 John | is my friend.

     He | should have replied to my letter.

    Chapter 6 Semantics

     What is semantics?

     Semantics is defined as the study of meaning. However, it is not the only linguistic discipline that studies meaning.

     Semantics answers the question “what does this sentence mean”. In other words, it is the analysis of conventional meanings in words and sentences out of context.

     Reference and sense

     Linguistic expressions stand in a relation to the world. There are two aspects of meaning.

     Reference is the relation by which a word picks out or identifies an entity in the world. But the referential theory fails to account for certain kinds of linguistic expression.

     Some words are meaningful, but they identify no entities in the real world, such as the words dragon, phoenix, unicorn, and mermaid.

     It is not possible for some words to find referent in the world, such as the words but, and, of, however, the, etc.

     Speakers of English understand the meaning of a round triangle although there is no such graph.

     Sense is the relation by which words stand in human mind. It is mental representation, the association with something in the speaker’s or hearer’s mind. The study of meaning from the perspective of sense is called the representational approach.

     Classification of lexical meanings

     Referential meaning (denotative meaning) – central meaning of words, stable, universal

     Associative meaning – meaning that hinges on referential meaning, less stable, more culture-specific

     Connotative meaning – the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to, embraces the properties of the referent, peripheral

     Social meaning (stylistic meaning) – what is conveyed about the social circumstances of the use of a linguistic expression

     Affective meaning – what is communicated of the feeling or attitude of the speaker/writer towards what is referred to

     Reflected meaning – what is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression

     Taboos

     Collocative meaning – the associated meaning a word acquires in line with the meaning of words which tend to co-occur with it

     Lexical sense relations

     Synonymy

     Synonyms are words which have different forms but similar meanings.

     Dialectal synonyms – lift/elevator, flat/apartment

     Synonyms of different styles – gentleman/guy

     Synonyms of different registers – salt/sodium chloride

     Synonyms differing in affective meaning – attract/seduce

     Synonyms differing in collocation – beautiful/handsome, able/capable

     Synonyms are frequently used in speaking and writing as a cohesive device. In order to avoid repetition the writer/speaker needs to use a synonym to replace a word in the previous co-text when he/she wants to continue to address that idea. The synonyms together function to create cohesion of the text.

     Antonymy

     Antonyms are words which are opposite in meaning.

     Gradable antonyms – pairs of words opposite to each other, but the positive of one word does not necessarily imply the negative of the other. For example, the words hot and cold are a pair of antonyms, but not hot does not necessarily mean cold, maybe warm, mild or cool. Therefore, this pair of antonyms is a pair of gradable antonyms.

     Complementary antonyms – words opposite to each other and the positive of one implies the negative of the other: alive/dead

     Reversal (relational) antonyms – words that denote the same relation or process from one or the other direction: push/pull, up/down, teacher/student

     Antonymy is frequently utilized as a rhetorical resource in language use. Oxymoron and antithesis based on antonymy. Gradable antonyms may give rise to fuzziness.