semantics in linguistics

semantics in linguistics

Exploring the Intricacies of Semantics in Linguistics

1. Introduction to Semantics and its Significance in Linguistics

Language, at least human language, is more than different sounds and the intentional relation to non-linguistic objects. The study of the internal side of language in understanding the sense of the sentences is the field of semantics. Semantics is concerned with understanding meaning during interpretation and with how meaning interacts with the interpretation process. For example, as we move from one sense to another in hearing a person talk, we take more transitive-causative senses of a morpheme as already known and shift to animate agents for the arguments of tread, as in “The construction workers tread with care, lest the floor buckle.” In this sentence, tread appropriates a sense which is not obvious from tensed words. Semantics reveals the understanding of language as a shared system. Without semantics, one is only able to interpret individual tokens.

The importance of semantics in the discipline of linguistics stems from the need for humans to represent knowledge about the world in a shareable form which unambiguously communicates meaning. Semantics is the science of meaning in language. It is elementary to what people mean in their uses of language. Semantics data are essential to the construction of more effective computational systems of natural language understanding. Philosophically, semantics provide important evidence bearing on traditional philosophical problems.

2. Key Concepts and Theories in Semantic Analysis

To study semantics, we need to be familiar with a series of key concepts such as ambiguity, vagueness, entailments, implicatures, presuppositions, cohyponyms, and lexical fields. These concepts help explain why semantics analysis can be difficult with natural language and why an artificial language, as used in logic, is not sufficient to capture all the meanings associated with words and sentences in natural language. With the help of semantics theories and those key concepts, we can further our understanding with sophisticated analyses to account for why people understand meaning the way they do. Although it is not well established, the study of semantics is so powerful, it can lead to a comprehensive account of what exactly people know about meanings and how people understand meaning.

Studying semantics, however, is not as easy as simply reading between the lines or trying to interpret meaning. It is not a skill that can be learned in dealings with giving and interpreting instructions from a manual or learning a language. Exploring the intricacies of semantics involves far more than those situations. A great communicator not only selects the best words but also understands words properly. There are many tough concepts and complex rules in the world of semantics. To address these difficult challenges, some all-encompassing theories and individual ideas have been developed to help one understand the many aspects and layers of semantics.

3. Pragmatics: The Interface between Semantics and Context

However, other lines of analysis are nowadays acknowledged to be of equal importance. These concern the making relevant of the entailment of a proposition and connecting such entailment with the conversational implicature (Grice) or the adoption of different degrees of cognitive regularity and hierarchy in understanding and representing the meanings of lexical items, among others. Factors that play a role in lexical semantics and, by that, are distinct from variables of a word’s “syntactic” or morphological nature, e.g. subsets of grammatical information encoded in a lexical item, determining the “inheritance” of one word from another, the word’s context of use, or its frequency of occurrence, would seem to be no longer investigated separately from the environment in which lexical items function and confer consistent cross-linguistic generalizations about their use.

The question of what exactly the word “meaning” means and covers has remained a bone of contention for a number of centuries, and all the available evidence seems to suggest it is unlikely to be resolved to the satisfaction of all the disputants. This evidence includes the multiplicity of definitions or characterizations in the literature on meaning (i.e. its different facets or perspectives) as well as the existence of varying kinds of differences as to the import or degree of such definitions or characterizations themselves. One standard way of looking at differences of perspective on meaning is to divide these perspectives into syntactic (formal), semantic (content), and, sometimes, pragmatic (use) differences.

Pragmatics, in the words of Bach and Harnish, is “the study of linguistic communication: how it is achieved and how it is understood”. In the words of Cruse, it is “the study of meaning by reference to semantic processes”, i.e. it investigates the relation between “what is said” and the “context” within which this is said. Elements of the “context”, thus intimately connected with pragmatics, include “who is involved in the communicative act and what purposes they have in participating; what are the cultural values of the participants in the context; and where the act is taking place”. Pragmatics is concerned not only with the direct interpretation of an utterance, but also with “inference”, the production of “utterances”, and so on. In addition to looking at meaning at the “truth-theoretical” level of conditions or states of affairs the “world” has to satisfy for the utterances to be true, pragmatics, when linguistic and situational context is not enough to assess an utterance (the so-called “verbal underdeterminacy”), points to other sources of information about the speaker’s intention or meaning to assess his utterances. These sources include the speaker’s beliefs and knowledge, his aims, and the way he uses language.

4. Semantic Change: Evolution and Variation in Meaning

One of the most surprising findings from semantics in linguistics is the knowledge that meaning is unstable. That is, the meanings of specific words have undergone tremendous change throughout their collective lifetimes. Euphemism is a device that allows the speaker to avoid the stigma of the topic at hand. However, euphemism is not inherently a positive force (many euphemisms have undergone pejoration), and, in certain politically correct cultures, what were formerly agreeable, inoffensive terms can suddenly become highly pejorative. Women’s, Blacks’, and Gay Liberation movements have engaged in efforts to call public attention to their causes which requires increasing the stigma attached to antiliberation terms such as sex-object, coon, and queer. Also, as people continue to use the unacceptable terms in private, other less prejudicial new colloquialisms become desirable so that sensitive speakers do not offend others whom they wish to keep as friends. Consequently, the resulting belief in the political incorrectness of a word can become the most crucial moderator of the frequency of its usage.

5. Applications of Semantic Analysis in Language Processing and Communication

A second general application of linguistic semantics is in the creation, analysis, and improvement of machine systems that possess some facility to understand, recognize, or generate human speech. The need for interfaces between economic and efficient man-made computers on the one hand, and complex human masses of attitudes, beliefs, hopes, fears, and language on the other, has led to the development of a related sub-field of linguistics, which may be described as computational semantics and pragmatics. The motivation in this case is equally clear-cut and compelling: natural language has become a convenient medium for efficient and rich communication between machine systems and their human users when the task at hand becomes necessarily complex, or when the information needs to be conveyed in an intuitively transparent or natural way.

The focus of the review now shifts to what are probably some of the most interesting aspects of the semantics of natural language – those implications of linguistic behavior and categorization serve a significant role in the way we cope with the communication of discourse. Claims that ‘natural language theory is applied epistemology’, or in a weaker form that much work in semantics results from the need to interpret the various inferential claims that pass back and forth through natural language, are fairly influential in the field. The sorts of questions raised – mostly about properties of real people in realistic communication situations – do indeed seem to be particularly well matched to insights that can be gained through work couched in a psycholinguistic framework.