Name-Ma Thiri Aein

Roll No-DELT-12

What is Semantics and Pragmatics? Discuss the relation between Semantics and Pragmatics with
examples and then elaborate on the ways of determining the boundaries of the semantic range of
the words.

Semantics and Pragmatics overlap in their scope as they both deal with the meaning of
linguistics expressions. Semantics refers to the meaning of words and their meaning within
sentences. Pragmatics deal with the meaning in a language concerned with their context. They deal
with meaning differently but many students of linguistics confuse these two terms.

Semantics deal with how word meanings combine to give the meaning of a sentence. It is
principally concerned with content words. But Pragmatics does take the speaker into account and
how they use those expressions. It deals with speaker's intended meaning and the language in use. It
attempts to analyze how it happens that often more is communicated than said. Here is the example
for relation between Semantics and Pragmatics. When I speak to myself, there is no ambiguity: I
know that when I say "Rose", I mean "Rose". There is no need to consider about pragmatics when
the semantics is known. But when I'm interpreting words, there is always ambiguity. When someone
tells me "everyone", I don't know if he meant a person in the room or a person in the universe. In
this situation, I have to use pragmatics to choose from many possible semantics. Thus, the fields of
pragmatics and semantics are related to another. Some categories in semantics require the
application of pragmatics in order to have a satisfactory interpretation.

On the other hand, there is always a tension between these two fields of linguistics.
Semantics has a narrow field because we deal with the text only and analyze the meaning of the
words as they combine to constitute meaningful sentences. Semantics is just the meaning that the
grammar and vocabulary impart, it does not account for implied meaning. Moreover, the meaning of
utterance is not dependent on the context in semantics. But pragmatics has a wider approach
beyond the text, speaker's intended meaning and the hearer's inference based on shared
knowledge, shared assumptions and the context of the utterance.

The use of the sentence "He is so cool" may have different meanings. Semantically, this
sentence can be interpreted as "He is very nice, a compliment to the person, which is the literal
meaning. But under pragmatics, this sentence suggests the context: the positive attitude of the
speaker towards the person. This is the intended or inferred meaning in the sentence.

In pragmatics, there are many fields to consider such as context of linguistics and physical,
deixis, reference, inference, anaphora, presupposition, speech acts, politeness, positive and negative
face. In the above examples, we can know that it is impossible to interpret without knowing the
context (deictic words).

But in Semantics, it considers the meaning of a sentence without paying attention to their
context. It has two main categories as lexical semantics (the meaning of words and the meaning of
relationship among words) and phrasal semantics (the meaning of syntactic units, which are larger
than words). Semantics is about what a speaker conventionally means (objective or general
meaning).

To specify the main difference, semantics focus on the meaning of words without laying
emphasis on their context whereas pragmatics do lay emphasis on the context in addition to
studying the meaning of the same words.

In order to be able to deal with the world around us, we have to put labels on things. We
need to develop a way of determining the boundaries of the semantic range of words. Semantic
range is the set of items that we identify by means of a word or lexeme. The sets may be grouped
with others with which they share a common feature to form a semantic field. It is important to
define a word in terms of what it is not or in term of subsumes. We have to reach a compromise
between having a manageable array of categories on the one hand and insufficient precision on the
other hand.

The take-off between manageability and precision clearly depends on how precise one has
to be. Arabs need to make finer distinction between different types of camels. Eskimos have more
words than we do to identify different types of snow, such as fine-grained, powdery snow, light
snow, snow flake etc.

Depending on the context, the number of terms used may be more varied. The words horse
and a few others like mare and foal are all that we need to be able to talk about horses. But in horse
racing, it needs more terms to refer to the things concerned. The more significant an object or
concept is to a community, the greater the tendency to lexicalize the label used to denote it, to have
a more succinct term.

In English, we use the same verb "run" to denote the quickly movement of a person, the
function of a computer, to start own business. Thus, a word usually does not possess just one
meaning; a word has different meanings. Semantic range refers to the range of possible meanings a
word possesses. To refer roofs and ceilings, different terms are used in English and Myanmar. In
Spanish, the term techno is used to refer both of them. Corner can be used to refer both external
and internal space in English but two terms are used to refer to each in Spanish.

More specific terms are arranged under their more general superordinate terms is known as
hyponymy. It is also called Subtype or Subset. The hyponym of a word defines its semantic range.
Hypernym is a word that denotes general category. It is also called Generic term, Superordinate,
Super-type, Superset. The hypernym serves to designate a semantic field. Componential analysis
defines the range of words in terms of presence or absence of particular components.

The semantic range of a word can be defined with the assistance of another word that
means the same thing, a synonym, and a word that means the opposite, an antonym. For example,
hide and conceal are synonym. But they cannot be substituted for each other in all circumstances.
Although "high" and "tall" are likely to be same, there is a difference of reference. In the case of
antonym, we have to consider different types of relationship such as easy and difficult, single and
married, give and take, fail and pass.
 To sum up, it is important to consider that context plays a very important role in the
definition of the meaning of words. It does much to determine the meaning of word. One knows a
word by the company it keeps or the meaning of a word is its use in the language.