaya and Mimamsa schools in Indian vyakarana tradition conducted a centuries-long debate on whether sentence meaning arises through composition on word meanings, which are primary; or whether word meanings are obtained through analysis of sentences where they appear. (Chapter 8).
13. ^ Lakoff, George; Johnson, Mark (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Chapter 1.. New York: Basic Books.. OCLC 93961754.
14. ^ Mitchell TM, Shinkareva S, Carlson A, Chang K, Malave V, Mason R, Just M. (2008-05-08). "Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns". “Science” 320 (5880): 1191–1195. doi:10.1126/science.1152876. PMID 18511683.
15. ^ Levin, Beth & Steven Pinker. (1991). Lecxical & Conceptual Semantics. Blackwell. Cambridge.
16. ^ Levin, Beth & Steven Pinker. (1991). Lecxical & Conceptual Semantics. Blackwell. Cambridge.
17. ^ Jackendoff, Ray. (1990). Semantic Stuctures. MIT Press. Cambridge
18. ^ Jackendoff, Ray. (1990). Semantic Stuctures. MIT Press. Cambridge
19. ^ Cruse, D. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
20. ^ Cruse, D. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
21. ^ Cruse, D. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.
22. ^ Nerbonne, J. (1996). The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory (ed. Lappin, S.) Blackwell Publishing. Cambridge.
23. ^ Nielson, Hanne Riis; Nielson, Flemming (1995). Semantics with Applications, A Formal Introduction (1st ed.). Chicester, England: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-92980-8 .
24. ^ AJ Giannini. (2010) Semiotic and semantic implications of "authenticity". Psychological Reports. 106(2):611-612.

External links

• semanticsarchive.net
• Teaching page for A-level semantics
• Noam Chomsky, On Referring, Harvard University, 30 October 2007 (video)
• Ray Jackendoff, Conceptual Semantics, Harvard University,13 November 2007(video)
• Semantic Systems Biology
• Semantics: an interview with Jerry Fodor ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 8, 2007.

Categories: Grammar | Semantics | Social philosophy | Greek loanwords | Concepts in logic

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