SEMANTICS

SEMANTIC

How are you bloggers? I hope you always keep healthy and enjoy with our life. Keep spirit and always still study to be better human. Before, I have to posted about linguistics, although not more deeply, and in this opportunity I want to describe about semantics, the branch of linguistic. Well everybody, please still read my blog…

a. What is Semantic?

      Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences.
b. Subfields of Semantics are:
  ⤇Lexical Semantics is concerned with the meaning of words, and the meaning relationships among words.

⤇ Phrasal or Sentential Semantics is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than   the word.

 ⤇Pragmatics is the study of how context and situation affect meaning.

c. What is Meaning?
⤇ Conceptual Meaning: Conceptual meaning covers those basic, essential components of meaning that are conveyed by the literal use of a word.

⤇Associative Meaning is the type of meaning that people might connect with the use of words. The associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the

speaker.

 D. TAUTOLOGIES (ANALYTIC SENTENCES)

Tautology is a sentence that is true in all situations; a sentence true from the meaning of its words alone. These sentences are always true regardless of the circumstances.

E. CONTRADICTIONS

Contradiction describes a sentence that is false by virtue of its meaning alone, irrespective of context. 

F. SYNTHETIC SENTENCES

A synthetic statement is one which is not analytic or contradictory, but which may be true or false depending on the context. Synthetic sentences are based on our sensory data and experience

The truth value of a synthetic statement can’t be figured out solely by logic. Examples;

  ð  My oldest cousin is female.

G.AMBUGITY

          Our semantic knowledge tells us when words, phrases or sentences have more than one meaning, that is, when they are ambiguous. In structural ambiguity the same sequence of words has two or more meanings. The boy saw the man with a telescope is an instance of structural ambiguity. It is ambiguous because it can mean that the boy saw the man by using a telescope or that the boy saw the man who was holding a telescope. The sentence is structurally ambiguous because it is associated with two different phrase structures, each corresponding to a different meaning. Lexical ambiguity arises when at least one word in a phrase has more than one meaning. For example the sentence “The fisherman went to the bank” is ambiguous; because the word "bank" has distinct lexical definitions, including "financial institution" and "edge of a river".

  ð  Our knowledge of lexical and structural ambiguities reveals that the meaning of a linguistic expression is built both on the words it contains and its syntactic structure.

       H. IDIOMS

       An idiom is an expression whose meaning does not conform to the principle of compositionality, that is, may be unrelated to the meaning of its parts.

J. SYNONYMY

     Synonymy is used to mean sameness of meaning. Synonyms are words with the same or similar meanings. Words that are synonyms are said to be synonymous, and the state of being a synonym is called synonymy. Synonyms can often, though not always, be substituted for each other in sentences.

K. PROTOTYPES

           Prototype is the most characteristic instance of a category. While the words canary, cormorant, dove, duck, flamingo, parrot, pelican and robin are all equally co-hyponyms of the superordinate bird, they are not all considered to be equally good examples of the category “bird.” According to some researchers, the most characteristic instance of the category “bird” is robin. The concept of a prototype helps explain the meaning of certain words, like bird, not in terms of component features (e.g. “has feathers,” “has wings”), but in terms of resemblance to the clearest example. Given the category label furniture, we are quick to recognize chair as a better example than bench or stool. Given clothing, people recognize shirts quicker than shoes, and given vegetable, they accept carrot before potato or tomato. It is clear that there is some general pattern to the categorization process involved in prototypes and that it determines our interpretation of word meaning.

CONCLUSION:
 Based on my opinion from the explanation above semantic is the brances of linguistic that study of meaning in sentences more deeply like euphemism, synonym, idioms, ambiguity and other brances of semantic.