A brief history of semantics

Semantics, the youngest branch of linguistics, has been debated in ancient Greece.
Philosophers debated the way words acquired their meaning. Some believed that
names were naturally conditioned by the properties of things, while others believed
that names were given arbitrarily through convention.
Socrate attempted to mediate between the two discussants by pointing out two
types of names. Compound names and those that are divisible into smaller
constituent elements. Socrate argued that words give us no clue about their
‘natural” meaning except for the nature of their sounds. He concluded that
convention and usage manifest what we have in mind when we speak.
Plato and Aristotle also made significant contributions to the study of semantics,
with Plato focusing on the analysis of sentences and Aristotle delving into the
meaning of words. Plato also dealt with other problems, such as the relation
between thought language and the outside world, opening the way for analysis of
the sentence in terms that are partly linguistic and partly about logic. He was
dealing with matters about syntactic semantics, the meaning of utterance, rather
than the meaning of individual words.
Aristotle's works, including Organon, Rhetoric, and Poetics, his general approach
to language was that of a logician interested in understanding how people know
and express it in language. In the field of semantics, he identified a level of
language analysis, the lexical one, in which the ultimate aim is to study the
meaning of words either in isolation or in syntactic constructions. He deepened the
discussion of polysemy, autonomy, synonymy and homonymy and developed a
full-fledged metaphor theory.
Stoic philosophy's contribution to semantics relates to their discussion of the nature
of linguistic signs and the relationship between signifier, signified and the object
named. Avery makes a clear distinction between reference and meaning, as
postulated later by Ogden and Richard in the famous “ triangle” that goes by their
name.
Etymology and the Middle Ages also played a role in the development of
semantics, with philosophers speculating on the evolution of meaning and the
modes of signification. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was worth mentioning in
linguistics and semantics the activity of the “Modistae,” the group of philosophers
so named because of their writings On the Modes of Signification. Philosophy and
logic were the two important sciences that strongly impacted the study of linguistic
meaning.
Only during the 19th century did semantics become an independent branch of
linguistics science in its own right, With scholars like CH.C. Reisig and M.Breal
laying the foundation for the study of meaning. Dictionaries and lexicography also
contributed to the understanding of semantic categories and principles. In
Romania, Dimitrie Contemir and Lazar Saineanu made notable contributions to the
discussion of semantics. Ferdinand de Saussure’s work in linguistics, particularly
his ideas on structure, further influenced the field of semantics. The 1920s and
1930s saw the publication of important books by Jost Trier, G. Stern, C.K Ogden,
and J.A. Richards. The book's title, “The Meaning of Meaning,” suggests its
content. The book deals, for the most part, with different definitions of the word “
meaning.”
“The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” by the anthropologist B.
Malinowski was highly instrumental in the development of a new “ Contextual”
theory of meaning advocated by the British of linguistics headed by Firth(1935)