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Thursday, September 17, 2020

The Overview of Semantics as The Study of Meaning

Semantics is the study of meaning

Semantics is one of the brands of linguistics. When we learn a new language, we will find out that a language consists of words and grammar. Grammar has two parts; morphology and syntax. Morphology deals with the structure of words and syntax deals with how words are combined.

Basic both words and grammar, there is semantics. It called the organization of meaning. Dixon (2005) claims that words can have two pairs of shorts of meaning. The first, it may have 'reference' to the word; red describe the color of blood, chair refers to an item of furniture, with legs and back, on which a human being may comfortably sit. The second, a word has 'sense', which determines its semantics relation to other words, e.g. narrow is the opposite (more specifically; the antonym) of wide, and crimson refers to a color that is a special sort of red (we say that crimson is a hyponym of red).

An introduction to English semantics, Patrick Griffiths (2006) states that semantics is the study of the "toolkit" for meaning; knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of the language and in its patterns for building more elaborate meanings, up to the level of sentence meanings. And it gives us information that semantics as the knowledge that learns about words meaning and sentence meaning.

Meaning behind sentence

The literal meaning of the sentence is based on semantics information that we have of our knowledge in our English. The people that have English ability surely can explain the meaning in every language their learning. Ogden and Richard in Karim Nazari (2011) give the following list of some definitions of meaning. The meaning can be any of the following:

1. An intrinsic property of some things.

2. Other words are related to that word in a dictionary.

3.The connotation of a word (that is discussed below).

4. The thing to which the speaker of that word refers.

5. The thing to which the speaker of that word should refer.

6. The thing to which the speaker of that word believes himself to be referring.

7. The thing to which the hearer of that word believes is being referred to.

Why Semantics is Interesting for the Linguist?

It is because semantics give the linguist information on how to understand every step of the study of words, their meanings and sentence meanings, abstracted away from contexts of use, to describe the subject. It tries to describe and understand the nature of knowledge about meaning in language that they are learning.

Dixon (2005) argues that as a language is used, the meaning is both the beginning and the endpoint. A speaker has some message in mind, and then choose words with suitable meanings and puts them together in appropriate grammatical constructions; all these have established phonetic forms, which motivate how one speaks. A listener will receive the sound waves, decode them, and if the act of communication is successful in understanding the speaker's message.

We cannot study meaning without structure

Semantic is the element of any language to express the meaning. It can also be characterized as a symbol system. In characterizing the system of meaning always has a relationship between words and sentences of a language. Then the linguist wants to know more about semantic, they will learn structure first. Because we cannot study the meaning without knowing structure. The meaning of a complex expression is determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituents.

Conclusion

We study languages, which means, we must pay close attention to the meaning. We must spend time thinking about the meaning of words, sentences, its grammatically properties, and how they interrelate. At the time, people speak language, they want to learn its meaning first, what it conveys and what not, to have a fair idea of morphological and syntactic possibilities.