Semantics

• Semantics is the branch of linguistics that

deals with the study of meaning, changes in
meaning, and the principles that govern the
relationship between sentences or words and
their meanings.
• It is the study of the relationships between
signs and symbols and what they represent.
What is semantics?
• Semantics is the study of meaning in language. It is
a wide subject within the general study of language.
• An understanding of semantics is essential to the
study of language acquisition (how language users
acquire a sense of meaning, as speakers and writers,
listeners and readers).
• It is also essential to the study of language change
(how meanings alter over time).
• It is important for understanding language in social
contexts, as these are likely to affect meaning, and
for understanding varieties of English and effects
of style.
• It is thus one of the most fundamental concepts in
linguistics.
• The study of semantics includes the study of how
meaning is constructed, interpreted, clarified,
obscured, illustrated, simplified, negotiated,
contradicted, and paraphrased.
Some important areas of semantic theory or related subjects
include these:
• Symbol and referent
• Conceptions of meaning
• Words and lexemes
• Denotation, connotation, implication
• Pragmatics
• Ambiguity
• Metaphor, simile and symbol
• Semantic fields
• Synonym, antonym and hyponym
• Collocation, fixed expression and idiom
• Semantic change and etymology
• Polysemy
• Homonymy, homophones and homographs
• Lexicology and lexicography
• Thesauruses, libraries and Web portals
• Epistemology
• Colour
• The noun semantics and the adjective semantic are
derived from the Greek word semantikos
(“significant”).
• In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is
devoted to the study of meaning, as borne on the
syntactic levels of words, phrases, sentences, and
sometimes larger units of discourse, generically
referred to as texts.
For thousands of years, philosophers have
pondered the meaning of meaning, yet
speakers of a language can understand what
is said to them and can produce strings of
words that are meaningful to other
speakers.
• To understand language we need to know
the meaning of words and the morphemes
that compose them. We also must know
how the meanings of words combine into
phrases and sentence meanings. Finally, we
must consider context when determining
meaning.
• The study of the linguistic meaning of
morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences
is called Semantics.
Subfields of semantics are lexical (of or
relating to the vocabulary, words, or
morphemes of a language) semantics,
which is concerned with the meanings of
words, and the meaning relationships
among words; and phrasal or sentential
semantics, which is concerned with the
meaning of syntactic units larger than the
word.
• The study of how context affects
meaning is called Pragmatics.
• For example, the sentence "It's cold in
here" can be interpreted in certain
situations as "close the windows".
 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

The sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

was presented by Chomsky as a great example of a
series of words strung together randomly. It
grammatical according to the lexical classification,
however, it is non-sense on a semantic level. Or so
goes the claim. But is the claim correct?
According to a well-established usage of the
word "green", a green idea is one that is new
and untried. Again, a colorless idea is one
without vividness, dull, and unexciting. So it
follows that a colorless green idea is a new,
untried idea that is without vividness, dull,
and unexciting.
To sleep is, among other things, to be in a
state of dormancy or inactivity, or in a state
of unconsciousness. To sleep furiously
may seem a puzzling turn of phrase but
one reflects that the mind in sleep often
indeed moves furiously with ideas and
images flickering in and out.
So, what is the poet telling us? (One
assumes that the quoted line is from the
work of a poet working in a medium of
studied precision and ambiguity. Or rather,
as we shall see...) Very simply the poet
seems to be saying that new ideas, not yet
sharply defined, circulate in the
unconscious, rapidly altering at a furious
rate.
One is left then with a question. Why is this
nice bit of poetic imagery cited by its author
as a quintessentially meaningless sentence?
Here we have an exquisite bit of irony. The
author evidently has a turn for poetry, a turn
which he turns his face against. And the
hidden face, the denied self, has taken its
revenge. The scientist has called on his
creative self to exhibit a bit of nonsense.
The poet denied has replied with a sentence,
apparently meaningless, which is no such
thing when listened to with an attentive ear.
And yet consider; this sentence is a very
intellectualized production - it is indeed
"colorless". It was, we suspect, a new idea, a
variant of a possibility, still new at the very
moment of production, one occurring by
chance in the froth of the unconscious.
In short, the cited sentence was a colorless
green idea that had slept furiously.